February 27, 2006
Lamentation
At the height of the oppression of apartheid, so goes the story, South African government soldiers surrounded Desmond Tutu’s church with loaded guns across their chests. Calmly, he addressed them, and said, “Please join us, for you have already lost.”
Something about this scene strikes me as startlingly similar to all those who now surround the church emblazoned with their own myopic focus on the gospel. They’ve no guns across their chests. But they’re no less armed with equally loaded and deadly threats arising out of a confusion apparently unable to distinguish between the authority of Holy Scripture’s normative tradition and that of even the best-intentions of pontifical councils.
This spiritual apartheid neither reforms nor refreshes, but only cripples and diminishes our collegial capacities to respond to God’s Commandment to love and to God’s subsequent Commission to implement that Commandment throughout the world. One can only sense and fear a kind of adolescent hooliganism about it all that only retards a more mature response to what truly must be our Lord’s lamentation, ”Please join us, for you have already lost.”