A Tweet, a Task, a Tale, and a Truth
Written by Dan McDonald
I began this blog several days before
the events in Paris, and the events not noticed in Beirut underscored our need
to learn how to represent our faiths in respect to others’ life journeys.
Humankind is divided by differing cultures, ethnicities, religions, and socio-economic
positions in our varied experiences of humanity. We often expect peace without
our taking care to encourage peace. Peacemaking is a continual labor as
it requires constant care first to obtain it even tentatively and then to maintain
it permanently. The story I tell is a story of a day when on Twitter, I posted a
tweet that I expected to resonate with Christians focused on a Christian
understanding of the incarnation. But much to my surprise the only person for
whom it resonated to the point that she favorited it and then re-tweeted it was
a young Muslim woman. I have never met her but her postings seem to generally
speak with genuine human compassion. For me to feel that a word I had written
resonated within her soul brought to me a wonderful sense of gratitude. As the
news about the events in Paris unfolded my thoughts went to this young woman,
whom I could only imagine watching the news unfold with a sense of what would greet her as she walked in an American city with Middle Eastern features. I would like to hope she faced mostly good. I messaged her as the news of the Paris attacks
unfolded. I expressed hope that all was going well for her and wished God’s
blessings upon her. I will treasure her response always and will say that it
was characterized with gratitude for the kindness I tried to show.
I hope to promote in my own way an understanding between
people who are given the task to seek God and do so in many varied ways. We
should be dialoguing with one another and not making war. We who are dialoguing
with one another should stand firm against those in our communities ready to
rush to war, or at least make sure we seek to promote civility if we believe a war against an extreme evil is necessary. A dialogue between people requires strength of human virtue. It
requires the strength of listening to someone without requiring them to be what
they are not. But perhaps it requires simultaneously the strength to resist the
temptation to be momentarily what we believe they would like us to be or to say
what we think they would like us to say. We must resist the temptation to try to pretend to be what we are not. It is for this reason that in this
lengthy blog I seek to lay a foundation for understanding that we must allow
for and encourage every person’s peaceful pursuit of truth, while holding ourselves as Shakespeare would say to ourselves being true. I try both to express my appreciation
for the diversity existing within humanity, while not shrinking back from expressing what is near and dear to my own heart. I would
only hope in the process to build bridges not only with those who believe what
I believe but also with those who on a path different from mine.
So today I tell the story of a
tweet, a task, a tale, and a truth.
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There was a morning I wrote a tweet of
no more than 140 characters. I tried to pack in it a thought that a Christian would
understand was related to the truth of the incarnation. I forget exactly what I
wrote. I think it was something about how we show our love for God in our deeds
towards others. I imagined as a Christian that such a thought would be embraced
mostly by those who had thought about life believing that God became man that
man might return to God as we loved one another because God first loved us. I
wondered, as we timid writers often do, how many people might show how this
thought resonated within their minds and souls. It turned out only one person
pressed the favorite selection. Only one person shared the tweet. That one
person who did both actions was not a Christian who thought often about God
becoming man in Jesus Christ; but a Muslim who understood that charity towards
others is an essential pillar of a holy life. From the Christian perspective,
if we believe that God became man, we must also believe that we see God in human
faces, and therefore our love of God cannot be greater than our love for the men
and women and communities into which our life journeys bring us. It was as a
fellow human being, a Muslim expressed how the words I expressed resonated
within her being, that I began to realize that the shared humanity that
characterizes each of our life journeys is something important that should
impact each of our commitments to the faiths we presently own as our own, or is
it that they own us, as we seek to be faithful to them? The sharing of a common
sentiment helped me to understand that even if our differences of faith were
important differences, so was sharing a common humanity a big thing to
never be minimized as if unimportant.
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My thoughts turned to a message once
given by St. Paul. He spoke of a common task given to all humanity as he stood
on the famous hill in Athens where the Acropolis still stands today. He quoted
as much from a non-Christian Greek poet as he did from the Scriptures as he
described how each of us is given the task to seek God. He said that day: “God
has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the
earth, and has prepared their appointed times and the boundaries of their
dwellings so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope
for him and find him although he is not far from each one of us”.
(Acts17:26-27) He appealed to them again from the words of a Greek poet, saying
“for in him we live, move, and have our being, as also some of your own poets
have said, ‘For we are his offspring.” (Acts 17:28)
I can imagine that if today he were
given the opportunity to speak in Beirut or Amman he might choose a quote from
Rumi, the medieval Muslim sage, some of whose words are expressed in the
photograph beneath, as Rumi reminds us of the walk of life, the search to which
we are called. We may walk with others but no one can walk our journey for us.
We are given the task to seek and to find. That is true for every person in
every race, ethnicity, culture, and faith.
