Performing The Faith

Christians are not called to be heroes or shoppers. We are called to be holy. We do not think that holiness is an individual achievement, but rather a set of practices to sustain a people who refuse to have their lives determined by the fear and denial of death. We believe that by so living we offer our non-Christian brothers and sisters an alternative to all politics based upon the denial of death. Christians are acutely aware that we seldom are faithful to the gifts God has given us, but we hope the confession of our sins is a sign of hope in a world without hope. This means that pacifists do have a response to September 11, 2001. Our response is to continue living in a manner that witnesses to our belief that the world was not changed on September 11, 2001. The world was changed during the celebration of a Passover in 33 A.D.

Mark and Louise Zwick, founders of the Houston Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, embody the life made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus. They know, moreover, that Christian non-violence cannot and must must not be understood as a position that is no more than being 'against violence.' If pacificism is no more than 'not violence,' it betrays the form of life to which Christians believe they have been called by Christ. Drawing on Nicholay Berdyayev, the Zwicks rightly observe that 'the split between the Gospel and our culture is the drama of our times,' but they also remind us that 'one does not free persons by detaching them from the bonds that paralyze them: one frees persons by attaching them to their destiny.' Christian non-violence is but another name for the friendship that we believe God has made possible and that constitutes the alternative to the violence that grips our lives.

I began by noting that I am not sure for what I should pray. But prayer often is a form of silence. The following prayer I hope does not drown out silence. I wrote the prayer as a devotion to begin a Duke Divinity School general meeting. I was able to write the prayer because of a short article I had just read in the Houston Catholic Worker (November 16, 2001) by Jean Vanier. Vanier is the founder of the L'Arche movement - a movement that believes God's salvation has given us the time to live and learn to be friends with those the world calls 'retarded.' I end with this prayer because it is all I have to give.

Great God of surprise, our lives continue to be haunted by the specter of September 11, 2001. Life must go on and we go on keeping on - even meeting again as the Divinity School Council. Is this what Barth meant in 1933 when he said we must go on 'as though nothing has happened'? To go on as though nothing has happened can sound like counsel of despair, of helplessness, of hopelessness. We want to act, to do something to reclaim the way things were, which, I guess, is but a reminder that one of the reasons we are so shocked, so violated, by September 11 is the challenge presented to our prideful presumption that we are not in control, that we are going to get out of life alive. To go on 'as though nothing has happened' surely requires us to acknowledge that you are God and we are not. It is hard to remember that Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather he came to make us disciples, citizens of a your new age, a kingdom of surprise. That we live in the end times is surely the basis for our conviction that you have given us all the time we need to respond to September 11 with 'small acts of beauty and tenderness,' as Jean Vanier tells us, if done with humility and confidence, 'will bring unity to the world and break the chain of violence.' So we pray, give us humility that we may remember that the work we do today, the work we do every day, is false and pretentious if it fails to serve those who day in and day out are your small gestures of beauty and tenderness. - Stanley Hauerwas