THE SPIRITUALITY OF CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE

The Spirituality of conflict and violence is an idea introduced to us by a great Benedictine Monk called Thomas Cullinan OSB. He offers practical hints on how one can get involved in the building of the community in obedience and humility, but this once done well will always create conflicts at the end of the day, you either become a matter for the sake of the Reign of God by dying severally or simply become nice and go unnoticed as a missioner. H states “to participate in life, we ought to be humble and obedient before a given reality, and this reality is that of being witness to the truth”. 

That means that we have to be artisans in God’s world, artisans whose primary and only task is a loving and total response to truth. We are called to look at the example of Christ who came to the world to bear witness to the truth. (John 18:37). This truth is the present reality of the peoples, present lives, what is happening to them, among them. The question we have to confront is what does the divine love affair called “Reign of God” look like? Sometimes we seem to divide the truth according to the arrogant life we live, the western understanding of independence or individualistic attitude which has come of age to the approach of freedom. It’s this freedom that keeps the self-intact and demands the right to choose as one likes. The self-concerned, not self-forgetfulness. It seeks to be free from reality and relations. It doesn’t receive freedom and peace as a bonus and a gift.

If we are to reread and reexamine our actions to that of the Gospel it will come clear that if our primary call is to a loving response to truth, born out of the original obedience and humility, then we cannot avoid conflict. It’s an inherent part of living for truth, its conflict unsought bur freely accepted. The gospel is not about mere private virtues and individual spirituality. It’s about living in the public forum in the light and truth of God’s love affair with people, it’s to understand why Jesus passed through non-comprehension, conflict in our own times. Most of the world evils in this society is being perpetrated by high-minded people who seek themselves as virtues (clever devils). The virtuous are those who are good at crashing others in the religious community and in the church, whether they know it or not. Jesus was always in favor of the naughty and be in collision with the well-behaved. The question one may ask is why?

In the Gospel of John 9, we come across a community that was primitive to assume that sickness or affliction should be linked with personal or family guilt. This is what we modern people of God have fallen into and we find that we are not sick ourselves but fickle. Fickle means changing frequently, especially as regards one’s loyalties or affections. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, for him to have been born blind? Some Pharisees said, “we are not blind surely!?” To these questions, Jesus answers: Neither he nor his parents sinned. Blind?

 If you were, you would not be guilty but since you say “we see” your guilt remains”. This man born blind has the vigour to go head-on with those in authority, his challenge could be as saying, to the government minister of defence: why are you so fascinated by the peace movement? Are you going to join it? The man’s parents cannot disown him, he is their son, and yet not wanting to be counted among the subversives. Jesus was not in conflict with the Law, the Torah as such, it was a confrontation with the treatment of the Law as an ideology.

The word “ideology” has a long-time historical unfolding of many years. Not in its neutral sense of the sets of ideas which any culture or class which has to interpret the world, but pejorative sense, referring to a set of ideas, theories, and principles which have ceased to be relative tool for understanding reality and have become an absolute, a machine, into which reality is fitted. Today we have been enticed with the western individualist consumerism, Islamic fundamentalism. This has turned into violent forms in Latin America, parts of Africa, Philippines, South Korea, and Hong Kong, etc. If the church has to confront this reality it will have to admit that it will be conflict and what we are doing today, we tend to be nice and hard in picture.

Thomas Cullinan delves into ideological characteristics:

High minded: These the ideological mentality is long-cherished thinking, what in the west they call individualism, Marxism, the Law, each is at the root of bad or careless thinking, but careful thinking in real matters of values. Very plausible, mentally attractive, even addictive.

Limited Criteria: the criteria of economic reduce what is perceived as truth, to a limited realm, leading to totalitarianism, even in the names of democracy and freedom.

Simplifying criteria: Simplifying the ambiguities, varieties, contradictions, and mystery of human reality.

Righteous: A great sense of righteousness and freeing the self from the sense of own guilt.

In Jesus’s time, it was impossible for many people especially associates in Galilee to keep the Law. These were, therefore, “accused and outside the Law” and in some way guilty. The voices are heard in our ears when undertone hatred and blames start flying around, for example in times of overseas and donation packages: “If those people “over there” chose to work and better themselves, they would do so than depending on us”.

Guilt misfit: these brand themselves as being in the bondage of fate, the bondage of sin developing a language that is pervasive. Jesus liberated the blind man not only from being called “sinner through and through from birth”.

No oppositions: “who is not for is against us” A strong ideology, having to set the scene as a simple confrontation between two diversities has no place for the third parties. Everyone is either Loyal or the Enemy, or a dupe of the terrorist’s a regime based on “natural security”.

