Articles – Page 109 – Religion Online

AIDS in South Africa: Why the Churches Matter

South Africa has the world’s second largest AIDS epidemic (in gross numbers). Its neighbor, Zimbabwe, ranks first. During the past ten years, while AIDS has come under control in central African countries with far fewer resources, the disease has gone out of control in South Africa, in the richest, most cosmopolitan nation in the whole sub-Saharan region. An estimated 10 million South Africans, out of a population of approximately 40 million, will die of AIDS during the next ten years.

In a recent article in the New York Times, author Nadine Gordimer expresses views about the disease that South Africa is eager to promote and that have wide acceptance in America. Gordimer calls for more money to develop a vaccine, for Third World debt relief, and for less military and more public health spending within Africa. She thinks that, given Africa’s poverty and social malaise, we cannot condemn the promiscuous sex that is spreading AIDS. And she concludes by warning of the epidemic’s economic impact, saying that "the bell tolls for thee, globally."

A critical look at these ideas might help explain why the epidemic continues to rage in the part of Africa with the most resources for fighting it. With a unanimity that invites trust, the scientists working to develop a vaccine have said that the nature of retroviruses itself is the main factor holding up an AIDS vaccine. Third World debt relief would probably not have the intended consequences. The states receiving this relief would be likely to use the public money freed up from social welfare demands to expand their militaries -- and military spending is one of the things Gordimer deplores. That donor countries have been the enablers of Africa’s arms addiction has certainly been the pattern so far.

That the AIDS crisis threatens Africa’s economic development seems unarguable. In central Africa during the early ‘90s, AIDS threatened to become a disease of the middle and upper-middle classes, decimating the skilled trades and professions. The higher a man’s income, the greater his access to sexual partners, and traditions of polygamy encouraged him to take advantage of all his opportunities. The danger this posed for the region’s economic future -- a danger reported in the Western press and widely publicized locally -- contributed significantly to a rethinking of both public policy and private mores. Most important, this threat motivated the public to move beyond apparently inadequate "safe sex" campaigns to more difficult and effective changes. In Uganda, for example, an HIV test now is required before marriage, and the social pressure in favor of chastity has grown markedly.

South Africa is different. Its white and its thoroughly westernized black middle class are not very vulnerable to the disease. The case of Charlene Smith, one of the few white rape victims, became a media sensation. She was able to obtain the drug AZT as a precaution against the transmission of HIV, and to prosecute her attacker and see him sentenced to 30 years in prison to prevent his carrying out his further threats against her. But destitute rape victims have no such protections. For this and other reasons, in South Africa AIDS remains almost exclusively a disease of the underclass. The prosperous here simply do not share the fate of the poor to the extent common in other African countries. The income gap is wider than in any other nation except Brazil, and the institutional divides left over from apartheid are immense. Consequently, most of the people on the favored side of the prosperity gap do not see AIDS as an eventual or indirect threat to their own well-being.

Almost 35 percent of South Africans are unemployed. These are the AIDS-vulnerable, uneducated black and "colored" (mixed-race) poor. Unemployment is a major reason for the country’s very high rate of violent crime. Up to 70 percent of the army is HIV-positive. But the military is being drastically cut back anyway; soldiers of the next generation will be both fewer and better skilled. Gordimer cites a prediction that 270,000 out of 1.1 million public servants will be infected by 2004. But nearly as many, mostly from the lower ranks, may lose their jobs through the privatization and rationalization already under way.

Losses of employees to AIDS are an expense and trauma to American institutions, but not to those in South Africa, where people who are HIV-positive hide their condition as long as possible for fear of persecution and die relatively quickly once they have AIDS, since few interventions are available to them. Private charities and extended families take care of the vast majority of AIDS orphans.

Finally, AIDS has been most common in the predominantly Zulu province of ZwaZulu-Natal. The Zulus supported the apartheid regime and are a thorn in the side of the new government, which is dominated by the Xhosas. Commercial interests covet the fertile ZwaZulu-Natal farmland now kept in small subsistence parcels through tribal allotment. Why would policymakers fear that AIDS would have an economic impact on the country? It can make economically superfluous and burdensome human beings disappear.

The above sketch is the only way I can explain the unusual feebleness of South Africa’s attempts to deal with the epidemic. "Sarafina II," the centerpiece of the Nelson Mandela regime’s anti-AIDS campaign, was a glitzy traveling musical that, because it charged admission, did not reach most of its target audience -- low-income black youth. The Health Department then tried to promote Virodene, an industrial solvent with no medicinal properties, as an AIDS cure, and this led to a vicious fight with and estrangement from medical authorities.

The new president, Thabo Mbeki, has become interested in the widely discredited Duesberg hypothesis that the HIV virus is a fabrication and that AIDS is really a set of symptoms of poverty or drug use. Mbeki has also disputed the safety of the widely esteemed drug AZT. He insists on exploring these issues thoroughly before providing rape victims and HIV-positive pregnant women with AZT treatment to reduce transmission of the virus.

Even those who at first appear more forthcoming tend to have an "all or nothing" strategy that suggests a basically dismissive attitude toward the disease. In a recent article in the Cape Argus, Dr. S. P. Reddy (a "health promotion practitioner and HIV/AIDS researcher") argued that AZT could save 50,000 to 100,000 babies a year from HIV. The virus means death before the age of five for nearly all infected infants. The new drug nevirapine’s effectiveness is similar to that of AZT, yet the cost is only a tenth as high, less than $5 per child.

The use of this drug might seem both humane and affordable. However, some children who survived HIV would die later anyway from poverty-induced ailments, Reddy wrote. Why bother with the drug unless South Africa can provide "housing, education, clean water, health clinics, health-worker training, and nutritional supplements" as well? Thus, the "full ramifications [of the drug treatment] must be carefully researched and costed."

Reddy’s rationalization is fairly representative of views popular with the government and the development elite, who strive to keep the international and local media’s attention on South Africa’s AIDS crisis in order to foster foreign aid and grass-roots projects. When I asked a community worker in Cape Town’s squatter camps what ordinary people were saying about AIDS, she replied, "They think it’s a way for people to get jobs." There is a breath of truth in this version of an AIDS conspiracy theory.

A subcategory of the "all or nothing" approach is purveyed by organizations like Planned Parenthood, which teach "life skills" in the hope that young people will become sexually prudent as part of an integrated improvement in their lives. Participants in programs get information, encouragement in self-esteem and training in social interaction, but no actual prescriptions for behavior. Also, community health workers distribute contraceptives and treat sexually transmitted diseases on the spot. The workers are carefully chosen as ethnically and culturally similar to the people they work with, and trained to communicate within their milieu instead of imposing alien ideas.

The planners seem to have imbibed from the study of population control (especially the notorious coercion used in China) a dogmatic opposition to "targeted" approaches. Their scruples are commendable, but whereas failure to promote contraception means unwanted children and overpopulation, failure to combat AIDS means mass death. Can organizations say with equal conviction in both cases that clients should simply be free to choose, with no pressure of any kind?

AIDS is not causing, nor is it likely to cause, an economic crisis in southern Africa. That is the real reason why the epidemic is not being dealt with effectively there. Perhaps half-consciously, certainly imperceptibly to Western media, a narrowly economic understanding of public welfare is allowing millions of people to die. What’s neeeded is a call to action based on what the epidemic actually is: a humanitarian catastrophe resulting mainly from irresponsible sexual behavior. Against South Africa’s cultural and economic background, the only hopeful efforts to mitigate and control AIDS that I see are coming from the churches.

Churches feel obligated to make spending money on medical care a priority, even if the only outcome is likely to be the temporary relief of suffering. The South African Council of Churches has helped to establish a number of home-based AIDS care groups. These relieve overcrowding in hospitals, allow for the dignified treatment of patients and help destigmatize the disease. The churches undertake unglamorous charity work such as collecting food for AIDS victims and their families and caring for children with AIDS and AIDS orphans, as in Cape Town’s Nazareth House, a Catholic outreach.

Education efforts are mostly in the early stages, but are growing rapidly. Many churches have fitted their traditional teachings about chastity and monogamy into programs to fight the disease. One example is the ZAP AIDS Project, under the auspices of Catholic Welfare and Development. ZAP AIDS does its work in public schools, prisons, churches of many denominations, and shelters for street children.

Denominations are not unanimous in their definitions of sexual morality, but their disagreements are limited to questions that, in Africa, have little to do with AIDS. Homosexuality is a contentious issue within the Council of Churches, but in South Africa homosexuals are a relatively low-risk group for AIDS. (Arguing this, an actively homosexual man recently went to the Human Rights Commission and won the right to donate blood.) Another question is whether condoms should be available to those who do not accept monogamy. Even the liberal churches strongly urge monogamy, though not insisting on legally binding or heterosexual unions.

The "safe sex" controversy is perhaps the most unfortunate distraction in the fight against AIDS, not least because it has restricted cooperation among the churches. The more permissive of the mainline churches staunchly defend condoms, a resource that has been important in combating AIDS in the industrialized world. But the use of condoms is at odds with some aspects of African culture. In many regions of southern Africa, men prefer dry sex, and some women even take pains to dehydrate their vaginal canals. Without natural or artificial lubrication, condoms tear and come off.

Though the Western myth is that the Catholic Church in the Third World is retarding public health measures for the sake of a theological nicety, that is certainly not the case on this continent. African men’s resistance to condoms is already considerable. Condoms are imported by the ton and given away by the double handful -- and hardly used. In TB eradication campaigns, the overreporting of people’s cooperation with medical advice is measurable (chemical tests show whether patients have taken their pills or not) and quite high. If appropriate adjustments were made to the statistics for reported condom use (in the few programs that actually follow up distribution with surveys), the already modest numbers would shrink to practically nothing.

