katinga 's Public Library

Philosophy had failed.
The handful of sages who had made Greek episteme their
own and who actualized the lofty moral precepts of Stoicism lived out
their lives in a quiet desperation, convinced that human existence is
little more than the lot of a condemned prisoner who waits in his cell
upon the call of the executioner. A cold wind full of despair whistles
through Marcus Aurelius’ contention that “it is possible to
be a good man, even in a palace.” the final irony of classical antiquity
consisted in its having wrought civilization out of barbarism as it chiseled
palaces out of stone quarries: it had to suffer stoically, as does a man
a burden or a secret tragedy, the very glory that it created.

So it was a very
tired and sad world that hurried to the Good News of Bethlehem: “For
unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ
the Lord.”

But
in this ghastly simulacrum of civilization that we call the twentieth
century, where all honor is forgotten, there are still children in the
high plains of Castille who are romping now through cobbled streets covered
in snow, the night bitter and cold under a sky swept clean of clouds.
The they are singing, these children: “Ande, ande, ande, la Maria
morena; ande, ande, ande, qu’es la Nochebuena.” Dark Mary,
Our Lovely, please hurry and give

birth to Your Son,
because tonight is the Good Night. Like the first shepherds, in haste,
they flee from a tired and sick world in order that they might find Emmanuel,
our Great God. Stumbling and falling along the roadside, fleeing the banalities
of a world without Him, they bear Her along and buoy Her up. Tonight they
will fling themselves before His Manger and sate themselves, gluttons
for God, in adoration. Come, Dark Mary, deliver us tonight Christ, Our
God, Our Lord, Our King

Of course Christian communities don’t have a blameless history in the region. But they have something special to say. To the Westerner, they say: “Remember that Christianity didn’t start in England or even Rome; it’s a Middle Eastern faith.” To Muslims, they say: “Remember that Islam would not have spread as it did without the way being prepared (as the Koran itself says) by the other local religions — by Christians and Jews. Remember that there are ways of being authentically Arab, non-Western, that don’t have to be Islamic.”

These communities will survive only if fellow Christians in the West decide to pay a bit of attention. This doesn’t mean using clumsy political or military pressure to “protect” them, in ways that only reinforce the idea that they’re Western allies and so must be unreliable. That’s happened too often in the past. It means being willing to protest when they are ill-treated; to make contact with them, to set up links between local churches here and in the Middle East; to remember when we visit the region that they exist and need friends. It’s not that these Christians are being persecuted by Muslim governments on the whole. It’s a matter of rising tides of extremism, which governments are as keen to check as anyone.

So God wants to give each one of us himself, his whole self,
Father and Son and Holy Spirit. God is pure love, pure generosity,
and the aim of love is always intimacy, oneness with the beloved. Doesn’t
the lover always want to get closer and closer, to get inside the beloved’s
soul? You want to give your whole self to the one you love. That’s why
God gave us the Holy Spirit. And that’s why it’s better to have
the Holy Spirit than to have Jesus only physically present, as the first disciples
did.

Sal: Better even than having Jesus here on earth?

Chris: Yes, that’s what he said himself. He said, “It is
better for you that I go away (he was speaking of his ascension into Heaven)
because if I do not go away, the Spirit will not come to you, but if I go
away, I will send him to you.

In a similar vein, in his outstanding “History of the Jewish People,” British writer Paul Johnson explained that the bulk of Western European Jewry failed to realize that Hitler was a crazed anti-Semite with whom coexistence was an impossibility. Through centuries, Europe’s Jews had dealt with threats and dangers and assorted depredations. But they could always ultimately coexist with their malefactors. There would be the occasional sacrifice of wealth, land and lives, but the Jewish community endured. Hitler was different – he wanted all the Jews dead. A million of Europe’s Jews realized the urgency of the situation and fled to Palestine, America, Shanghai and other safe harbors around the world. Six million didn’t realize the danger soon enough and perished.

There are some very bad people out there with whom good people cannot coexist. That’s a historical certainty, as well as a moral one.