From the Editor's Desk

Questions and sanctuaries

Holy Week is at once that time out of time as well as that time tied to the most miniscule moments of the everyday. “With good reason,” writes Jesuit Fr. Leo J. O’Donovan, “we move thus through solemn rites, one after the other, even though we know instinctively that the reality we celebrate is not a sequence of events but rather a single mystery binding time and eternity, loss and love, empty hearts and fulfilled communities.”

In other words, Easter is not a discrete moment, but a celebration of the mystery that infuses our lives, “the unitary manifestation of the cost and promise of our lives together.”

The question, of course, is how we live the paschal mystery in, as O’Donovan puts it, this “battered time.”

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I remember a service I attended in Guatemala City in November 1981 in a lovely church that accommodated mainline Protestants, mostly well-to-do, in a nice section of the city. That year in Guatemala was a bloody year. In travels around the country, a fellow journalist and I conducted clandestine interviews with Protestants and Catholics involved in trying to keep communities together in the face of a brutal government crackdown and the ubiquitous death squads. One of the interviews I conducted was with a doctor, one of two remaining in a hospital department of six. The others had all been assassinated by hit squads, it was suspected because of their work with indigenous groups. The man I interviewed had gone underground and was trying to get himself and his family out of the country.

But that sunny Sunday morning in that chapel of privilege, there was but a wink to the vicious war going on outside the doors. The people in the pews were not asked to consider the awful oppression in their land, the massacres and torture and assassination. That was occurring elsewhere, in chapels of far less privilege, in much humbler quarters. It was a battered time in that country, and how one worshiped, how the words of the Christian sacred texts applied, it seemed, depended on one’s station in life and how deeply one chose to look at what was going on.

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What about these battered times?

I think about that chapel at times when I attend Mass in this era of endless war. I wonder if our sanctuaries have become places of privilege, more suited to isolating us and wrapping us in false security than baring our Gospel to harsh realities. Can Easter alleluias resound when we are increasingly asked to silently pay our taxes for grueling war, for new generations of nuclear weapons, for the largest military establishment in the history of the world? What do our communities of faith mean when civil liberties are denied, when torture is advanced as a necessity in this time of war, when our young are the targets of recruiters seeking to engage them in deadly, futile pursuits in our name?

There are, to be sure, many levels to these matters, and the pulpit is not a political podium. Our personal alleluias can and certainly should resound. Our communities are meant to rejoice. But we are meant, too, to know not only our faith but also our world. In his recent book Chasing Joy: Musings on Life in a Bittersweet World, Fr. Ed Hays writes: “Americans and Europeans who have no hope that the coming years will bring them a better and higher standard of living therefore need to find a new gauge for happiness.” On the personal level, he argues, we have everything we need and people who have contentment should experience joy. So the attention should be turned on the fact that we have enough. But we always want more, and joy keeps escaping.

I have to wonder, in the same way, about a country and its pursuit of power and influence. Is it possible that we have reached that point where, without saying so, we have begun to understand that the appetite will never be sated? Are we beginning to understand that the more we spend on projecting power the farther we move from the idea we have of ourselves as Americans? Do we see, perhaps, that what we have become as a country is distant from what we profess as Christians?

Is it possible that the questions, at least, might sneak into our sanctuaries?

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An Easter moment -- and a particularly catholic Easter moment -- crossed my desk this week in the form of a news release noting that Sr. Mary Waskowiak, president of the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, was arrested early March 17 with many others for an act of civil disobedience at the White House as part of a Christian Peace Witness against the War in Iraq. She was fined $100 and released after six hours.

It was catholic because it demonstrated a compassion and concern for the stranger as neighbor and Catholic because in her person, all of our prayers, all of our displays of piety, all of our rituals took form, not in triumphal procession, but in a humble gesture. In her act of disobedience, time and eternity were bound for a moment, and the Christ of nonviolence was made present in our circumstances.

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, April 6, 2007