Reasons for not using condoms vary in Africa, as they do everywhere, but one is particularly strong. African men, the decision-makers with most of the power, tend to believe even more than do African women that sex is for procreation. Activists paddle upriver in working against this belief, and they must work against it in promoting condoms, the most confrontational of modern birth control methods.

The churches would do better to forget about condoms and put their energies into what they do have to offer, which they themselves fail to appreciate fully. Their stance for chastity and monogamy, often labeled as "unrealistic," is actually much better suited to African culture, especially in its present troubled condition, than are modern Western teachings about sexuality emphasizing personal freedom and individual development.

For many women in southern Africa today, heterosexual intercourse is either coercive or deceitful in some way. Either a woman is actually raped (South Africa has the highest rate of rape in the world; the rumor of the "virgin cure" has sent male AIDS patients on the hunt for younger and younger girls to rape), or she is pressured socially and economically. Women do not believe they have the right to disobey men, and wives and girlfriends are desperately dependent on their men. Extreme poverty may force women to become prostitutes in order to survive. And many women do not know and are afraid to ask whether a man has other partners.

A nurse and midwife who routinely deals with AIDS in families lamented the effect of anarchic sexual practices on the spread of the epidemic. She was especially concerned about the attitude of young men. Xolisa, 15, said that she and her friends were regularly harassed, chased and grabbed, sometimes in public. "They try to drag you inside -- you have to get away," she said. As a veteran of Planned Parenthood education, she was fully aware of and articulate about the danger of AIDS, but she was facing that danger alone. The police were "useless," she said, as the media also assert.

Xolisa and other young people I spoke to confirmed that parents typically retain the traditional notion of choosing spouses for their children, but put it into practice only to the extent of refusing to meet boyfriends and girlfriends or even acknowledge that there could be any. (An alarming custom is for the parents of a teenage boy to build him a small, private hut behind the family home; girlfriends can meet him there, unseen by his family.)

Young people are thus left to negotiate their relationships without guidance from the people most interested in their welfare. Peer pressure, heavy-handed seduction and rape are the outcome, with predictable victimization of young girls by older boys and grown men. AIDS spreads more easily from men to women than in the opposite direction, and traumatic sex, with the tearing of tissues, is the easiest route to sexual transmission.

The most reassuring message to a typical African girl is that her community will protect her from early, chaotic sex and that she will be able to marry a man indoctrinated against adultery and raise her children in safety. Trying to get someone so powerless to "take responsibility for her sexuality" is a cruel joke. With family and tribal structures pathetically weakened by colonialism and apartheid, and the government inept and indifferent, the only institution even seeking to make these all-important promises is the church. Though these promises cannot always be kept, they are far more practical than projects to "foster every individual’s right to his or her own unique development" -- projects that make no sense in the African context.

A return to chastity would be a return to a workable African society. Gordimer states that "promiscuity is difficult to condemn when sex is the cheapest or only available satisfaction." That is an obstacle only insofar as human activity is a laissez-faire marketplace. That marketplace begins to turn into a community when people insist that all its members have a future to protect, so that it is unacceptable for any to behave irresponsibly.

Muslims as well as Christians have strict views on sexual conduct, and even animists are expressing their desire to restore older mores. (Credo Mutwa, a leader of traditional healers, appeared in the Cape Argus recently speaking of ancient practices involving voluntary quarantine, which he claimed defeated earlier waves of venereal disease introduced by colonial forces.) But the Christian churches are strongest and best positioned, and therefore bear the greatest responsibility for demonstrating what can be done.

What the churches are doing is not enough to contain the epidemic, but they are ensuring that many of their members survive it. Keith Benjamin of the South African Council of Churches reports that in a group of 25 clergymen interviewed, not a single one had had to deal with a congregant who was an AIDS patient. He sees the clergy’s distance from the disease as unfortunate, but I think that he has missed the good news. Among those who feel bound by it, what the churches say about sex is life-saving.

Ironically, a disproportionate amount of the credit goes to conservative black churches with no AIDS programs and no specific AIDS message -- the churches regularly accused of having their heads in the sand. Most black churchgoers belong to these denominations. (The Zionist Church alone has 3.9 million members; this single institution keeps nearly one out of ten South Africans relatively safe from the new plague.) Lucy is a 26-year-old who attends the Gospel Church of Power in Guguletu, a squatter settlement near Cape Town. She said her church had nothing to say about AIDS. No one in the church had AIDS. All its members were very strict about marriage.

Some churches do go too far, and ostracize the few AIDS sufferers they have to deal with. In the mainline churches, certain parishes have refused pastoral care to victims and their families. Some of the conservative black churches have an actual policy of exclusion, which extends to a ban on church burial. This is, of course, inexcusable for any people professing to follow the teachings of Jesus -- but it is somewhat understandable, given the churches’ own weakness and exclusion in South Africa. The apartheid government shut down mission institutions and defamed religious proponents of racial equality. Churches’ commitment to nonviolence (and in some cases refusal even to take sides) diminished their influence with the liberation movement, and consequently with the new government, if not the whole new polity.

But the absence of economic incentives to fight AIDS might make an observer feel, apart from any moral, sectarian or theological considerations, that a religious revival alone can save South Africa from eventually consigning perhaps a third of its population to death. This is my own conclusion, although I am a Quaker, a member of a sect that is liberal and tolerant almost to the point of being secular and that frowns on proselytizing. I simply see in this part of the world the greatest practical need for churches to do what they ordinarily do, and to do more of it.

Lessons in Retirement

Taking Retirement: A Beginner’s Diary.

By Carl H. Klaus. Beacon, 256 pp.

Are you old?" a little boy asked as he popped up in the pool beside me. Hoping that his vision merely had been blurred by the spray and not wanting to admit my age, I tossed off his question by replying, "I didn’t think my backstroke was that bad." He paddled away muttering, "You must be crazy."

Perhaps I was. At the time I was on the brink of retirement from a long career as a campus minister, and I had every reason to be happy about the future. My career was ending on a positive note. My personal finances were in order. My wife, Alice, and I were planning a trip. I had plenty of good, self-chosen work lined up to keep me busy. I had a hobby. I could look forward to the company of retired friends and to sharing relaxed lunches with my wife.

But I was not happy. Talk of my replacement made me feel unneeded and unwanted. I knew that I would miss my office and the work-day contact with other people. As my mail and phone calls slowed to a trickle, I felt isolated. My desk calendar stopped recording -- and reminding me of -- my accomplishments. The changes in my routine made me fidgety.

And I worried about the ominous things that happened during the two weeks before my retirement date: a driver ran into my car and totaled it; our dishwasher, garbage disposal and computer broke down; a manuscript I had submitted for publication was rejected; and my doctor, his face drawn in a frown, told me I had to come in for tests.

Obviously, I needed help. Cast upon the turbulent waters of a major life transition, what would help me keep my head above water? Retirement savvy didn’t come any more naturally to me than learning how to read, write and do arithmetic had when I was a child. Then I had had to learn the three r’s; now I had to learn a fourth one. Carl Klaus’s Taking Retirement appeared just in time to help.

Klaus is a professor of English, founder of the Iowa Institute of Writing, and author of numerous books. As I read his journal, I had the uncanny feeling that he was telling my life story as well as his own. Like him, I had worked for many years in a university setting, more than 30 of them in the same place. Like him, I had heart problems and had dealt with professional tribulations and writer’s angst. Like him, I had a supportive and sensible wife, had dabbled in doing stand-up comedy and had enjoyed and developed a hobby. I identified with his retirement activities: working on his finances, vacating his office, reminiscing as he went through his files, planning a retirement trip and getting a new laptop computer. He records emotional ups and downs that mirrored my own. When he noted that retirement is worse than a heart operation because there is no bypass for it, he expressed the pain I was feeling.

I spent a great deal of time during my final days at my job worrying that I would not be able actually to retire. When I put up my sign saying "retirement" everyone seemed to read it as "available." I had a dozen invitations to undertake a variety of projects, almost all having to do with the work I thought I was leaving behind. Klaus documents a similar process and his struggle to say, "Enough!" At first he perceived these professional connections as comforting handles with which to hold on to the familiar, but soon they began to get in the way of his new interests -- gardening, traveling, writing, cooking and just spending leisurely time at home.

Although I wanted to throw off all the work my job involved, I didn’t want to give up the keys to my office. This familiar place comforted me. It seemed to bring order to my new life, a life which felt dangerously without anchors. My office was like a secure spaceship saving me from drifting meaninglessly into the great void of retirement.

Klaus’s book assured me he had experienced the same thing, only more so. Not only the space but also the daily contacts with students, colleagues and the mail seemed critical to him. He felt rejected when his request for office space was denied. He rejoiced when he was given a place in the emeritus wing. Then, over the months, as his interest in other things developed, he realized the foolishness of his desire to hold on to the things of the past. I, too, am now getting along quite nicely without my old office, thanks to my new office at home. Reading Klaus’s account of the drudgery of moving his boxes of books and files helped me through a similar process.

Identity problems plagued my crossover into retirement. When I was working I knew who I was. My robe defined my role. I had a title: "PR" or "Pastor Robbins" or "Reverend." When the final retirement reception came (an event to "draw the line," says Klaus), I was shorn of those titles. People still used them, but they had become meaningless. Klaus repeatedly laments his loss of identity; he wonders, "Who am I anyway?" Although he previously had reinvented himself through three or four career modifications, he was not ready for the psychological impact of losing his title when he retired.

Retirement made me realize that my age-cohort was now old people. Since I had worked with young people all my life, I resisted being lumped with the elderly. Similarly, Klaus did not want to be "ghettoized" with the old. Still, we are old. I can well remember the first time, many years ago, when a young person called me "sir." Klaus records that when he fell in the street and someone yelled to him, "Are you all right, sir?" the appellation hurt worse than the accident. He describes how a visit to a retirement home triggered thoughts about his own "transformation."

