Mud Machine

30 05 2011

In a just-released book, Italian author Roberto Saviano points out a phenomenon which takes place in many of our contemporary societies: the mud machine.[1] Whenever someone dares to criticize those in power – not only political power, but also those who control social discourse, the media, and base institutions – or provides a significant obstacle to their interests, dirty facts about that person are dug up and rendered public. A photo of someone sitting on the toilet is enough to demoralize the critic’s credibility, even if we all sit on it every day. (I confess I am writing these words from this very throne, though, I hasten to add, it’s just because I don’t want to awaken my wife and child late at night, and the bathroom is the only quiet place…) When the critic seeks to make serious pronouncements, his image will be damaged and everybody will giggle inside, remembering the unfortunate picture and its tasteful combination of white ceramic, pants under the knee, and newspaper.

Saviano argues that the mud machine is not only prejudicial to democracy, by intimidating possible criticism and opposition, but it has also a more subtle effect; it disfigures the psychology of the society. Its message is: “you are no better than us, you are also dirty. There are no better people. So don’t you dare criticize us.” It is a message that brings people to the same level, by throwing everybody to the floor, face in the mud. We are encouraged not to fly high, for someday someone may release a fact that will pop the balloon and throw its remains on the mud, and show that we are not better than anybody else. It is a communion of mediocrity, a shadow on the pursuit of excellence, a disincentive toward virtue.

As I read Saviano’s analysis, I could not help but think of its parallel in the spiritual path. We all know the personal equivalent of this social mechanism, our own personalized mud machine. “You will yield to temptation eventually, so don’t even try resisting. Actually, don’t even try being better than you are. You belong to the mud, and like a good worm, enjoy it well. Make it your home. You will never transcend it.” Some people try to psychologize this voice and call it negative self-image. Self-help gurus call it lack of positive thinking. The Christian faith, however, uses a stronger term – strong as an unbearable medicine – and names the person behind the voice, as the devil.

The devil may sound like superstition, a Medieval stereotype too cartoonish to be real. And yet, we hear him. Don’t we? And one of his very strategies is to hide his presence and to get us to disbelieve his existence, because, if we don’t see where the mud comes from, it arrives as hard as rock, and we believe that mud is all there is to life.

C. S. Lewis illustrated the devil’s strategy in his brilliant The Screwtape Letters, where a senior demon provides advice to a young novice on the art of tempting humans. In one of the letters, Screwtape writes, “I do not think you will have much difficulty to keep the patient in the dark. The fact that ‘devils’ are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.”[2] I don’t think I would believe in anyone in red tights either, not even Tina Turner, let alone the devil.

Maybe one of the crucial steps to spiritual sanity is the realization that the devil exists, just like one of the steps to social consciousness is awareness of mechanisms like the mud machine. We know we are seeing better if the light illuminates the darkness; we know the light is reaching us if the darkness is exposed and we can see beyond it. Noticing the devil may be one of the healthiest, and strangest, things to do – he will be full of subterfuges, and will throw the Medieval cartoon at us and “don’t you listen to that crap” kind of argument – but we won’t see beyond him until we face him, and see that muddy face melt when the light shines bright.

René Breuel

[1] Roberto Saviano, Vieni Via con Me [Flee with Me] (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2011), 39-42.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 32.


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

What shape are you?

27 05 2011

Consumerism has given us many globally recognisable shapes. Creative types might think instantly of iconic design profiles: the figurine coke bottle, the Nike swish, the sleek Apple Mac. The cynical among us might suggest more sinister outlines: the increasing Western waistline, the reducing Arctic ice.

But nothing the consumer mould produces is as significant as this: the way it shapes our souls. The problem with consumer culture, to put it bluntly, is not so much the products it makes – these can be ingenious, useful and, increasingly, more sustainably produced. The problem is not so much the mess it makes – this is a massive global challenge, but still only a symptom of a deeper malaise. The problem with consumer culture is the people it makes.

Let’s make this personal. The problem is me. ‘Hi, my name’s Mark and I’m a consumer.’

The truth is that I am hugely shaped by my addiction to stuff. I am formed by my fear of a dull, reduced life. I am defined by the ever-present danger of lagging too far behind the consumer pack. Funnily enough, I don’t feel addicted. But, at the same time, I really don’t want to be the only person who hasn’t seen the latest blockbuster / hasn’t been skiing / isn’t culturally up-to-date (delete as appropriate). All this is deeply formational, and the shape it gives me is a rushed, dissatisfied and self-focussed life.

