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We Are One, Like It or Not St. Paul in 1 Cor. 12:12 speaks to the unity of the kingdom envisioned by Jesus: “We were baptized into one body in a single Spirit, Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as free men and we were all given the same Spirit to drink....God has composed the body . . . so that there may not be disagreements inside the body, but each part may be equally concerned for all the others. If one part is hurt, all the parts share its pain....Now Christ’s body is yourselves, each one of you with a part to play in the whole.” The intimacy of our connection to one another is graphically expressed in the analogy of the oneness of our bodies. There is nothing we know, comprehend, experience so viscerally as the connection of the eye to the hand, to the foot. We may know very little, but we know we are one. But the analogy continually breaks down as the human community engages in destructive warfare on its members, as though the hand said to the eye, you are not a part of me. Oneness seems foreign to our experience. And yet in our midst a Simone Weil, a Dorothy Day so identify with victims, the afflicted, that Paul’s words are incarnated, “If one part is hurt, all the parts share its pain.” Mother
Earth herself, God’s startling handiwork, is the ultimate affirmation
of Paul’s eloquence, the umbilical-like connection of land, sea and air
beyond nation states, borders, walls. The fate of the earth requires we
acknowledge our interdependence. Willigis Jager, a German Benedictine monk, expresses it simply. “It
is the life of the Divine that unfolds in creation.....What happens in any
part influences what happens in any other part...All being is
relationship...the will of God, properly understood, is connected with this
holistic worldview and the interdependence of all being.” (Search for the Meaning of
Life). The Garden of Eden narrative begins to make sense-- we dwell in a paradise; leave it intact. The consequences of our myopic living lead to an inexorable break in nature’s balance and set in motion a chain of destruction. John Connor, founder of Grassroots Coalition for Environmental and Economic Justice, (grassrootsl @pa.net) in his December newsletter mentions a book by Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Letters from a Catastrophe which concludes, “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose to destroy itself, but that is in essence, what we are in the process of doing.” We turn on the ignition of the car and it impacts the Amazon, as well as the temperature of the North Atlantic, which profoundly effects the climate of Europe. And so it goes. We revisit Genesis 6: “God looked at the earth; it was corrupt, for corrupt were the ways of all living things on earth. God said to Noah, I have decided that the end has come for all living things, for the earth is full of lawlessness because of human beings.” A second flood would be our choice. A refreshing candor with crystal clarity in regard to Iraq has appeared in the unlikely voice of an American Catholic bishop, a Mexican American, Gabino Zavala, Bishop President of Pax Christi U.S.A. Read carefully and inhale and embrace this Gospel vision─unequivocal speech like Jesus.
Bishop Zavala turns to Dorothy Day to compare the Works of Mercy with the Works of War.
What are the works of war? Some of us know them from experience. Those, like the Iraqi people tonight, know them intimately: Destroy crops and land, seize food supplies, destroy homes, scatter families, contaminate water, imprison dissenters, inflict wounds and burns, kill the living. As people of faith, we must help elevate and make a
path for another way through the wilderness, the nonviolent way of Jesus, the
peace of Christ, Pax Christi. Joe Bradley |