He laments the way that age separates the elderly from young people and even provokes hostility between the generations. He wonders if his diary is an effort to protect himself from decline and ultimate obscurity, "a self-perpetuating enterprise to the greater glory of myself."

While Klaus is more interested in describing his experiences than in "the rage for meaning," he offers some terse insights. About staying loose: "The spring flowers had survived the snowstorm by staying flexible, by the natural expedience of bending rather than breaking." On finding wisdom: "Knowledge sometimes arrives in the most unlikely ways." On fleeting fame: "A flurry of attention and then a long and quiet life." On studious inattention: "This morning I focused on sleeping in, then on eating a leisurely breakfast while reading the newspaper without actually taking in the news." On acceptance and trust: "Perhaps things just fall into place in retirement, as in a garden, without one’s even knowing it." He concludes, "I’m beginning to feel as if living well were all that mattered. Not as the means to an end, but as an end in itself." What counts finally "is getting on as decently and thoughtfully as one can." There is grist enough in this book for grinding out a way of living as well as a way of retiring.

Klaus is very good at describing the roller coaster of feelings in retirement -- one day up, the next down. He says he cherishes the time for reflection afforded by his diary exercise, but later says he wishes it were done. He writes about his hysteria, frustration, loneliness, fear and anger as he tries to come to terms with retirement, and then describes several good days spent visiting friends, eating good meals and presenting readings of his new book. He works compulsively, then goes for days without shaving or dressing till afternoon. He spends enjoyable hours planting his seeds and flats, then looks at his weather-beaten garden and laments that he is adjusting no better than his plants are.

Several retirement cards I received said something to the effect that because I had done my work so well, I could now be pardoned from work. Klaus describes this perception as one of the ironies of retirement: the reward for work is to stop working -- unless we can find a way to be meaningfully active in the absence of "a regular remunerative position." One way to do this is to keep on working -- to teach a class, set up a consulting business, do supply preaching. Instead of working and getting paid, you get paid (by your retirement plan) and work. Even though I no longer have "a job that pays wages," I carry my work habits into retirement. While these habits reassure me that I know who I am, keeping them also impedes my transition into retirement. Not wanting to be "terminated," Klaus spends a lot of time doing much of what he has already done, refusing to relinquish his occupation, forsake his career. But he knows that his assignment is to retire.

The retirement process is not so much a swaying bridge as a twisted path. Though Klaus goes this way and that, he does move out of his initial funk. Despite vacillation, Klaus realizes that it is nice not to have to read all those student essays and run all those workshops. And it’s nice to be free to do other things. His wife, Kate, provides a needed reality check. "How many good years do you think we have left?" she asks. We know he has finally come to terms with retirement when he rejects his admitted self-pity, overcomes his resentment (the "venom of the retirement bug"), gives up his backwards glance, and embraces his new life with jubilation. In the end, he finds the "tranquillity" that he has been seeking. All this gives me hope that my own season of melancholy will give way to a time of joy.

The book offers much in which to delight, including masterful accounts of gardening, cooking and eating. Klaus’s exhaustively documented meals amount to a tantalizing gourmet notebook. The last part of the book is a wonderful account of a Canadian getaway. Klaus is also good at presenting the intricacies of retirement planning. He struggles with the frustration of trying to figure out the complexities of his retirement plan, the vagaries of the stock market, the indifference of the Medicare system and the insecurities of Social Security.

Klaus is aware that retirement is different for different people, and that he is only giving his story. He does not address issues unique to longevity in a job or to forced retirement. He gives us only brief glimpses of the notion of vocation (a life and livelihood that are so integrated that one flows seamlessly into the other), and the impact of retirement on the spouse of the retiree (Kate complains that he is writing a "me alone" book). He says nothing about religion and little about the lurking reality of death.

Still, many people will find this book helpful. Drawing on a spectrum of retirement styles, many of which he documents through his talks with others, Klaus manages a smooth transition. Of his trip to Canada, he writes, "It’s like turning the page of a book. You turn a corner, go down a road, and it’s all behind you." Klaus has helped me to turn a corner. Now it’s time to look ahead.

Between Two Advents: In the Interim (Luke 21:28)

"Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near"

(Luke 21:28).

We live in between the first coming of Jesus Christ and his second coming, and most of us feel a lot better about the first one. Christmas is about a baby, after all, and that makes everything easier. We know about babies, and so we know how to domesticate Christmas. We set up a crèche, pin up a wreath, set out a poinsettia or two. Maybe we sing "Away in a Manger" with the alternate tune. Altogether we figure out how to manage Christmas so that the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay won’t end up scaring anybody.

But the second coming is something else. As Karl Barth said, we can’t fathom the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, and we stammer when we try to speak of it. I think I know what Barth meant. Part of our problem is that the Bible describes the return of our Lord in literature that is hard to interpret. The literature is apocalyptic -- which means it’s an unveiling of the world that lies behind this world. It’s a revelation that tells about the transition from this age to the next.

But the transition is rough. It’s so full of emergency. According to the gospel scenario, everything breaks loose at the return of Jesus Christ. Nations go to war, and civilians run for cover. There’s blood in the streets and famine in the fields. The earth shakes and the sea roars. There are signs in the sky above, panic on the earth beneath, stars falling, people dying of fright -- it’s a whole drum roll of disaster.

And then, in the midst of all the confusion, people will see "the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory." He’s the incoming Lord. He’s the oncoming Lord. He’s got power to judge and power to save, and when he comes the second time he will be too big to miss. At the end he’s "God without disguise," as C. S. Lewis once wrote -- God without disguise who comes at us so unmistakably that he will "strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature."

It’s the climax of the human drama. Christ coming to finish what he started. Christ coming to gather his saints and vindicate his martyrs. In this event -- we Christians confess -- in this climactic event all the hopes and fears of all the years come together one last time.

So why does the second coming make some of us squirm? What is it about this topic that makes us uneasy?

One problem is that we don’t know how to read the literature, and, in particular, we don’t know how literally to read it.

Another problem is that the church has been expecting Jesus to return for a long time, and he hasn’t done it yet. "It’s hard to stand on tiptoe for two thousand years," says William Willimon, and so after a while people settle down. People settle into a kind of "everydayness in their faith," and they quit scanning the horizon.

The way this plays out for most Catholics and confessional Protestants is in a kind of interim faith, a common-sense Christianity that stays fairly close to the ground. We don’t deny the big, booming events such as the second coming, but we don’t think about them very much either. We’ve still got, church and sacraments, after all; we’ve got scripture and prayer; we’ve still got the golden rule and the Ten Commandments. We’ve got Christian pop music to make us feel right at home in the world. And every week we faithfully spend some of our money and time on kingdom causes. That’s ground-level Christianity, and it’s just enough religion to keep us going.

Why does the second coming make us restless? We have trouble with the literature, as I said. Also, we can’t figure out God’s schedule. I’ll propose a third reason. A lot of us have been secularized enough by now that our view of the world has flattened out, and the Second Advent of Jesus Christ doesn’t fit into a flattened-out world very well. It’s too fantastic, we think. It’s too supernatural. In certain moods we think it’s too embarrassing. It’s an embarrassing advent, and so we leave it to those embarrassing Christians who have turned apocalyptic speculation into a billion-dollar industry -- prophecy buffs with their computer charts and wrong predictions that are then folded back into new predictions in the kind of prophetic improvisation that Paula Frederickson calls "apocalyptic jazz." Prophecy buffs clicking away with their pocket calculators, and premillennial preachers who spin a Camp David peace summit in such a way that it appears to rise right off the pages of Ezekiel.

How alarming all this is. How alarming to read those bumper stickers that say, "Beam me up, Lord!" How distressing to see those four-color laminated placemats of the Rapture, complete with wrecked cars and crashed jetliners! Some of us encounter such things in fellow believers, and we feel the way we do when we run into a sword-swallower at a wedding reception.

John Calvin wrote commentaries on every book of the Bible but one. When he got to the last book of the Bible -- the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, the book of whores and dragons and clashing empires -- he read it and then put his pen back in his drawer.

But is it better to ignore the Lord’s return? Is it better to live with a low ceiling over our lives, and no room there for the incoming Lord? We may be the sort of people Jesus warns about in Luke 21. Watch! says Jesus. Heads up! Be alert! Pray that you will have the strength to stand before the Son of Man! Jesus says this to people who have given up on the second coming and have settled into a ground-level religion. At this level their hearts get waterlogged. Their hearts get "weighed down," as verse 34 says. Here are people of God who weigh themselves down with worldly anxieties, and then relieve them with worldly amusements. Jesus mentions drunkenness in particular. People worry, so they get drunk. They get drunk, so they worry. And that makes them want a drink. In the classic addictive cycle people try to relieve their distress with the same thing that caused it, and that’s how they end up trapping themselves.

Watch! says Jesus. Be alert! Jesus says this because his return isn’t an apocalyptic fireworks display. His return is the coming of the kingdom of God. It’s the coming of justice in the earth. When the signs appear, says Jesus to a temple-full of listeners, don’t give up! Don’t freeze up! "When these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."

Jesus is talking to people who know about redemption. These are Exodus people. These are passover people. These people have a history of being squeezed by Egypt, Babylon and Rome. To these people, redemption is the longing of their heart. They want Rome off their back. They want Caesar out of their hair. It’s their dream. It’s their passion. The coming of God’s redemption means justice is coming, liberation is coming, the King of all the earth is coming. When biblical people want God’s redemption they cry out: O God, rescue me. Deliver me. Bend your ear toward me, O God, and in your righteousness save me (Ps. 71).

Do we know anything about such passion? I’m thinking that when life is good, our prayers for the kingdom get a little faint. We whisper our prayers for the kingdom so that God can’t quite hear them. "Thy kingdom come," we pray, and hope it won’t. "Thy kingdom come," we pray, "but not right away.