God is, of course, in the formation business too. He has a particular shape in mind for us – ‘to be conformed to the image of his Son’ (Romans 8:29). It’s an image of suffering and glory, as Paul makes clear. It’s an image of generosity and blessing (at times ‘poor, yet making many rich’ – 2 Corinthians 6:10 – easy now, Paul!). Eugene Peterson calls it ‘the soaring and swooping life of grace’.

Or we could say ‘less stuff, more life’.

Mark Powley is author of the newly published Consumer Detox: Less Stuff, More Life (Zondervan).


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Beauty and Truth?

25 05 2011

‘”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote John Keats in 1819. This celebrated line, still admired as poetry, rings somewhat untrue today. In an age when beauty is often achieved by untruth – Photoshop editing, misleading camera angles, manipulated statistics – and when truth is often not beautiful – the world’s hunger, meaningless tragedies – the connection Keats noticed between truth and beauty seems today tenuous at best.

Still, our idea of beauty carries a direct relationship to our ethics. Contemporary eco-philosophers have noticed, for example, that though a person may appreciate the beauty of a mountain range, or of an endangered tiger, this appreciation of beauty does not necessarily lead to a desire for conservation of one’s idea of beauty. If we think of beauty only in terms of our own subjective experience, and not in terms of beauty being embedded in something outside ourselves (i.e. the animal, or flower, or mountain range), the act of preserving beauty turns in on itself. Beauty becomes only subjective. Our primary concern is to sustain our experience of the sublime, not to promote life outside of us.

A different perspective arises when we appreciate beauty as something given to us, not arising from inside ourselves. It generates a consideration of beauty which does not get lost in its own subjective sphere, but which also propels us outward, to active engagement in the world. In a dense but interesting comment on a passage by theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, David Moss observes, “Where we can no longer read the language of beauty so, for Balthasar, the witness of creation as created becomes untrustworthy and open to abuse… In short, those transitory experiences of the truth, goodness and beauty of the cosmos are intelligible only by way of reference to a transcendent order of Being that is absolutely true, good and beautiful.”[i] In other words, only when we recognize objective beauty, truth and goodness in the world, beyond our own subjective experience of it, can we really be moved to preserve it and to admire the work of their creator.

Among the wide variety of theories of beauty competing for our attention (and operating underneath many contemporary cinematic plotlines), one can make a good case for the “wheels coming off” when social understandings of beauty ceased being based on knowledge of a creator God. The celebration of beauty which remains possible within a nihilistic understanding of the world is deeply problematic, and as Moss suggests, open to abuse and even untrustworthy. To affirm God’s act of creation of the world, with all its beauty and ugliness, provides a stability for beauty that allows us to appreciate it in the context of love and relate beauty to truth.

Jeremy Kidwell

[i] David Moss, “Hans Urs Von Balthasar: Beginning with Beauty”, in David Horrell et all., Ecological Hermeneutics (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 202. In case you’re curious, here’s the passage by Hans Urs von Balthasar (a contemporary Swiss theologian) that inspired Moss: “the world, formerly penetrated by God’s light, now becomes but an appearance and a dream – the Romantic vision – and soon thereafter nothing but music. But where the cloud disperses, naked matter remains as an indigestible symbol of fear and anguish. Since nothing else remains, and yet something must be embraced, twentieth-century man is urged to enter this impossible marriage with matter, a union which finally spoils all man’s taste for love. But man cannot bear to live with the object of his impotence, that which remains permanently unmastered. He must either deny or conceal it in the silence of death.” (Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, (1982) 18-19)


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Categories : Making a Difference

Life Seasons

23 05 2011

Life has its seasons. Nelson Mandela spent a good portion of his adult life fighting the South African apartheid regime. In Mandela’s eyes, the only sane option was to resist a system which built walls of injustice between black and white people in the country. He organized an opposition party, wooed mass support, coordinated guerrilla efforts when diplomatic ones were met with indifference, worked during the night to lay low during the day, until he was
 captured by government forces in 1964. Deemed a threat to the country, he and his companions at the ANC received a life sentence in jail.

His active season had finished; a time of loneliness and reflection was starting. His last speech before his 27 years exile in Robben Island was a chance to take a final stand. Heading to his closing words, Mandela took a moment, faced the court judge in the eyes, and declared, “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”[1] Mandela used his final public words to confirm his stand behind the cause he fought for.

