"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Gandhi, an Indian (under English law) lawyer and well acquainted with the rational application of legalistic justice, fell in love with the Gospel, especially Christ's call for unconditional love, of both enemy and neighbor, and unconditional and unsolicited forgiveness of each other. Sadly, and unfortunately for the world, the Christian prejudice of South Africa against dark-skinned folks blocked his path to the Church, then.
Gandhi was as spiritual as he was knowledgeable about the law, plumbed the depths of all the great religions and surfaced with his remarkable and well known comment in reference to Exodus 21:23, 24, the Hebrew law, given to Moses c 1440 - 1400 BC. He knew well that all laws trace back to Exodus and the even older Code of Hammurabi. Basically, according to the Hebrew law, which is extremely nuanced, anyone who breaks one of the Ten Commandments is put to death. Period. No jury; no trial.
But, there's more to this. Nothing in life is born in a vacuum. What was the already established precedent for this kind of Exodus' cruel, dispassionate, merciless, punitive legislation? Well, the Code of Hammurabi, an ancient Babylonian (some say Sumerian) law code, dating back to about 1772 BC is even less forgiving. One of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world, the code - or law - was enacted by the sixth Babylonian (Sumerian) king, Hammurabi. It was scripted onto large extant clay tablets and consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments, adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" with justice graded on social status, of slave versus free man.
That was the state of things when Jesus began his ministry. The very idea of forgiveness was an idea completely new and unusual for the primitive, more primal, sense of justice, which demanded revenge, blood for blood, in the world, then.
"If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." John 8:7
When we consider the enormity of the crime against humanity that is Syria, and the heinous criminality that occurred in Aurora, Colorado, Friday, it is next to impossible and even inconceivable that we could even consider talking about forgiveness. But, we must.
Something is so very wrong in our world, today. You would be blind not to see it. This is systemic, part of a larger matrix. We are all woven into this global fabric and nothing happens in one place that doesn't effect the overall tone, color and dynamic of the whole.
Bashar al-Assad's oppressive dictatorial regime in Syria is affecting the entire world, infecting the virtual water of the world, spiritually. We are all affected and yet there has always been so much oppression everywhere in a million different manifestations, everywhere also. Where do we begin to unpack this enormous elephant in the living room of the world?
We start with ourselves. The universe, the world, the country, the community, the family is comprised of individuals. When we can be totally honest with ourselves, maybe we can start to put down our accusatory stones. Who hasn't sinned? Sin is the offensive deed which twists us, poisons us until it disconnects us from our true self which is always in communion with God, whether or not we know it.
When - for whatever reason, but often through some form of abuse - one is distanced from one's own center, one's own soul, which was wedged away and out of our consciousness, we begin to create, unintentionally, a kind of pseudo self - a mask - ego - that we pretend to ourselves is our self. But, it isn't. It's a mask. Sadly, we don't know this. And, even sadder, the whole world is an accomplice to this. The television, media, films, videos, everything is heavily invested in our conforming to an externalized, idealized "image." (how's that for graven image?)
We wear it for all the world to see hoping that somehow it matches the picture which "out there" has been defined as acceptable, attractive and correct. I think we convince ourselves it is our real self, we even may think we have found our self, but we haven't. We've only created more distance from ourselves and so we begin to do whatever we can - and we do amazingly awful, inauthentic things - to convince the world "out there" that we are good, real, giving, caring, loving, ingenious, creative, wealthy, whatever.
What we have done is created a pseudo self, or, in other words, an ego. This ego is THE joker of mankind. The ego runs the global greed, oppression and control machine that has completely got us all in its cruel, death grip. Whether or not we want to think that there is an even larger, potent, power of evil than that Jungian collective unconscious, I don't know. That's beyond my point here.
But, that "joker" is hell bent on killing us off. Period. That's its point. It does it insidiously by separating us from each other, as it is separated from its authentic self, but it doesn't even know it. It is a liar, a thief, a killer, a trickster. And, it's a loner. Looks like a perfect profile of a Narcissistic psycho-sociopath. Hello Hitler!
So, we might look at this hideous evil and our natural instinct is to push it out of our midst. And, we should on one level, but we should also not on another. If we are a society that says it supports life and goodness, then to kill is not who we are and so anything that would cause us to be less than who we authentically are has changed us and controlled us, and in a sense wins if we do what it does, which is kill.