When our own kingdom has had a good year we aren’t necessarily looking for God’s kingdom. When life is good, redemption doesn’t sound so good. That’s how things go. God’s redemption is good news for people whose life is bad news. If you are a slave in Pharaoh’s Egypt, or a slave in antebellum Mississippi, you want your redemption. If you are an Israelite exiled in Babylon, or a Kosovar exiled in Albania, you want your redemption. If you are a woman in modern India (it doesn’t matter what caste you belong to) and your husband or fiancé doesn’t think your family has come up with a big enough dowry, and if he locks you in a closet for three months or calls up his buddies and threatens to have them rape you and then kill you -- I say, if you are a modern Indian woman in such a predicament, you want redemption from wicked sexism, and you want it with every fiber of your being.

According to scripture, the person who wants redemption wants the kingdom of God whether she knows it or not. And the coming of the kingdom depends on the coming of the King, the one who will return with power and with great glory. However we are to understand this apocalyptic event, whatever form it takes, the second coming of Jesus Christ means to a Christian that God’s righteousness will at last fill the earth.

When our own life is sweet, we can look across the world to lives that aren’t sweet. We can raise our heads and our hopes for those lives. We can weep with those who weep and hope with those who hope. We can look across the world, and across the room, and across the pew. It’s natural to hope for ourselves, and how healthy it is to do it. But it’s unnatural to hope only for ourselves. And how parochial it is to do it.

Be on guard, says Jesus, that you don’t get weighed down with parochial anxieties and parochial amusements to relieve them. Be on guard against that fatal absorption with yourself! Take care! Stay alert! "Stand up and raise your heads because the kingdom is coming."

Jesus’ words are an antidote to our sloth, an antidote to our worldly cynicism, an antidote even to our scorn of prophecy buffs. Jesus’ words are meant to raise our heads and raise our hopes. Could justice really come to the earth? Could husbands quit beating up their wives, and could wives quit blaming themselves? Could Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak look into each other’s eyes and see a brother? Could some of us who struggle with addictions or with diseases that trap us -- could we be liberated by God and start to walk tall in the kingdom of God? Could Jesus Christ appear among us in some way that our poverty-stricken minds can never imagine in a scenario that would simply erase our smug confidence about where the lines of reality are drawn?

If we believe in the kingdom of God we will pray, and we will hope for those without much hope left. And one more thing, one more tough thing. We will work in the same direction as we hope.

In a wonderful book titled Standing on the Promises, Lewis Smedes says that hoping for others is hard, but not the hardest. Praying for others is hard, but not the hardest. The hardest part for people who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ is in "living the sort of life that makes people say, ‘Ah, so that’s how people are going to live when righteousness takes over our world."’

The hardest part is simple faithfulness in our work and in our attitudes -- the kind of faithfulness that shows we are being drawn forward by the magnet force of the kingdom of God.

According to a story that Os Guinness tells, 220 years ago the Connecticut House of Representatives was in session on a bright day in May, and the delegates were able to do their work by natural light. But then something happened that nobody expected. Right in the middle of debate, there was an eclipse of the sun and everything turned to darkness. Some legislators thought it was the second coming. So a clamor arose. People wanted to adjourn. People wanted to pray. People wanted to prepare for the coming of the Lord.

But the speaker of the House had a different idea. He was a Christian believer, and he rose to the occasion with good logic and good faith. We are all upset by the darkness, he said, and some of us are afraid. But "the Day of the Lord is either approaching or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. And if the Lord is returning, I, for one, choose to be found doing my duty. I therefore ask that candles be brought."

And men who expected Jesus went back to their desks and resumed their debate.

Pope Pius XII and the Nazis

Hitler’s Pope: The Secret history of Pius XII

By John Cornwall, Viking Penguin, 430 pp.

Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican

By Pierre Blet, S.J. Paulist, 304 pp.

These two volumes stand in stark contrast. John Cornwall indicts Pope Pius XII for aiding and abetting the Nazis in order to consolidate his power over the Catholic Church. Pierre Blet offers an equally strong defense of Pius as a compassionate leader who did all he could to help Jews and other Nazi victims under very trying circumstances -- a claim Blet considers confirmed by 12 published volumes of Vatican archival materials. There is little or no middle ground between the two authors. Cornwall is the prosecutor, Blet the defense attorney. Neither succeeds fully in his assumed role, though Blet’s scholarship is by far the sounder.

Cornwall has good credentials -- he is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and author of the bestselling A Thief in the Night: The Death of Pope John Paul I -- but his new book is full of exaggerated claims and deceptions, beginning with the title and dust cover. The title implies that Pius XII was a virtual agent of the Nazis. Yet Cornwall’s actual argument stops short of any direct connection between the pope and Hitler’s program. He presents Pius’s willingness to enter into a concordat with Hitler and to refrain from strong public criticism of the Nazis as based on Catholic self-interest rather than on any support of Nazism as an ideology. And the cover photo of Pius was taken in 1927, before he was pope, as he was leaving a reception for Paul von Hindenburg, president of the Weimar Republic. Though the photograph is correctly identified in very small print, it conveys the impression that the pope is visiting the Third Reich.

The exaggerations do not stop there. Far more serious are the unfounded claims about the "secret" materials on which the book supposedly is based. Vatican library records show that Cornwall spent very few hours there and that he was not privy to any materials unavailable to other scholars. In short, there is little really new in Cornwall’s account. And his interpretation of materials is often deeply flawed. His claim, for example, that Pius harbored a deep anti-Semitism is based simplistically on a condemnatory remark Pius made about Jewish bolsheviks. The comment may have been inappropriate, but many Jews of the time said far worse things about Jewish bolsheviks.

Cornwall presents only the evidence that suggests his predetermined view. Nowhere does he seriously engage the major scholarship on Pius that has come from such important Jewish and Christian researchers on the period as Michael Marrus, John Morley, John Conway and Owen Chadwick. Some of their works are listed in Cornwall’s bibliography, but he does not seem to have used them. He does not even acknowledge Marrus’s major work on the subject. Nor does he deal in any comprehensive way with the published Vatican archival material.

It is disturbing to see the attention this book has received from the secular press, including reputable journals. That publisher hype can elevate a work of deeply flawed scholarship to the bestseller list is a serious threat to responsible scholarship. No well-recognized scholar who has studied the relationship between the Vatican and the Holocaust was asked to review this volume in the nonreligious press.

Cornwall does raise some issues that cannot be ignored, especially by Catholics, but most of these have already been raised in a more comprehensive fashion by other scholars. At best, Cornwall serves as a devil’s advocate. Perhaps the most important issue with which he deals is Pius’s signing of the concordat with Hitler. Cornwall interprets this signing as integral to Pius’s efforts to centralize the church’s power in the papacy. He makes it a major aspect of his indictment in part because he sees a connection between centralization then and centralization later under Pope John Paul II, of which he is profoundly critical. The supposed connection may be an important subtext of this book.

There is little doubt that Pius XII strove to bring about such centralization, and his effort is surely open to critique. But there is a real question about the motives that Cornwall attributes to Pius’s efforts. It is clear that Pius had no illusions about full Nazi implementation of the accord. While his judgment about the value of the accord for the preservation of catholic life in Europe may be seriously questioned, he did not support the agreement simply to enhance his own power, as Cornwall implies, but because he felt it was in the best interest of the church at the time. Pius’s vision may have been too insular and diplomatic; he was insufficiently concerned about protecting the human rights of non-Catholics; he seriously misjudged the significance of the concordat in legitimizing the Third Reich; and his treatment of the Catholic Center Party in Germany is deeply disturbing. These issues must be considered seriously by anyone who cares about maintaining the moral integrity of the church. But Cornwall’s book is of little help.

For Cornwall, all of Pius’s failures come down in the end to a seriously flawed personality and spirituality. Pius left us no deeply personal reflections on his papacy, something we would need in order to evaluate his personality. But we have ample documentation of his actions and increasing evidence of how people close to him regarded his administration. This record is complex. There is now solid evidence, in part from Vatican archival materials, that Pius did more to oppose Hitler and to help Hitler’s victims than many believe. That he might have done even more, for example through the papal nuncios, that he might have acted earlier and that he might have spoken more publicly are claims that need a more thorough airing than many of his Catholic defenders have allowed. But Cornwall’s book presents only a very small part of that record, the part that supports his indictment.

Blet’s book, on the other hand, helps demolish the thesis that Pius was "silent," at least if one means by that that he did nothing on behalf of Jews and other Nazi victims, such as the Poles and the disabled.

Blet presents a detailed description of Pius’s largely behind-the-scenes interventions. While Blet can be criticized for not providing detailed citations for the material he quotes, he presents unquestionably genuine evidence. What is not so certain are some of his judgments about that evidence. Much like his late archival associate Robert Graham, Blet tends to highlight Pius’s positive actions without ever questioning whether he might have acted earlier and more comprehensively. While he does engage some of the criticisms of Pius XII -- such as those made by the Polish government-in-exile in London -- he tends to explain them away, always giving Pius the benefit of the doubt.

Blet also fails to address the issue raised by Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress. Riegner has identified an important missing document from the published archival materials (whose existence is acknowledged in the archives) that shows the Vatican had information about the depth of the Nazi attack on the Jews considerably earlier than it has claimed. Similarly, Blet omits any reference to the strong critique of Pius made immediately after the war by Jacques Maritain, a prominent Catholic who eventually resigned his post as French ambassador to the Vatican over what he regarded as Pius’s inaction on the issue of German guilt.

Blet’s volume may finally force scholars on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust to probe far more thoroughly into the 12 published volumes of Vatican materials. The planned joint Catholic-Jewish scholarly team that is to examine these documents in depth will, one hopes, further advance this process. And full credibility will come only if the remaining archives are opened, at least on a selective basis. Both Cardinal John O’Connor and the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin called for such openness. So long as the archives remain closed, Pius XII and the Catholic Church of the time will continue to live under a moral cloud.