But then, a new season of opportunity opened itself after decades in solitary confinement. After being released from prison, Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994. His struggle for a democratic, equal society achieved its climax. The challenge of reorganizing a country around a new principle, equality among all, together with its political, economic, social, and geographic ramifications, took him to dramatic action as well as arid cabinet conversations around tea pots and tedious listening to complaints. Routine at the presidential office was surely different than routine as an underground party leader. In his 1994 autobiography, Mandela states that “I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.”[2]

He found out, in other words, that life has ample space for the heroic as well as the mundane. Life is decided in boring moments as well as in epic ones. Sometimes the best one can do is to carry out the tasks of the day, have a telephone conversation, fill out a spreadsheet, file a report. Because the verve with which we face habitual duties will be the verve with which we will live the rest of our life. If we crumble before an uneventful day, so will we when it is time to take a life-altering stand, look someone in the eye or be ready to die for something.

René Breuel

[1] Nelson Mandela, quoted in Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (London: The Free Press, 2005), 127.

[2] Ibid., 648.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Red Pen Fear

20 05 2011

When people email me, they almost always include some line that goes “please don’t check my spelling” or “I know I’m terrible at grammar” or “I hate emailing an English teacher.” It is interesting, especially considering that I have always been a bad speller myself and that the sort of work I do has little to do with pedantic proof-reading or nit-picky grammar. My family, friends and, perhaps more naturally, my students are all afraid that I’m secretly examining every word they write, every phrase that leaves their fingers. But I assure you this is not the case: I never pay any attention to spelling or grammar in the emails I receive. It seems inappropriate ― a reduction of an interpersonal exchange to frequently ossified rules about phonetics, prepositions, and punctuation ― to even think about such things when reading a friend, loved-one, or even student’s email.

Over the past three days I’ve marked hundreds of pages of student writing. As I finished the final paper and uttered a (sincere) “thank God that’s done!”, I was struck by the similarity between the fear that people have in writing me and the fear that many people, myself included, feel about God. When I pray ― and when I don’t ― I sometimes fear that God is analyzing and weighing everything I say, checking it for its spiritual grammar and its theological correctness. Many of my friends who are not people of faith express a similar fear about God: that he is scrutinizing every instant of their lives, looking for the misplaced comma, the misspoken word, the dangling modifier, or the good work left undone. And so, they avoid him like some of people I know avoid emailing me.

This fear is, perhaps, somewhat well founded. It is cliché, but no one is perfect and, so, we naturally fear that the perfect God sees our mistakes, our errors and judges them with his red pen, making note of each and every imperfection…But, that isn’t how I react to my students work or to the letters of friends. No, I rather enjoy hearing from them, enjoy the interaction regardless of a misspelled word.

While I don’t want to suggest that the extreme and staggering evil that people are capable of is the equivalent of a squinting modifier, I am reminded of Father Zosima’s comment to a young woman who came to him for confession. After hearing her confession he tells her, “If even I, a sinful man, just like you, was moved to tenderness and felt pity for you, how much more will God be.” If I (and all the other English teachers I know out there) actually don’t read emails looking for the mistakes that family and friends might be making, why do I have such an uncharitable view of God, imaging him as the divine corrector, red-pen in hand, ready to mark, to judge, to fail me.

While the Christian faith is often portrayed as an exercise in judgment and nit-picky morality, this isn’t the picture of God that the biblical text reveals. God is holy but he is not out to get us. He is deeply concerned with our lives and loves us. Such a theological statement may seem childish, but when Karl Barth, (one of the 20th century’s most important theologians) was asked to sum up the most profound thought of his 14 volume work of dogmatic theology, he paused for a moment and said: “Jesus loves me, this I know.”

Jessica Hughes


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Axis of Awesome

18 05 2011

When you’re tubing the YouTube, you may have have come across the “Four Chord Song” by the Australian comedy trio, the Axis of Awesome. In the song, they reveal that a great deal of the hit pop songs all rely on a simple progression of four chords – C-minor, F-minor, E-flat, B-Flat. They can play over 60 popular songs using these four chords (although, admittedly, because they’re an Aussie band, some of the songs would only be known to an Australian audience, but hey). The astonishing thing is how different all these songs seem to be – they come from a host of different musical genres, styles, eras. There’s everything, from ‘80s classics like “Don’t stop believing”, Richard Marx’s slow-and-soulful “Right here waiting”, the Black Eyed Peas “Where is the love?”, Bush’s grungy “Glycerine”, over and over these songs revolve around this exact same chord progression.

