What good does it do to meditate on atrocity? (The short answer is: None, except…)
Last week I meditated, for the first time I can remember, on the Stations of the Cross, as found in Celtic Daily Prayer. Like the book as a whole, this meditation is beautiful, poetic.
What I’m thinking of as meditation on atrocity involves dwelling on Christ’s being whipped, his flesh being torn, his shoulders being wrenched, and so on.
It led me to wonder about such meditations on the cross as Mel Gibson’s The Passion. I understand that many people regard that film as almost sacred. I respect their viewpoint.
Focusing on torment can become unhealthy.
The cross is about denying self, loving your enemies, doing the Father’s will not your own. Psychological meanings demand as much of us today as the physical suffering, and are more likely for the average person than dying a horrific death. We may get carried away with the “glamour” of the thing, and forget the boring cross of everyday life.
Suffering is real. Ask military veterans, people living with chronic illness, survivors of abuse and real torture. You don’t need to make it up. Just be thankful that God hasn’t led you there yet.
However, the cross was officially sanctioned torture.
For the first time in American history, our country allows torture. I know the verbal dance our officials do, and I don’t buy it. Torture is torture. The US has turned to Guantanamo and some of the new democracies in the former Soviet bloc to find territory outside the media glare where it can torture people.
Some lines you don’t cross as a civilized society. It took hundreds, thousands, of years to get to the legal ban on self-incrimination and the ban on cruel and unusual punishment in the US Constitution—and only a day 9-11-2001 to knock it down.
When we meditate on the cross, we should see there all tortured people, including those since 9-11. Our reflections should lead us to resolve never to allow torture, or anything that even comes close to it, not only for the sake of victims (which in itself should be sufficient), but for our own sake.
Studies at Stanford showed that the average person is likely to obey instructions from a perceived authority to administer electric shock to subjects of scientific experiments. In another study college students placed in a “concentration camp” social structure began to abuse the “inferior” social group.
People who torture violate minimal standards of human conduct. Do they become less than human? They certainly are not behaving as God wants us to behave.
What an irony that a president who thinks of himself as a “Christian” (assuming others weren’t as good Christians as he) should be in office when we begin torturing people. That way of treating enemies must be in some part of the Sermon on the Mount I haven’t read yet.
Photo by Mary Fran
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