Both the Blet and Cornwall volumes are also part of the current struggle over the possible beatification and canonization of Pius XII. Cornwall addresses this issue directly in his work -- indeed, some of his critics see the book as an attempt to derail the sainthood process. Blet does not deal with the issue directly, but many see his book as an effort to clear the air about Pius so that the process might continue. Whatever Cornwall’s intention, his biased portrayal may inadvertently have strengthened the hand of those promoting canonization. This would be most unfortunate. Many of us who have researched Pius’s record are strongly opposed to his canonization, beatification or even elevation to "venerable" status. Such action would make it extremely difficult, particularly for Catholic scholars, to continue their investigation of his record. At a March ‘99 consultation on the Vatican document on the Shoali, We Remember, I joined Marrus and other participants in emphasizing this point to Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews. He promised to transmit our argument to key Catholic officials in Rome.

For Cornwall, Pius remains the pope who ignored the requests of some German bishops to speak out more publicly and strongly against the Nazi attack on the Jews. He was a consummate diplomat at a time when the church needed a prophet. For Blet, Pius is the church leader who confronted the Austrian bishops over their support of Hitler’s annexation of their country, who harbored Jewish orphans at his summer residence and who strongly supported the efforts of Italian nuns to hide Jews in Rome. Neither author solves what historian José M. Sanchez has termed the "enigma" of Pius XII. Perhaps no one ever will.

Learning from New Forms of Church: Gospel Ventures

Mainline to the Future: Congregations for the 21^st Century

By Jackson W. Carroll. Westminster John Knox, 130 pp.

Transforming the Mainline Church: Lessons in Change from Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Hope.

By Robert A. chestnut., Geneva Press, 186 pp.

The other day, on a crowded subway, I glimpsed an ad featuring an attractive, curly-haired young woman. She was leaning over the back of a chair and laughing in a quietly pleased sort of way. I wondered what she was advertising. Furniture? Clothing? Miracle shampoo? At the next stop, as passengers stepped off the train, I leaned over to see what the photo urged us to buy. No, it wasn’t shampoo. It was church. "Vineyard Christian Fellowship. Going to church was never this much fun."

Such advertisements, aimed so precisely at a particular demographic group, are a hallmark of what Jackson W. Carroll calls "post-traditional churches," and they point to some of the most contested issues between these churches and the mainline. The post-traditionalists worry that those outside the church will not be drawn inside unless church can be made entertaining and fun. Traditionalists worry that such approaches present the life of faith as just one more consumable commodity.

Post-traditionalists argue that congregational life, including worship, must adapt to contemporary tastes in order to reach the unchurched. Traditionalists argue that too much adaption will obscure what is mysterious, prophetic and holy -- in short, what is countercultural about Christian faith. Post-traditionalists accuse traditionalists of allowing aesthetic tastes shaped by social location to keep the unchurched at arm’s length. Traditionalists accuse post-traditionalists of abandoning a rich musical heritage.

Jackson Carroll and Robert Chestnut attempt to move beyond these anxious debates to ask what we can learn from the new forms of church emerging around us. Their books are addressed to their brothers and sisters in the mainline -- both those who are chafing under the pressure to embrace neo-Pentecostal forms of church life in the service of church growth and those who are intrigued by the new forms but have no idea how to integrate them into liberal Protestantism.

Carroll’s is the gentler voice. He wants to allay the fears of readers, reminding them that innovation in worship and congregational life has been a vital part of the history of the church since its earliest beginnings. He wants us to evaluate and learn from the new forms instead of feeling threatened by them.

Chestnut takes a more apocalyptic tone: if we want the mainline to survive, to renew itself, to bring the gospel to seekers outside the church, our churches will have to become entrepreneurial." With his eye on the parable of the talents, he writes, "The gospel is venture capital, and if we don’t venture with it, it will be taken from us.

Following Robert Schreiter, whose groundbreaking work (Constructing Local Theologies) showed how theologies are shaped by the context of particular communities, Carroll wants to pay attention to local ecclesiologies. His refrain throughout is a riff on a line from Barth: "There is no intrinsically sacred sociology of the church." In a postdenominational age (which both Carroll and Chestnut agree we are in), the place to look for "clues to renewal and vitality," Carroll argues, is in the new and creative ways particular communities strive to embody the gospel in particular social and cultural contexts. Though not all these ways are worthy of imitation, Carroll thinks we should imitate the boldness with which new churches are "exercising the freedom that we are given in Jesus Christ to develop ecclesial practices that are both faithful to the gospel and appropriate to the social and cultural challenges of post-traditional society."

The social context of Pittsburgh’s East Liberty Presbyterian Church is precisely what convinced Robert and Jan Chestnut that Robert should accept a call to become its senior pastor in 1988. A majestic church which, in the years before World War II, was situated in the midst of a thriving business district, East Liberty experienced a steady decrease in membership after the war. Whites began moving to the suburbs, and a badly planned urban renewal project resulted in the closing of many businesses and the creation of a moat-like traffic circle that kept African-Americans enclosed in a decaying neighborhood.

The congregation responded to its changing context by opening a shelter for homeless men, a food pantry, a soup kitchen, after-school tutoring programs and a summer camp program for neighborhood kids. It held dinners so that the members of the congregation and those served by the church’s ministries could eat together and get to know one another. Church membership, however, continued its slide. And while the membership of the church was somewhat integrated racially, it was much less integrated socioeconomically.

Chestnut saw here the seeds of the kind of ministry he longed to lead: urban, interracial, multicultural and deeply involved with the local community. But he warned the call committee that if he became their church’s pastor, they would have to be ready for radical change.

East Liberty had then and still has today an endowment larger than that of many seminaries. In his first year, Chestnut was able to work with an advertising and special events budget of $75,000. To provoke the change he believed East Liberty needed, he was able to marshal an army of consultants on everything from marketing to worship to conflict resolution. This is not the story of the renewal of a typical church, but of a large, well-endowed urban church, a city cathedral. But Chestnut insists that there are lessons here for other churches as well.

Like Carroll, Chestnut wants us to learn that "progressive, ecumenical, mainline Protestantism," the tradition in which he firmly places himself, cannot afford to ignore what more theologically conservative, entrepreneurial churches have learned about growth and renewal. Those churches, he tells us, have found that in order to thrive and grow they must pro-vide worship, music and programming that attracts those outside the church. We’ve got to stop satisfying ourselves, he argues, and begin to try to imagine what will draw in those who are hungry for some connection to a life beyond themselves, but who have not seen the church as a place that might answer that hunger. He believes the parable of the talents calls us to view the church as "a new business start-up, a small-cap, high-risk, aggressive-growth venture," an entrepreneurial institution that dares to make radical changes in order to reach out to those outside its walls.

He also wants us to know that this venture will not be easy -- that, as congregational consultant Peter Steinke says, pain is a necessary part of change. When Chestnut began the difficult work of trying to help the church sort out which aspects of its traditional service reflected its core theological commitments and which merely reflected the class and cultural tastes of the majority of the congregation, he and his family suffered. Threatening messages were taped to the front door of their home, hurtful rumors were circulated and Chestnut was nearly fired.

He stayed, but his wounds are still tender, which might account for the occasionally troubling nature of his descriptions of the conflict. For example, his analysis of the opposition of some of his African-American members to the inclusion of gospel music in the Sunday service sounds condescending. He interprets their opposition as their need to distance themselves from "Their own cultural heritage" and seems not to consider the possibility that these members did not want their white minister to define for them what it means to be an African-American Christian. But the lesson he wants us to take from the narrative -- that it is impossible to lead a congregation through change without conflict -- is well taken.

I must admit that the "small-cap, high-risk, aggressive-growth venture" language does not sing to me. It brings to mind neither the trustworthiness called for by the parable of the talents nor the kind of risks Jesus asks us to take. It suggests something to be made use of, something with which to turn a profit, rather than something which might change our lives. This doesn’t mean that churches shouldn’t advertise. It means that we should learn to reinvigorate our own language -- the language of risk, commitment and trust -- rather than looking to the stock market to provide a language for us.

I wonder how devoted Chestnut himself is to the entrepreneurial language he has picked up in church growth seminars, for he also argues that church boards should develop spiritual processes of discernment by which to conduct their business rather than "mimic the business procedures of corporate America." Chestnut is at his most convincing when he follows his instinct that what will draw seekers to the church and keep them there are opportunities to deepen their sense of God’s mystery and presence, and to find resources for drawing near to God in the midst of everyday life.

For all his emphasis on learning from neo-Pentecostal churches, the most striking changes at East Liberty do not stem from that tradition. The most thickly described "innovations" are rather ancient forms of worship recovered for the contemporary context: chant (in the form of a weekly Taizé service), anointing of those seeking healing, and labyrinth walks. These contemplative, bodily practices have been a large part of the church’s renewal and growth.

Of course, one church’s innovation is often another’s longstanding tradition. Carroll reminds us that the changes we see on the religious landscape by no means go in one direction only. Carroll reports on an Assemblies of God congregation that became Episcopalian and on evangelicals who became Orthodox. "Post-traditional society," he writes, "does not mean the end of tradition. It means instead a world in which traditions can be claimed, rejected, reinterpreted, or even invented, but not simply taken for granted and uncritically followed." Indeed, those who most want to submit themselves to ancient traditions are often converts to -- that is, choosers of -- the tradition they embrace.

The challenge that new, emerging forms of church present for the mainline is not as simple as how we might integrate praise choruses into the 11:00 AM. service. The challenge is that we can no longer take our way of doing things for granted. We must ask ourselves: How does our life together, in worship, service and fellowship, reflect our central convictions about who God is and what God is calling us to? What does it mean to be faithful? What does it mean to share the gospel? What does it mean to be trustworthy stewards of God’s gifts? The new forms of church have reopened these questions in vital ways. It is the work of mainline churches to engage these questions as deeply and richly as they can.

