9/27/13It happened to be the eve of Yom Kippur at a Jewish temple. I had invited the internationally known and respected apostle of peace -- Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton -- and the leaders of a remarkably optimistic group that calls itself the Meta Peace Team to speak to the audience of a forum of which I have been the principal lecturer since 2008.
The forum is not part of the temple's organization. Its rabbis have have nonetheless welcomed us to use space in their building. A person once said to me that such generosity was certainly "the Christian thing to do." I responded that I thought it was "the Jewish thing to do." But never mind.
Those speaking for the peace team were Sister Elizabeth Walters, IHM, and Father Peter Dougherty of the Catholic Diocese of Lansing, Mich. Bishop Gumbleton led off with an impassioned call for what he called "enemy love." This particular forum and its proximate occurrence to Yom Kippur in the midst of the great debate about whether or not the United States should rain fire down upon Bashar al-Assad for gassing his own people made the bishop's talk all the more of moment.
It was the day that Russian President Vladimir Putin's guest column appeared on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Bishop Gumbleton praised Putin for his criticism of President Obama and his determination to strike Assad's Syria in retaliation for his use of a weapon of mass destruction in the murder of more than 1,400 Syrians.
In the discussion period that followed, I asked the bishop if he didn't think Putin's pointed counsel to Obama to obey international law was somewhat disingenuous, given Putin's own frequent disregard for what few civil rights laws obtain in post-Soviet Russia.
The bishop was right back with a reminder that Nikita Khrushchev had sent just such a communication to President John F. Kennedy at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, which helped avoid what some figured at the time might have been an all-out nuclear war. The bishop's message was that an offer to broker peace should always be taken seriously, no matter its source. I responded that perhaps Ronald Reagan was not wrong to say "Trust, but verify." And so it went.
Sister Walters and Father Dougherty followed with accounts of what the Meta Peace Team is, does and has done on three continents, that is to help people learn "active nonviolence" by interposing its member between sworn enemies, by surrounding with their own bodies those being threatened, always trying to make friends out of enemies.
That testimony picked up on the bishop's emphasis on the simple idea of forgiveness, which, he said, can never materialize when the would-be forgiver has not asked the one he intends to forgive to remit his own trespasses. "It's the only way to where we must go," Bishop Gumbleton said.
I was already on record with most of that audience for having seemed to suggest in an essay published seven days earlier that, given the crime against humanity the use of poison gas constitutes, it might be posthumous justice for the gassed victims of Syria were Assad his gangsters to be punished severely.
The bishop was well aware of the content of that essay, and he was not about to concede anything to me. "Enemy love," he kept saying, knowing that I had written half a book about the Sage of Nazareth's strange ethical counsel to love the enemy along with neighbor and self.
I was a tad miffed that I had been outmaneuvered and decided to make a rebuttal in the essay that you are reading right now. Then I went to hear my friend Father Paul Chateau's Sunday homily on the Parable of the Prodigal Son. There was no doubt in Father Chateau's mind that it had to be forgiveness all the way every day if the human race was not finally to do itself in.
The father figure in that parable had been told by his younger son in so many words to drop dead. The boy wanted his inheritance before the old man died. His older brother -- the slavishly obedient one -- slaved on for the father and was mightily offended when the wanton younger sibling crawled home on his hands and knees only to be received as royalty. The elder son strenuously objected, unable to comprehend why his father would treat his upstart brother so richly.
Although the word is not used in the parable, forgiveness of an unconditional kind is the main theme of the story. When I heard it reiterated, I remembered that in my translation and paraphrase of the maxim, "Forgive seventy times seven," I rendered it "Forgive as often as it takes," and that with approbation from those further up the ladder of recognized scholarship than I.
It is not up to me to forgive Assad for his unspeakable crime of using poison gas on his own countrymen. Neither is it for me to dissuade others from doing so. Should Assad be tried before the World Court for his crime against humanity? Shall he be forgiven? Is his crime unforgivable? Was Adolf Hitler's?
The Meta Peace Team and their episcopal visitor would probably brush that question aside for the sake of getting on with the making of peace. At any price?
All this took place the day before Yom Kippur -- a day of atonement. Bishop Gumbleton rightly said that the United States has plenty for which to atone -- its use of the atom bomb twice in 1945, its complicity in the overthrow of two legitimate leaders in Iran in 1953 and in Chile two decades later, its militaristic cruelty in Vietnam and the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the bald-faced lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, as in the dread mushroom cloud predicted by Condoleezza Rice.
No one attempted to gainsay the bishop on the subject of forgiveness. Even a Holocaust survivor who happened to attend the forum that day appeared by the nodded head to agree. If she could forgive, who would dare not for the sake of making, or trying to make, peace?
Yet those 1,400 Syrians whose lives ended in agony speak from their graves. We should only have been able to hear their screams and their last tortured breaths as the gas struck them down in convulsions and finally to death.
They must not be written off as collateral damage in some kind of grand bargain to strip Assad of his remaining WMDs but leaving him in power. Such a result, in fact, might be unforgivable. Moreover, any semblance of peace achieved would be merely a cessation of hostilities. As Jeremiah said some 2,600 years ago, They have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people but slightly, saying "Peace, peace" when there is no peace.
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FOOTNOTE: The massacre in Kenya, the Washington Navy Yard shootings, and the murders-by-gun in such cities as Detroit and Chicago are yet other incidents of what Robert Burns called "man's inhumanity to man." They, too, mean that there is no peace. Peace does not suddenly dawn on its own. It must be made. The sons and daughters who make it are the blessed ones.