This joker's mask was first created when he somehow was split off from his authentic self. We don't know when that happened or how it happened, but it happened. It was caused by some kind of real or perceived condemnation, criticism, cruelty of some kind, that caused the person to hide from his real self, which he perceived was the cause of the cruel treatment. The split began then, perhaps it was only a tiny crack, but it began, and along with the possibility of some inherited chemical imbalances or whatever, continued to deepen and widen until this person was in full pursuit of an adequate mask to be himself.
He couldn't find his way back to his real self. He must have been deeply hurting, deeply wounded, very alone, angry, frustrated and by the time he pounded rounds of gunfire all over a movie theater killing 12 people, he had become a monster beyond anything recognizable as a human being.
So, now what? Do we put him to death for his crime? Justice would say yes and it might even give some of the family members of those who died last Friday a tiny piece of comfort. But he is only today's current scapegoat for the human race's outrageous and enormous dysfunction. No one acts independently from their culture, time and personal history. There is so much more to this that we may or may not ever understand.
I think we should put this person under an intense psychological, spiritual and physical examination and look at his family of origin, even several generations back, his education, his life-long peer groups, friends, work mates and see what happened.
If we simply throw him in jail, or kill him by lethal injection, we have simply thrown a big stone at him. If we acknowledge that all of us, every single one of us has at least a tiny bit of evil in us because we are all drinking the same egoic, image-infused socially conditioned water as he drank. We are all part of this big soup that is pretty toxic, spiritually and psychologically. We have to spiritually detox and collectively clean up our world, rid it of the kind of evil and oppression that is on the nightly news, every night.
If we were to simply try, judge, convict and sentence this joker, would it really bring justice? Could anything bring back the lives of a little six-year-old, or a mother, or the other precious, innocent, souls that were in that theatre last Friday? Nothing our justice system can do will bring them back. So, there is no such thing as justice. It's a mute point. It is a little lie we tell ourselves. It is an illusion. It is not real and we need to stop pretending that it is.
If we were to simply try, judge, convict and sentence this joker, would it really bring justice? Could anything bring back the lives of a little six-year-old, or a mother, or the other precious, innocent, souls that were in that theatre last Friday? Nothing our justice system can do will bring them back. So, there is no such thing as justice. It's a mute point. It is a little lie we tell ourselves. It is an illusion. It is not real and we need to stop pretending that it is.
Gandhi saw this. He knew this. He also knew the law - all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi. He saw the wrongness of such an oppressive system. Maybe it was necessary 4,000 years ago, but it's ridiculous now. We are ready as a world to take the next step, the step into the fullness of God who loves us unconditionally, who understands even the deepest, darkest, most recessed parts of our starving, broken, splintered souls and understands what happened over the course of our lives, what led to this heinous evil. God is not like us. God does not take an eye for an eye. Certainly, and thank God that God is so much bigger than that, so far beyond that. Is there anything we can do to separate ourselves from God? No. St. Paul says NO!!**
We need to learn from this tragedy. We need to see where we too might be splintered away from our own inner authentic Self, the one that is eternally in communion with God, creation, the universe, or by whatever name you call our great creator. Whatever causes the first splinter is sin and we all are somewhat splintered, all in varying stages of distance from our core, where God is directly experienced in connection with ourselves. Our true self is there, completely whole, and holy, unharmed and undiminished as vibrantly alive and radiant as ever, eternally in the arms of God, in communion with God and the entire cosmos.
Whatever caused us to separate from that authentic self was some kind of abuse, cruelty, evil and that was sin. The subsequent sins are those selfish, inauthentic actions we took (or were inflicted on us) that led us further and further away from our original true self and which aided and abetted others' greater distancing and separations also.
This thing called sin has a lot of different names, so it's a good idea to look at what it really is. Among many things, it's victimizing, selfish, fearful, small, insecure, cut off from it's true self which will keep it cut off from others, starving spiritually. Also, because it's not in connection with it's true self, it becomes like a vampire, stealing the spiritual life of others through manipulation and control, even to the extent to use fear, domination, violence, fear and death.
The late M. Scott Peck, MD, psychotherapist and Christian, defined "evil" as narcissistic. (People of the Lie) So, when the media brings out the shrinks, scholars and religious people to discuss this joker, we have to remember, we are all one - whether or not we feel it or see it or like it - and so if one of us is infected with this pernicious evil, we all have it or at least are touched by it in varying degrees. This is something we all have to look at.
"How and in what way am I an enabler of evil?" might be a good question for us to each ask ourselves. And, be honest. It's hard and it's not pretty, but the more authentic you are about it, the closer to God you get. Do you really think we can take the risk of this happening again? Where and how will it happen again? Because, it will.