"Going to church has never been this much fun." When I saw that advertisement on the train, I thought two things. First: That kind of advertising might actually work. We’ve been well trained to respond to ads. The people that ad brings into the church might come for the fun and stay for something more lasting and profound.

But I also thought of a friend who, three weeks after being raped and badly beaten, attended a church service. And what she found there, in the hymns and in the readings, was something she had not found anywhere else: language potent enough to give voice to what was in her heart. Why, O Lord, do you stand so far off? Why do the rich still oppress the poor? Why do the wicked prosper? Why is there so much violence in our cities? Why, oh why have you forsaken me?

The subway ad would not have drawn my friend back to church. She wasn’t looking for fun. She wasn’t interested in being entertained or being distracted from her pain. What she found in church was a way to join her voice to the voices of all who have ever cried out their heart’s anguish to God. She sang the psalms with all who have ever sung them: with Israel in exile, with Jesus on the cross. Where else but in the church could she have done this?

As we seek to find ways of sharing the gospel with a culture accustomed to the speed and flash of the Internet and the thrill of consumption, I hope we can "go forward," as Carroll puts it, "remembering." Remembering that our faith bears a vision of human life that goes beyond consuming. Remembering the words and songs and silences that can receive those whose hearts have been broken, those whose bodies have been violated. Remembering that we have inherited language spacious enough to gather up all that human beings experience, language robust enough to speak the truth of our lives. That language is enfleshed in different ways in different contexts: in gospel music and chant, in oil for anointing and in silence, in chorales and hymns and dance. Church often is fun. But it should never be trivial.

Eruption of Truth: An Interview with Raimon Panikkar

Raised in Spain by a Catholic mother and a Hindu father, Raimon Panikkar has made inter-religious dialogue his life’s work. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1946, and is attached to the diocese of Varanasi in India. Panikkar is the author of some 40 books, including The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, The Trinity and World Religions, The Silence of the Buddha, The Cosmotheandric Reality and, most recently, the revised edition of The Intrareligious Dialogue (Paulist Press, 1999). After many years as professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he is living in retirement in Spain, revising his Gifford Lectures, "The Rhythm of Being," for publication. He gave this interview to Henri Tincq, religion editor of the Parisian daily Le Monde. The interview has been translated by Joseph Cunneen, founding editor of Cross Currents.

How is it possible to combine a heritage that is both Christian and Hindu?

I was brought up in the Catholic religion by my Spanish mother, but I never stopped trying to be united with the tolerant and generous religion of my father and of my Hindu ancestors. This does not make me a cultural or religious "half-caste," however. Christ was not half man and half God, but fully man and fully God. In the same way, I consider myself 100 percent Hindu and Indian, and 100 percent Catholic and Spanish. How is that possible? By living religion as an experience rather than as an ideology.

How do you explain the Western attraction to Asian religions and philosophies and the fear that this produces in Western churches?

One might well turn the question around and ask instead why the West exercises such an attraction on the East. The answer to your question, however, is that contemporary Christianity has given insufficient attention to many key elements of human life, such as contemplation, silence and the well-being of the body.

There is in this attraction a salutary slap by the Spirit, which is telling the churches in the West to wake up. The discovery of the other, the search for greater peace of mind and bodily calm, for joy and serenity, are sources of renewal. The whole history of Christianity is one of enrichment and renewal brought about by elements that came from outside itself. Do not Christmas and Easter, and almost all the Christian feasts, have a non-Christian origin? Would it have been possible to formulate the basic Christian doctrines without the hellenic tradition, itself pre-Christian? Doesn’t every living body exist in symbiosis with its external milieu?

Then why this fear? If the church wishes to live, it should not be afraid of assimilating elements that come from other religious traditions, whose existence it can today no longer ignore. Prudence, however, is a value that should be maintained; I certainly understand the voice of Catholic authority when it is raised against widespread superficiality.

Don’t most conflicts in contemporary society come precisely from the fear of a destruction of identity, a fear that has led to all those forms of religious withdrawal called integralism?

Someone who is afraid of losing his or her identity has already lost it. In the West identity is established through difference. Catholics find their identity in not being Protestant or Hindu or Buddhist. But other cultures have another way of thinking about one’s identity. Identity is not based on the degree to which one is different from others.

In the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity), people seek God in difference -- in superiority or transcendence. Being divine means not being human. For Hindus, however, the divine mystery is in man, in what is so profound and real in him that he cannot be separated from it, and it cannot be discharged into transcendence. This is the domain of immanence, of that spiritual archetype that is called brahman. In the Hindu system, people are not afraid of losing their identity. They can be afraid of losing what they have, but not of losing what they are.

Being afraid is always a bad sign. Christ says, "I give you peace" and "Do not be afraid." Contemporary Christians feel surrounded and are afraid of being dissolved. But what does the gospel say? "You are the salt of the earth." The salt has to be dissolved in order for the food to be more tasty. The leaven is there to make the bread rise. The Christian vocation is to lose oneself in others. From an institutional or disciplinary point of view, I can understand today’s reactions of prudence in the churches. But the duty of the Christian is to be dissolved, to "lose one’s life" in order to communicate it to others. The Christian faith even tells us that by losing our life we gain it. It is here that we find the meaning of the resurrection.

You believe in interreligious dialogue. On what conditions can it succeed?

The days are over when religions could take refuge in splendid isolation. In Europe, for example, religious people can no longer ignore the existence of the millions of foreigners with different cultures who are now living there. They can no longer ignore the fact that, across three quarters of our planet, the dominant religion is not Christianity. Hence there must be dialogue; the question is, what kind?

As long as I do not open my heart and do not see that the other is not an other but a part of myself who enlarges and completes me, I will not arrive at dialogue. If I embrace you, then I understand you. All this is a way of saying that real intrareligious dialogue begins in myself, and that it is more an exchange of religious experiences than of doctrines. If one does not start out from this foundation, no religious dialogue is possible; it is just idle chatter.

But how does one avoid falling into a vague religious syncretism made up of different expressions of religion?

I am obviously against what is fashionable today, which seems to be a matter of going here and there in search of spiritual satisfaction, and which ends in leading nowhere. The dialogue route that I propose is existential, intimate and concrete. Its purpose is not to establish some universal religion, to end up with a kind of United Nations of religions. Reread Genesis: God destroyed the tower of Babel. Why didn’t God want a world government, a world bank, a world democracy? Why did God think it better, to facilitate communication among men and women, for them to live in small huts on a human scale, with windows and streets, rather than on information superhighways?

For a Christian, the answer is in the incarnation: because the divine mystery is made flesh. For the philosopher, it is in order that human relations remain personal. I cannot have human contact with a computer; a machine is not a person. Genuine dialogue between religions, therefore, ought to be this dialogue: between you and me, between you and your neighbor; it should be like a rainbow where we are never sure where one color begins and another ends.

But can one still speak of religion, if one is not convinced of possessing the truth?

When, during his trial, Jesus is asked "What is truth?" he does not answer. Or he leaves the answer in silence. In fact, truth does not allow itself to be conceptualized. It is never purely objective, absolute. To talk about absolute truth is really a contradiction in terms. Truth is always relational, and the Absolute (absolutus, untied) is that which has no relation. The pretension of the great religions to possess all truth can only be understood in a limited and contingent context. Not to be conscious of our myths leads to integralism. But in order to be aware of our myths, we need our neighbor, and therefore dialogue and love. The truth is first of all a reality that permits us to live, an existential truth that makes us free.

I am not such a relativist as to believe that the truth is cut up in slices like a cake. But I am convinced that each of us participates in the truth. Inevitably, my truth is the truth that I perceive from my window. And the value of dialogue between the various religions is precisely to help me perceive that there are other windows, other perspectives. Therefore I need the other in order to know and verify my own perspective of the truth. Truth is a genuine and authentic participation in the dynamism of reality. When Jesus says "I am the truth," he is not asking me to absolutize my doctrinal system but to enter upon the way that leads to life.

Nevertheless, what is the point of believing and committing one’s life to something, if it is not a matter of defending one’s truth? Doesn’t the kind of religious dialogue that you are asking for, in which each would come, first of all, not to defend individual convictions but to share experiences, easily become reduced to a friendly chat?

I hold to my truth. I am even ready to commit my life to it and to die for it. I am simply saying that I do not have a monopoly on truth, and that what is most important is the manner in which you and I enter into that truth, how we perceive it and hear it. Thomas Aquinas said, "You do not possess the truth; it is truth that possesses you." Yes, we are possessed by truth. That is what makes me live; but the other lives, too, by virtue of her truth. I do not engage myself first of all to defend my truth, but to live it. And the dialogue between religions is not a strategy for making one truth triumphant, but a process of looking for it and deepening it along with others.

The Christian churches strive to insert the message of the gospel into the diversity of cultures. How is it possible to reconcile the respect that you have for other religions and cultures with the necessity, for a Christian like yourself, of "inculturating" the gospel?

It is of interculturation that we need to speak -- that is, of a meeting between traditions and cultures, and not the implantation of one culture in another. It would only be a proof of colonialism to pretend that one religious message, like the New Testament, has the right and the duty to inculturate itself everywhere, as if it were something supra-cultural. The church ought to take existing traditional cultures more seriously, and work for their mutual fecundation. How? By means of that mystical inspiration which is too often missing in its theology. For example, the best way to explain the "scandal" of Christianity to classical Hinduism is not to speak about Christmas or Jesus of Nazareth, but about the risen Christ and even the Eucharist. Do you know that the expression the 16th-century Council of Trent used to describe the Eucharist -- "the unique sacrifice that saves the world" -- is already found in a Vedic text that appeared 2,000 years earlier? In other words, the sacrifice that saves the world is first of all a kind of commerce between the human and the divine, something the Hindu understands as well as the Christian.