The “Four Chord Song” is pretty funny, and indicates that the Axis of Awesome guys are pretty clever. The only downside is the conclusion they draw from it. They suggest that “It’s really easy to write a pop hit – just mash these four chords together, and there it is.” I can’t help feeling that’s just a little too simplistic. What they seem to be doing here is cheapening the achievement of the original musicians, as if they weren’t really that talented, because they just jumped on the bandwagon of these four chords. That seems a little disrespectful of some often pretty astonishing musicians.

This all reveals a very common tendency in contemporary western culture: the tendency to celebrate difference over sameness. The “crime” of these songs, according to Axis of Awesome, is that even though they sound different because of style and genre, they’re really just the same, using the same four old chords. By their definition, a talented musician is somebody who does something totally different from everybody else. You see this coming out in lots of other places as well. Our society thinks newness, originality and individuality are three of the greatest virtues. Sometimes, that’s great, but not always.

Just in terms of music, there is a cost to this endless search for originality. It means we have a tendency to get bored very easily, and constantly need to hear – and therefore buy – something new and original. Sometimes, it seems we’d rather hear a bad new song rather than a good old one. It also means we miss the beauty of sameness. Seen from this perspective, the “Four Chords Song” is a celebration of how all these supposedly different songs are actually all connected. Something unifies them all, while allowing – even fostering – a diversity. Same and different become complimentary, not antagonistic, when we view the song from this perspective.

This preference for different obviously goes far deeper than music. We can come to disrespect or ignore the elderly among us, and forget our history. The boredom we feel in music also comes out in our workplaces, our friendships, even our marriages. Perhaps worst of all, we can begin to focus only on what makes us different from each other – this is where competitiveness and prejudice begin to fester. Celebrating difference is fine, but it only ultimately works when we realise that in the midst of our difference, there is something deeper that unites us, that makes us the same.

From the Christian perspective, what unites us is a “three chord” Community, a Trinity, that designed us to reflect Their image. All of us do that when we live in unity and diversity, just as They do. When we can celebrate what unites us – Them that are also Him – it is then that we can begin to make beautiful music together.

Matt Gray


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

Longing for Death

16 05 2011

Adolf Hitler spent a fortune in 1936 to buy a painting and hang it in his office. A secluded isle, surrounded by the boundless mysterious sea, is approached by a rowboat, and a figure clad entirely in white faces the water gate. In the rocky walls of the island are carved sepulchral portals, and dark cypress trees dominate the enigmatic center of the picture. Hitler had this painting in his office until the last moment, until he shot himself in his bunker in Berlin.

It wasn’t only Hitler who was fascinated with Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. Freud had a copy in his office, and Lenin had one hanging just above his bed. The painting inspired works by Munch, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, a symphony by Rachmaninoff, and Nabokov noted that the painting was to be “found in every Berlin home” in the early 20th century.[1] Böcklin himself described the Isle of the Dead as “a dream picture: it must produce such a stillness that one would be awed by a knock on the door.”[2]

What makes this painting so magnetic? Part of it is its surreal beauty: a funerary island floating on nothingness, with its massive walls unrivalled by the waveless calm of the ocean, the trees and the clouds bending to the whisper of the wind, the last rays of light that illuminate the island growing dimmer and dimmer, as the sun falls into its abyss. Part of the drawing power of this painting emerges from the questions it raises too. Who is that white figure? What is the oarsman feeling? What lies behind the cypress trees? A passage to the underworld, perhaps?

But maybe what attracts us most strongly to Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead is the allure of death drawing close. We can feel a frenzied calm taking over our hearts as “life as we know it” finishes and we are buried into some kind of mysterious destiny. We hear the silence of the moment, the serene embrace of the wind smoothing our skin, the attraction and the fear that dominate us as we approach the center of the island. Our existence approaches its twilight, and we try to take in a last flash of beauty before our eyes close.

Curiously, after five editions of Isle of the Dead, Böcklin painted also an Isle of Life. It is filled with signs of joy and vividness: music, company, dance, intimacy, color, animals, the blue sky, friendship. Instead of the tense magnetism of Isle of the Dead, this painting produces relief. One picture gets us bracing for death, the other relaxes our muscles. In one picture we are the tragic hero; in the other, part of a joyous feast in nature.

These paintings get me thinking. What is my picture of death? What awaits me? Will beauty engulf me, or will I dance on its bosom? Will I finish by myself, or will eternity ravish me with overflowing life?