So, put down the stone in your frightened little hand and look at all those in your life and love them with all your heart, love them so tenderly and fully and wholly that if there is a crack - and there probably is - somewhere from all that is happening on the media, films, videos, games - your love can begin to help heal the crack. Only love is the healer and only by loving can we begin to heal our families, communities, country and world.
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**Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
-Romans 8:35-39
-Romans 8:35-39
Bravo, kudos and compliments for your courage in speaking out in support of an alternative to punitive retributive justice in response to such egregious acts. Your Christian spiritually based approach is both interesting and illuminating and I agree wholeheartedly.
ReplyDeleteReaders of your blog may be interested in researching alternatives to our fixation on punishment and retaliation. Foremost, to my thinking, is restorative justice, well-documented examples of which can be found in the various Truth & Reconciliation Commissions that have been established in response to gross injustices around the world. For those interested, Wikipedia has excellent starting-point articles on systems of "justice" in general as well as on "restorative justice" in particular.
Speaking out as you have in response to the most extreme acts of violence is exceptionally hard but needs to be done, and hence my compliments. Even as one who has several times put it all on the line to bear witness to my own commitment to nonviolence, I usually find myself reduced to admitting my weakness, my fragility, as a human being when faced with the most extreme acts.
Back in the days after I had destroyed my draft cards in public with seven women and a priest who had all accepted legal culpability for the act, when I used to speak to groups in suburban church basements and have my commitment to nonviolence routinely challenged with invented scenarios involving someone suddenly about to shoot my mother, I would always try to connect with the usually hostile questioners by freely and openly admitting my weakness and the likelihood that I would probably instantly shoot the attacker if I were armed. My credibility and a link to my audience then legitimately established, we could go on to a more nuanced exploration of the more normative aspects of practical nonviolence and its consequences.
Nowadays, Vietnam and the draft long past, I more often refer to a similar moral challenge question centered on whether or not I would have shot Hitler, given the opportunity. A good friend and retired minister who is one of the few in my community who can always be counted upon to stand up in public, in collar, and say what needs to be said to confront violence and injustice, gave me the short sweet answer to that challenge that I've adopted as my own. He said "I'd shoot him but I would know it was wrong." I think most of us would pull the trigger under those circumstances, at least I would, and so the assertion establishes our relationship and resonance with most of our fellows while the tag-line about knowing it as wrong opens the door for more meaningful dialogue.
I think, with that in mind, that you might be able to strengthen your already persuasive presentation with a comparable admission of your own humanity and weakness. What would you have done, for instance, if you had been an armed security guard at the theatre in the audience when the young man started shooting if your only choice because of circumstances had been to shoot him dead? Would you have pulled the trigger? And if not at first, then how about when you saw him take aim at the young child? I think that's a close cousin to punitive justice. He was about to take an eye so I took his. But in principle at least, it's as morally wrong and serves us as poorly as any instance of punitive justice. That said, however, most of us would display our weakness and humanity by pulling the trigger to save the threatened lives.
I think we need to take care not to judge our weakness too harshly. A friend once gave me the insight that a God made us weak so that She could be strong. I've always liked that.
But I also think we need to stand clearly and bear witness, as you have done, at every opportunity. And so I offer my kudos and compliments again.
Thank you for your comments. I appreciate the connection between defense and revenge. I would kill to protect. Absolutely. If someone were hurting even an animal, I would do all in my human power to stop them. I probably wouldn't shoot to kill them, however. If I were in that theatre, I would definitely have shot to kill the joker. I wouldn't even think twice. Although, in an ideal world there would be no violence of any kind, protecting the innocent is essential to getting to that ideal world. You know the saying, "the only way for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." However, once the crime is done, and we are standing in judgment of the one who committed the crime, it's then that we can choose either to punish or to rehabilitate. I would always choose rehabilitation - if that's possible - because to kill a person such as this joker only extends the crime to one more soul. He is as much a victim as the people who tragically died. He is a victim of his own ego that went unchecked in our apathetic and blind world. We will see what actually happened to allow him to enter such a terribly dark space of his soul that he could even conceive of such a horrific action. It is unimaginable to me that someone "human" could do this. Obviously he was possessed by something other than who he really is. We are all really divine beings in human bodies. What happened to this man?
ReplyDeleteThank you Jim, for your wonderful wisdom and your own life-long commitment to peace and justice. You are a radiant example to all of us.