I believe in the incarnation, and I think that after the misadventures of the past 2,000 years Christianity should stop being the religion of the Book and become the religion of the Word -- a word that Christians should hear from a Christ who lives, as Paul says, yesterday, today and always. Then their faith can become more of a personal experience. To present the faith to men and women today doesn’t mean trying to introduce a little Thomism here, a little Judaism there, and so forth, but to reach them at their deepest existential, humble and mystical level.

The Christian truth is not the monopoly of a sect, a treatise imposed by a kind of colonization, but an eruption that has existed since the dawn of time, which St. Paul defined very well as "a mystery that has existed since the beginning," and of which we Christians know only a very small part.

Is that the reason why you are asking for a second Council of Jerusalem, following the example of the first, which decided to stop imposing Jewish rituals on new converts?

The crisis today is not that of one country, one model, one regime; it is a crisis of humanity. A council should be opened whose concerns would no longer be interecclesial -- dealing with priests, bishops, women’s ordination and so forth -- but would center on far more essential problems. Three quarters of the world’s population live under inhuman conditions. Humanity is in such great distress and insecurity that its leaders believe they must keep 30 million men in arms! The church cannot be a stranger to such distress, to such institutionalized injustice. It cannot remain deaf to the cries of the people, especially of the humble and the poor. The council I propose would certainly not be exclusively Christian but ecumenical, in the sense that it would give a hearing to other cosmologies and religions. Its purpose would be to determine how the Spirit is inspiring humanity to live in peace, and to bear the joyous news of hope.

Holy Fishes (Is.11;1-10; Rom. 15;4-13; Matt. 3:1-12)

Isaiah and the Baptizer conspire to give us animal dreams in this dark season of Advent. The earlier prophet’s vision warms our hearts. Who among us hasn’t yearned for a world in which lambs could hang out with wolves and adders behave as though Mr. Rogers had taught them how to play with children? A strange political critter appears in the dream as well, one that’s not the puppet of pollsters and the powerful, but a leader with the heart and Spirit of God. (Which is more preposterous, lions eating grass or politicians looking out for something other than their own advancement?)

We love to dream of the promised land. In Advent, however, we tread the wilderness, out where fiery John induces nightmares. "You’re nothing but a bunch of snakes slithering fast as you can from a grass fire," he accuses. John also promises new leadership, but the one he announces sounds more like the grim reaper than someone with plans for a kinder, gentler world.

John’s alarming forecast has the look of a scenario known to many who grew up in corn-growing country. Every fall the harvested ears went temporarily into "corn cribs" of various shapes and sizes. Later in winter or spring came the time to empty the crib into a noisy shelling machine that spat out cobs and made cracked feed of the kernels. Shoveling out a crib proved a hard day’s work, but the end always brought excitement.

When only a foot or two of ears remained in the bottom, dogs and cats began to circle the area. Shortly thereafter, the congregation of mice and sometimes a few rats who’d lived comfortably in this fleshpot would make their break. The cats did not invite the mice to play. Carnage and judgment ensued.

We endure such rhythms of exposure all our lives. Back in school, the report card laid bare our failures. The procrastination, cheating and lying we do later on in the "real world" often get overlooked, but when they don’t we bleed rivers of shame. Watch us watch our children at play on some ball field or gym floor, and it’s plain to see who’s really getting judged. Whose kid is that? Later on, as those children bury us, they listen respectfully, even forgivingly, to the eulogies, but if all the deeds of our lives were heaved from the granary floor of the one from whom no secrets are hid, much of what we’ve done would fly away like so much dryer lint.

Such a fate had befallen Isaiah’s people. Sharp-toothed Babylonians circled, and with axes they chopped down the tree of David. But a shoot grows from the stump, as the prophet promises. In this one we may hope. When he comes, he’s girded with righteousness, all right, and he sides with the meek, but he does not smite the earth nor slay the wicked with his breath. Instead, he appears himself as a defendant on the high priest’s threshing floor. His life is tossed in the air before the gale of fickle crowds and public opinion. The ax is quickly laid to the root once more, and the shoot dies, fixed with nails to the thy barren tree that stands where all our good intentions have crashed and burned.

But that ugly stump, a shameful thing of wicked judgment, becomes the shape of our hope and good news. Upon it Jesus joins us in the wilderness and takes as his own the depths of our emptiness. He’d asked no reward for taking this plunge, but he got one anyway. The title above his head might well have named him, "King of the Dead." Yes, he got us for his prize.

One more surprise remained. "God can make children from stones if God wants," John shouted. He meant it as warning, but it became promise. God could also harvest rich fruit from dead branches of a fallen tree, and did exactly that when Jesus ended up dead as dust and gravel.

We live by the promise that God will raise us too -- not only some day when we die the big death, but today, in our dead-as-a-rock-in-the-wilderness despair, loneliness, fear or shame.

How do rocks like us come alive? Isaiah explains: "For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." In short, we’ll know God the way husbands and wives know each other after long years of marriage. Indeed, that intimate knowledge will fill the earth like water covers the sea, and we who walk the earth will breathe knowledge of God the way fish breathe water.

Drowned in the baptismal flood, we breathe the Spirit of the Crucified. Thus do the dead live. This explains why we now hear music in the wilderness. It comes as part of yet another animal dream, though this one is God’s dream come true. When my sister and I were children, one of our favorite images came from a hymn that began:

Lord, dismiss us with your blessing,

Fill our hearts with joy and peace;

Let us each, your love possessing,

Triumph in redeeming grace.

Holy fishes, holy fishes,

Trav’ling through this wilderness.

Not until I learned to read did I realize the adults had not been singing of holy fishes, but, "O refresh us, O refresh us . . ." How dull and unimaginative. How adult!

For many years I grudgingly adopted the printed text. Thankfully however, I eventually discovered Isaiah’s promise that we’d be transformed and become fish in the sea of knowing God. Now we can sing of -- and be -- amazing, miraculous, wilderness-traveling "holy fishes" every chance we get.

In the wilderness, prepare a way! God has raised up children from stones. Swim along, singing!

Cellmates (Isaiah 35:1-10; Matthew 11:2-11)

Few know blindness so profoundly as prisoners who once could see the whole world but now find the universe shrunk to the size of a cell. Inmates hear only what jailers allow, most often some version of "We own you." As for music, the rhythm of one’s own pulse must suffice, and that hardly leads to dancing. One can even forget how to walk.

Such was John’s plight now that Herod had locked him up so as to silence the cranky prophet’s tongue. As the days dragged on, perhaps John could see only that he would never escape the bars unless he got really skinny. But even then, he could never squeeze his head through, so he’d have to leave that behind.

Despite the isolation, rumors from outside reached John. The Coming One he’d baptized and boldly proclaimed had begun to make his move. Soon would come the smiting of evildoers. Judgment on the threshing floor would surely commence. But the news that filtered into prison didn’t have the sound John expected. Jesus was saying things like, "See, I send you out like sheep into the midst of wolves. . . . They will hand you over to councils. . . and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next. . . . Do not fear those who kill the body. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father" (Matt. 10:16-31, passim).

And yet, the sparrows do fall. John would soon be among them. Had John baptized the Messiah for this? Would this Jesus prove his preaching wrong?

The prison of disillusionment that held John has its cell blocks all over our territory. A dear colleague lies dying in the year he would have retired. His mind has more books queued up and ready to write. His heart remains strong and spirit-filled. But cancer, that patient jailer, has made this world tiny. Tubes bind his wasted frame. Morphine has begun to string cobwebs through his brain. The only minor that enters his cell says there are no more towns to which he might flee.

So, Jesus, in whom my friend has trusted, are you the one, or do we look for another?

Jesus sends word back to John that seeing, hearing, walking and rising from the dead have been breaking out all over. Hopefully, when he receives Jesus’ report, John will remember Isaiah’s prophecies about the marvels that light up the wilderness. They will clue John to the truth about the day that’s dawned on his prison cell.

But not completely, not unless John could somehow know as we do the other stop Jesus made in the wilderness after receiving John’s baptism. There Jesus faced huge questions concerning what kind of messiah he would become. Should he -- and how should he -- open the prisons where the hungry starve, where tyrants rule the nations of the world, where disease and accidents knock the young from their temple perches to the rocks below?

When Jesus left the wilderness for the towns of Galilee and Judea, the stones remained inedible. Herod still reigned, and sudden death still stalked the land. Not that somebody wouldn’t have hell to pay for all this nastiness that makes life cheap. But the one to pay it would be Jesus himself. He would go the way of the cross. The road to Jerusalem would prove his Holy Way, a road quite busy with traffic of the unclean and lost fools gone astray. He would go as a sheep among the wolves, straight into prison. There he would die, just as John had done before him.

Yes, John had prepared the way Jesus would traverse, though not in the manner the Baptizer may have thought. John had given the executioners and word-of-God silencers one more round of practice by which to perfect their skills. While he, like the rest of us, looked for a holy way out of prison, the Coming One reversed the dream. His way led into prison and into the wilderness.

Now our way out is his way in, or so Matthew’s Gospel would teach us. When the one for whom John had paved the way told his own followers where his way led and called them to follow, he told them to go straight to hell. "They can’t keep you out," he promised (Matt. 16:18). He bade them, moreover, to carry with them the means of their own execution.

The Holy Way of Advent that cross-toting fools tread leads not out of the wilderness but ever deeper into it. None of us will escape the wilderness anyway. Our whole life happens within its wordless void, on its arid slopes that drain the life from us as we wander in circles learning the same old lessons over and over.