This explains why when we have had
the opportunity and time we discover in the genuine humanity of the search that
we discover at least for a part of the journey traveling companions with
wonderful insights whether it is a Christian mystic like Merton, an Islamic
sage like Rumi, or a Jewish philosopher like Abraham Joshua Heschel. To every
person on this globe the task has been given that we might seek the Lord while
he may be found. It is not simply a Christian task to seek God; rather it is of
the very essence of our fragile humanity. We seek God, not because we are
Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindi, Buddhist, or a member of a remote tribe with a
localized wise man; rather we seek God because we were created in his image and
as shadows it is uncomfortable being separated from Him for whom our lives are
lived as the shadows of His presence cast over the face of the earth. This is
even the task of the one so discouraged by life that he or she has ceased for
the moment to believe in any truth but the reality of the shadow separated from
the one who casts the shadow. Thus it is given to all mankind to seek him. So
we begin to understand that in our humanity the Christian and the Muslim and
all others in life are already called to a sacred journey on a path of life in
which they are given the task to seek him who is not far from any one of us. It
does not remove the differences between us, but we realize the great
significance of this our common bond.
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I sometimes wonder what I would have
come to believe if I had not grown up within a culture where Christianity
surrounded me. Sometimes we Americans imagine everyone growing up where people
grow frantic if the right Christmas theme is not on their Starbucks cup. But
sometimes I wonder what I would have thought about the Christian faith if I had
grown up in a culture where Christian thinking was only a vague foreign faith
with some ideas contrary to all reason. I doubt that I would have so quickly
been attracted to it as I was in my late teen years when forms of the faith had
surrounded me all of my life. I can imagine myself in another land, hearing of
Christianity and saying in reply “There is a tale too tall to be true.” But
perhaps I would have been intrigued by the very tale that seemed too tall to be
true. Perhaps I would have thought, “God becoming man” and thought at first it
had to be insanity and then wondering but what if it were not insanity? What if
instead of being a tale too tall to be true, it was the truth which every tale
wished it could tell?
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The Bible tells us that Jesus was
the Word of God and as the Word of God his origin was from the unchanging glory
and holiness and eternal truthfulness of God. When God spoke His word, something
true to God’s own nature entered into creation. The Bible goes on to speak of
how God not only spoke a word but let that word become personalized into the
existence of an actual human being. The Bible describes this saying “and the
word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of
the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) Another
New Testament author said it in this way:
“God,
who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by
the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has
appointed heir of all things, through whom he also made the worlds: who being
the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding
all things by the word of his power, when He had by Himself purged our sins,
sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.”
God spoke through His Word and
beyond the mere articulation of words. He united the essence of his revelation
towards humanity into an actual living human being. From the perspective of a
distant telling of the Christian story, the idea that Jesus is both God and man
seems preposterous. But from the perspective that God has been seeking to speak
to his people, that what he has said might then be actually expressed in true
humanity is a beautiful personification of his truth in a way which reveals to
us the nearness of God to our humanity and the love of God to seek us out by
entering our humanity. For God could with his words spoken to us as sinners
have either used his word to build a bridge to humankind or a wall forever
dividing our sin stained humanity from a truly holy God. In Christ the Word he
spoke was a bridge to span the gulf between God and man. Think for a moment
what you know about bridges. Think of the Golden Gate Bridge and how it was
built to span the narrow inlet between the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco
Bay.
A bridge is always anchored on both sides. The Golden Gate
Bridge between Marin County and San Francisco
If you look at any bridge, to be
operational, a bridge must be anchored on both sides of the waterway. The
Golden Gate Bridge crossing the narrow inlet between the Pacific Ocean and San
Francisco bay is anchored to the north in Marin County a short distance from
Sausalito; and it is also anchored to the south in San Francisco near the
Presidio. Jesus, according to the Christian understanding of things was meant
by God to be the bridge built between God and man. He is the Word of God having
his full origins in the unchanging divinity of God. He has become man, born of
Mary, to be a human being in every way, shape and form. In his Deity he reached
down to man and in his humanity he reached upwards to God. He spanned the gulf
between God and man. He died for our sins according to the Scriptures and became
the way, the truth, and the life for man to return to God. He died for our
sins, but in his righteousness he rose from the dead in three days. He absorbed
our death for sins that he might be able to grant us to share in his
righteousness and eternal life. He who was God formed a bridge by making his
entrance into humanity and then by completing the bridge by building the way within
our humanity to return to God.
I cannot do justice in an already
lengthy blog to the truth of the incarnation but I hoped to show at least some
rudimentary elements of what we who are Christians actually believe about God
becoming man. It is essential to us, because it is we believe how God moved in
his love of mankind to enter humanity so that humanity could return to God. He
did so, in order that he might build a bridge between two locations. As the
Brooklyn Bridge crosses the East river with one side of the bridge being
anchored in downtown Brooklyn and the other side being anchored in lower
Manhattan, God set forth his Living Word to become a bridge anchored in God on
one side and in our humanity on the other side of the gulf separating God and man.
Pedestrians
enjoying the walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge spanning the East River from Brooklyn
to Manhattan
At this present time, as a Christian
I sincerely wish my Muslim friends the best. I believe that peace best serves
men and women seeking truth, a task given to all humanity regardless of race,
ethnicity, culture, or creed. As I believe in a God whose word built a bridge,
I want my words to build lesser bridges and my life to suggest the way to the bridge which spans the gulf between God and man.
To my Muslim friends, and to all others
given the task to seek God I recognize seeking to be a sacred calling, a task to
be dutifully respected, even when as it seems always to be, done stumbling in the night looking for a
candle and a light.