René Breuel

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (1936), 56.

[2] John Culshaw, Rachmaninov: The Man and his Music (1949), 7.


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Amature Lovers and Remembered People

11 05 2011

Cockroaches big enough to be ridden by small jockeys squirmed across the floor, the smell of urine and alcohol hung in the air, and everything seemed to be caked with filth. I recoiled at the thought of helping a forgotten old man named Wayne last week. Standing in the doorway of his single room apartment I could see that “helping him” around the house would mean entering into a chasm of filth and pain. Wayne’s weathered face peered into my own, watching me take in what lay before us. A few hours later I am heaving his limp old “mattress” into a dumpster in the heavy rain. Much to my distress it somehow collapses over top of me and I find myself sandwiched inside of strangely warm, wet stinking mattress. Once freed, I want to get away. I want to run so far away from Wayne that I never have to remember him again. Instead, I take a minuet to “break”.

Wandering onto the apartment’s top floor I overlook the city. “How many other “Wayne’s” are out there?”… I quietly wonder. It is an overwhelming feeling. I realize in this moment that Wayne’s messy apartment is just the surfaced expression of his entire life. I also realize that there are many Wayne’s out there in the city, and, in fact, in me! I, too, have carefully concealed messes and “dirty rooms” needing to be cleaned. Wayne’s obvious mess simply leaks a larger truth that American philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s rightly observes: that “most men live lives of quiet desperation.” I’m not the first person to overlook a city and consider these things… Jesus approaches his own city and weeps at the thought of those like Waynen – those desperate for peace, people like me.[1]

Walking back into Wayne’s apartment I notice something I hadn’t before. In the middle of Wayne’s dimly lit room is a single chair. But who has one chair? A forgotten person nobody hears. I realize that my own desires to run away and forget Wayne would be commonplace. I re-entered Wayne’s apartment settled to not let myself forget him. I wouldn’t be content to just “cry over the city;” Jesus didn’t. Jesus entered the city and famously sat among those most eager for peace, the poor and the broken. He listened, remembered, and taught how to rightly love one another.

Still, I wonder who will remember all the Wayne’s we daily pass on the streets… who will notice when they “check out”? Will they be remembered? While Jesus is dying on the cross a forgotten criminal asks Jesus a simple request, “Remember me when you enter your kingdom.” People want to be remembered. It means their life meant something, that their life mattered. Jesus replies to the criminal “Don’t worry, I will remember you… but not only that, I am going to bring you with me to paradise.”[2] God not only hears the forgotten, He remembers the forgotten while promising a great party. It tells me that each person is of great value and significant in God’s eyes – worth hearing and remembering. That’s good news for all those thirsty for purpose and hungry for peace.

God hears and remembers people like you, Wayne, and even amateur lovers like me. In the words made famous in the movie Wayne’s World, “Party on Wayne…party on”.

Luke 23:38-43

Ryan Vallee is an an adventure seeker, amateur lover, and Jesus follower who enjoys good books, movies, and coffee.

[1] Luke 19:41-42.

[2] My paraphrase of Luke 23:39-43.


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A Tale of Three Deaths

9 05 2011

Three remarkable deaths have been celebrated worldwide in the past two weeks. Each had a particular flavour; each was celebrated in its own manner. But they were all cherished because, people believe, these deaths produce life. Let’s look at them in turn.

Osama Bin Laden’s death was long desired, and took place just like a movie would portray it. In four helicopters, “the small, elite force flew low and fast,” as Time magazine describes, to ambush Bin Laden in his sealed mansion.[1] President Obama exalted the greatness and determination of America, which “can do whatever we set our mind to.”[2] People celebrated a sense of closure and revenge, and the prospect of a safer world after Bin Laden’s death.

John Paul II’s beatification took place just one day before, on Sunday. It remembered the deceased pope Karol Wojtyła, and declared him blessed and capable of interceding on behalf of Catholics who pray in his name. Pilgrims came here to Rome for the celebration, and in the newsstand in front of my apartment there is a book with the title Karol is Alive.

Bin Laden was alive, and people wanted him dead; John Paul II is dead, and people want him alive. In Bin Laden’s case, people believe his death will prevent further killing of people through terrorist action; in John Paul’s case, further life is bestowed to him through the religious mechanism of beatification, and it is believed that he is alive, performing miracles, and answering people’s prayers. Life and death are interwoven in their deaths.  But regardless of political or religious beliefs, we all recognize that their deaths do not modify much of the state of things, nor change our lives in a substantial way.