Precisely that dry land shall blossom, however. It will rejoice with singing. Isaiah promised it. I have seen and heard the fulfillment. In the cell where my colleague lies with his dried-up tongue thick with morphine, we break the silence with singing. Indeed, it now seems that all the worship we ever did together, and all the theology we ever taught to our students and to each other, were only practice for this last leg of the wilderness journey

Yes, I’ll tell John what I’ve seen and heard. The crippled dance boldly enough to make all their tubes jiggle. The dumb cry out in whispers of tearful thanks. As sorrow and sighing come and go, the broken-down rejoice at the good news come to stay. But this can happen for John only if I go to his cell and remain there, ready to die with him, ready to join him in singing his head off.

What Child is This? (Isaiah 7:10-16; Matthew 1:18-25)

My extended family once had so many males named Frederick that the women in the family assigned each of us numbers so the tribe could distinguish between us at family reunions. I became Fred IV. A casual observer might have thought that we considered ourselves royalty, or perhaps a line of renegade popes.

I have a neighbor, Tom Cruse, and a former student, Julia Roberts, who hear all kinds of comedic responses when they use their credit cards or present an ID. In most cases, however, confusion over names produces consternation, not amusement. Rates of criminal identity theft have grown at an astonishing pace, we’re told, and its victims find their lives hijacked. We also hear repeatedly of individuals who are hassled every time they try to board an airplane because they happen to have the same name as some suspicious character on a government "no-fly list."

Joseph had no opportunity to consider the potential problems with "Jesus" as a name for his first-born son. He had a strange dream that told him how and why he should name the child with whom his betrothed was scandalously pregnant. He, after all, was named for one of the original kidnapped, hijacked and redirected individuals in his people’s long history. Indeed, anyone named Joseph who started having dreams that seemed to come true might as well, for the sake of prudence and personal safety, go hide in a cave. His life was no longer his own. Neither was his beloved nor the child he would raise.

Joseph, however, obeyed the angel in the dream. He took Mary to Bethlehem, and when her time came he named her baby Jesus, just as the angel had directed. Joseph could never have known that somewhere in the same stretch of time another woman among his people bore, birthed and named her child Jesus -- or Yeshua, as they would have pronounced it. Most likely, lots of parents named their boy babies Jesus back then, much as we commonly assign ours names like Chad and Brett.

Not one but two of those Jesus tots grew up to be men that the authorities feared enough to have arrested. Matthew’s story lets us follow Joseph’s son Jesus very closely. Yet we don’t meet up with the second man, his namesake, until near the end, There, as the Jesus that readers know best stands before Pilate on trial for his life, we are surprised to meet another Jesus, one whose surname is Barabbas. Mark and Luke say this man was an insurrectionist and murderer, Matthew only that he was "notorious."

Pilate’s question to the crowd (Matt. 27:17) sounds very confusing, at least to us. "Which Jesus shall I release for you, the one called Barabbas [which means "son of the father"] or the one called ‘Messiah’?" Joseph wasn’t around to see it, apparently, but now the fate and promise embedded in the name of Mary’s unborn child becomes clear. "He shall be called Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." At this point the saving scenario commences. One Jesus goes free, all reasons for his notoriety absolved. The other Jesus takes the full rap. His blood is spilled.

Obviously, Matthew does some preaching and theologizing here. If you bear the name Jesus, he says, then no matter what your crimes are, this other one dies while you go free. But even more than this, all the people have the slaughtered one’s blood on themselves and their children, precisely as required in the atonement ritual prescribed in Leviticus 16 and now played out in Pilate’s makeshift sanctuary. Two identical males, one the scapegoat and the other a sacrifice for sin and uncleanness, go to their respective fates as determined by the priests. This is how Joseph’s Jesus saves his people from their sin. His blood works forgiveness of sins for all whom it touches.

Back, then, to Joseph the dreamer and the child he and Mary bring into this world. Important as he became in some ways, even in becoming a saint of the church and having churches and hospitals named for him, Joseph appears as a humane but otherwise ordinary, forgettable fellow with conventional hopes for himself and his family. That is, he’s one of us. He will raise his child as best he knows how and then send the child out into the world where the youngster will get mixed up with and mistaken for all manner of others, many of them notorious.

Among those baptized into Christ, who have taken upon themselves the name of Jesus, these mingled fates and ambiguous identities have both tragic and salutary consequences. Even for pacifist cheek-turners, there is simply no escaping the world of Jesus Barabbas and whatever circumstances brought him face to face with Pilate’s power and caprice. Our children will suffer abuse and die, reckoned, often rightly, among the transgressors. Many of the sins that kill them will be our own. Yet, bearing as they do that other Jesus name, their suffering also comes to us as a sign like the one given to ancient King Ahaz. Emmanuel, "God with us," born in the shadow of mighty Assyria so ready to pounce, joins us in our darkness -- and he is tiny, hungry, vulnerable and barely noticed.

The Jesus who came once to Joseph’s home, Pilate’s court and the centurion’s killing hill will come again one day. He comes also into the here and now, in the flesh and blood of all who bear his name. Moreover, he always -- and only -- comes to give his life.

We’d better pay attention to our dreams. Our children aren’t our own any more than Joseph’s child was his. Somewhere out there now may be a child with whom my own child will one day switch lives.

Rachel Weeping (Matthew 2:13-23)

On Christmas Day we join choirs of angels and raise the strains of "Joy to the World!" Our children sing sweetly of the, little Lord Jesus so peacefully asleep on the hay that he doesn’t cry out when animals wake him with off-key parts to the lullaby. But then the music changes drastically. We hear wailing and loud lamentation. Ancient mother Rachel weeps inconsolably over the loss of her children. Must we listen to this? Have we no season to block out the sounds of grief?

Though it hints at eventual sorrow, Luke’s six-scene operetta about Jesus’ birth has no song of lament. By contrast, Matthew’s birth story is drenched in children’s blood and needs Rachel’s lament. No other tears suffice.

Remember Rachel? Because Jacob loved her more than Leah, the sister he didn’t wish to marry. God apparently closed Rachel’s womb, says Genesis, while Leah bore many sons. Eventually, Rachel confronted both God and Jacob. "Give me children or I’ll die!" she demanded. When she finally bore Jacob a son, she named him "Joseph," which means, "Do it again," or "Let there be another." Thus, all who shared her rejoicing and spoke her child’s name joined her prayer for another son.

When birth pangs came a second time to Rachel, the family was in transit. As so often happened then, something went wrong and Rachel died birthing the answer to her prayer. With her last breaths she named the baby Benoni, "Son of my sorrow." Jacob could not bear the sound of his beloved’s sorrow in this baby’s name, so he called the child Ben-jamin, "Son of my right hand." This second name lifted a burden from father and son, but it also silenced the dying mother’s voice.

For a thousand years Rachel rested in deep silence out there in her makeshift tomb along the roadside near Bethlehem. Then came a day when Jeremiah was watching as Babylonian soldiers marched Rachel’s offspring, children of Israel, naked and trembling along that same road toward exile far away. This prophet, himself so intimate with heartbreak that he wished both he and his mother had perished on the day of his birth, could not bear this grief alone. For company in sorrow, he called mother Rachel from her tomb and gave voice again to her cries that refuse all consolation.

The rabbis explain in an ancient midrash why the next verses in Jeremiah contain a promise of God: "Keep your voice from weeping . . . there is hope for your future . . . your children shall come back." Even God found the ruin of Jerusalem too much to bear alone, said the rabbis. So God called ancient worthies like Abraham and Moses to come weep. Both refused, blaming God for the devastation. "You stopped the knife from plunging into Isaac, and the Pharaoh’s armies from slaughtering the runaway slaves, but you couldn’t save Jerusalem?" they protested. At length God called Rachel, who came to share God’s own grieving. She refused all consolation, cheap or otherwise, and, according to rabbis, prompts God’s promise of hope. There are some desolations so profound they defy all but God’s own attempts to comfort, and even God must dig deeply to respond.

Later Jewish mystics took this a step further. They taught that when the Messiah came, only one place on earth would prove suitable for his coronation -- not some high place like Sinai or Zion, but that lonely place on the road to Ephrath where Rachel lies in the dust. "To mother Rachel he will bring glad tidings. And he will comfort her. And now she will let herself be comforted. And she will rise up and kiss him" (Zohar 2.7a-9a).

Matthew’s Gospel shares something of the spirit of these teachings. His story declares that Mary’s baby, Joseph’s soil, is the fulfillment of Israel’s messianic hope. The magi come with gifts that declare this child a king, but we cannot crown this messiah unless we first pass through Ephrath and stop at Rachel’s tomb. Matthew’s Gospel does more than pause there to listen. Although the Emmanuel child escapes Herod’s angry slaughter, his ultimate coronation will come not far from Ephrath, on Golgatha, where Mary will suffer the cruel robbing of her womb. This time, the Christian gospel proclaims, God also pays the identical price and knows the same loss as Rachel, Jeremiah, Mary and all who risk involvement in a creation of flesh and blood, love and hatred, joy and sorrow, song and sin.

In the midst of our celebrations we also listen to Rachel’s lament because today her children and her neighbors’ children are still dying with their hands on each other’s throats in blind rage over disagreements old as her own jealousy of Leah. Like Abraham and Moses in the ancient midrash, leaders Ariel, Mahmud, George and Tony step into the aftermath and lay more blame. They cannot take Rachel’s disconsolate cries to heart because, truth be told, it would kill them, at least politically.

Only those already dead, or willing soon to die, can respond in a way that might give hope to Rachel’s children and to all others caught up in all this world’s whirlpools of violence and genocide. Supposedly, there are 2 billion such folks among us these days -- a third of the planet’s population who take the name of Christ, bear his cross, have been buried with him by baptism into his death.

Perhaps we can’t do anything about Bethlehem and Ramallah, Jerusalem and Gaza, Iraq and Sudan, even 2 billion of us who no longer need fear death because the worst than can happen to us already has. But we can weep. We can join our voices with Rachel’s.

Imagine the din. Someone would have to listen.

God would listen. We have God’s promise. And maybe, just maybe, those who speak for God would listen, too.