Ideology legitimizes extreme nationalism in a high minded way so that it is obvious that it is better that one man even tens of thousands should die for the sake of the people. Anyone who is not one hundred percent for us, then he is one hundred percent in the camp of the enemy. No room to create alternative forms this can be seen in central America an example in time, some countries in the horn of Africa, ideologies are self-justifying and once you hear them say “we told you” that is a pure statement of a junta a regime that has literally killed the opposition, bought them and now they are singing their songs as what befell Nicolò Machiavelli with the Medici in Florence. “Had Nicolò Machiavelli, who until now had never bowed down before money or power, been broken at last? Does his prince show his readiness to change his political colors and abandon his once fearless style of addressing great men, in the hope that Medici might shed their suspicion and restore him to the fold of Florentine politics?” (Erica Benner, Be Like the Fox: 246 (2017).

Perversion of language: Because those in authority want to justify their stay, they are ready to pervert language to its own ends. The conviction of being right is a stumbling block to seeking truth and perceiving what taking place is really. The use of language is manipulative in communicating the truth. This affects even the mainstream churches, at what point of saying, in the name of Christianity, that we can only be peacemakers from a position of power? Is that not the ultimate denial of the truth?

Jesus lived for liberation and hope where we as the church should stand today. It’s along these lines, not along moralistic lines, that we should see Jesus as being counted among the sinners, and that we should understand the Lamb of God who takes away sin. It should be good news that divides the hearts of many, the good news that should confront much that is accepted uncritically, Good news that would divide us even from our own brethren. Jesus did not come to bring peace at any price. The art of being vagabonds, displaced persons, fools. Can we do it? And then not be right ourselves.

How do we cope? What can we do? We need to get organized and put ourselves in order, try harder to save ourselves. Jesus talks of the reign of God is near at hand, among us, yet to be but already here. He told the people that he could or couldn’t, enter it, but never said they were in it. It demands preparation and predisposition that gift-receiving demands the social justice required by the year of the Lord’s favor, and yet it was never merited. Like all love affairs, God’s Reign was enigmatic, better talked of in stories and celebration than in books and theses. It was recognized only those who know it by experience. You could know it but not know about it. It was recognized only by those knew it by experience. You could know it but not know about it. It’s the love of God in people’s lives, his antecedent Reign, which urges us. It’s not building something on his behalf. He is not this spectator God, wanting for us to do great things in his name.

Once we are all truly alight, then we can’t but be effective, being true to our calling, a candle burning truly. If you are, you will give light, whether, or how, or when, or to as a great patron of God, but will become transferred signs pointing beyond works, they will praise your Father in Heaven. Vincent Donovan in his book entitled Christianity Rediscovered gives an account of Maasai in Tanzania. A Maasai elder speaking says for Fr. Donovan “ a person who really believes is like a lion going after its prey” it’s nose and eyes give the speed to catch the prey, all the power of its body is involved in the terrible death lead and single blow to the neck with the front paw, the blow that actually kills. And as the animal goes down, the lion envelops it in its arms (front legs) puts it to itself, and makes it part of itself. This is how the lion kills. This is the way a person believes. This is what faith is. When you are afraid of the bend, having friends to go around the bend with is precious or even guidance from those who have already gone around.

Communion is based on a living conversation with the poor, the forgotten, the voiceless, the wounded, and then disposed of. So we carry in ourselves, wherever we are, deep suffering, we bear wounds of love which never heal, the wounds of the risen Lord. A Christian is not merely a striver for liberation yet to come, but the bearer of a liberation of which the down payment, the pledge, has already been made. It’s an enigmatic co-existence of suffering and joy which makes our lives, especially in the community a living sign, from being a patron of God’s reign we are called to be instruments of the Reign, called to freely, as it were normally. 

A conversion always involves death. This side of the grave, constant dying, only that new and freedom may be released in us, a community of faith. Freedom from fear makes us invincible “you can’t kill me for I have died already”. The way to contemplation is obscurity to obscure that it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing left in it that can be grasped and cherished as heroic or even unusual. And so…there is a supreme value in the ordinary routine of work and poverty and hardship and monotony that characterizes the lives of the poor and uninteresting and forgotten people in the world. We are not relaying artisans in God’s world, are we! We are God’s work of art (Ephesians). All the time we think we are the lion, in the end, the lion is God.

 Book consulted:

Cullinan, T., “A Spirituality for Conflict and Violence”, in SEDOS, Trends in Mission, toward the 3^rd Millennium, (eds,) William Jenkinson – Helene O’Sullivan, Orbis Book, New York 1993, 239-43.

Benner, C., Be like the Fox, Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom, Penguin Books (UK)  2017.

Donavan, V., Christianity Rediscovery, Maryknoll, Orbis Book, 1978.