And then we come to Jesus’ death, celebrated on Easter. Curiously, his death was much more like Bin Laden’s than that of John Paul: a hunted man, killed brutally because of alleged crimes, ascending shamefully to a cross. His funeral reminds us more al-Qaeda underground cells mourning the death of their leader than the throngs that flowed openly to St. Peter’s when John Paul died.

Still, Christians believe (and all Christians in this one) that his death produced life, and a rather particular kind of life: eternal, redeeming, abundant life. Death died when Christ died; he took mortality in his flesh so that it would be nailed to a cross with him. The Death of Death in the Death of Christ was the title of a seventeenth-century work by John Owen, and it condenses well the gist of Paul’s celebration: “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”[3]

Bin Laden was killed, and there will hopefully be less violence in the world because of it. John Paul died and was beatified, and there will hopefully be a prominent example to inspire people. Jesus died too, like them and like the rest of us, but his tomb is empty. His death is different. Death could not contain him; he rose from it and offers us eternal life. This is a death that changes things; this is a death worth celebrating; this is a death that produces true life.


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Categories : On Anything and Everything, The Heart of Faith

Love for Bin Laden?

6 05 2011

The news cycle for the last week and a half has been saturated with the events surrounding the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Besides being a probable game changer in the broader international effort to fight terrorism, Bin Laden’s death has evoked reactions of all sorts. Perhaps the most visceral images came from outside the White House shortly after President Obama made the news official. Video footage broadcast on CNN and other major networks showed Americans dancing in the streets in a raucous and joyous manner as if their favorite sports team had just won a world championship.[1] Anyone glued to the television must have wondered about the celebration. Obviously, the appropriate emotional response when a hero or a lauded public figure dies is one of mourning and grief, but is the opposite true? Is it right to cheer and jump for joy when a villain and infamous terrorist like Bin Laden is killed?

To be sure, for the thousands of families that lost loved ones on 9/11 and for countless others who were affected, Bin Laden’s death could and should bring a sense of relief, closure, or appreciation that justice has been served. As witnessed, some have rejoiced in Bin Laden’s death, whereas others now fear a backlash from Al Qaeda members who may hatch plans to retaliate. Whatever the reaction, the typical American response is clearly not one of concern for Bin Laden or his soul. As a murderer and mastermind of 9/11, Bin Laden has for the last decade seared himself into the American consciousness as the enemy of all enemies, and to think that one should love or pray for Bin Laden before or after his death seems completely radical and counterintuitive.

And yet this is exactly what is commanded in the Bible. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his listeners, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”[2] Jesus’ ethic is radical because it instructs people to face violence with unrelenting love. It is counterintuitive because it offends our pragmatic sensibilities and forces us to reconsider the way we relate to those who persecute us.[3]

So what is Jesus’ logic here? Is the command to love and pray for one’s enemies not merely counterintuitive but also exceedingly ineffectual or overly idealistic? Even in a world with enemies like Bin Laden, I would contend that it is neither weak nor quixotic to follow Jesus’ radical message. In fact, if anything can be learned from Bin Laden’s death, it’s that fundamentalist narratives which promote violence and destruction ultimately fail. Sure, Bin Laden managed to evade capture for years and tragically orchestrated a few terrorist acts, but to what end? Imprisoned in a fortress compound of his own making, Bin Laden lived out his last few years cut off from society and fearful of retribution.

In the end, one can see that Bin Laden’s logic is the one that is impotent. “To express our anger and hate to them,” Bin Laden wrote in 1996, “is a very important moral gesture. By doing so we would have taken part in (the process of) cleansing our sanctities from the crusaders and the Zionists and forcing them, by the Permission of Allah, to leave disappointed and defeated.”[4] By contrast, the radical ethic of Jesus to love our enemies proves to be more logical than one founded on anger and hate. If adopted, it offers an end to disappointment and defeat, and this, I think, provides all of us with a much better reason to dance in the streets.

Paul McClure

[2] Matthew 5:43-45

[3] I do not mean to suggest here that Jesus’ command to love and pray for our enemies precludes all military action. Though a frequently debated issue, my own take is that even while Jesus’ ethic of love is radical, it may still allow for forceful military action in certain circumstances, as long as love remains central and we seek the best, most redemptive option available for our enemies.

[4] Bin Laden, Osama. “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” From London-based newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi. 1996. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1996.html


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