There is a terrible, terrible evil flooding the world. Maybe it was there when you and I were young. We might have been too innocent to notice it. In our youth our parents and elders shielded us. They had felt the evil and they had not dared infect us with it. Their own wounds and scars were enough.
Or maybe today I feel this evil more than others. My work as a Benedictine monk is peace-making. I’m called to places and to hearts where there is no peace, only judgementalism and derision and outright violence. When I’m called, I have to get myself ready for the terror and the tears that I’ll find. I have to pray for the skill of healing.
I am acquainted with this evil. It seems everywhere. I catch its stink even on men/women in spotless clothes. They suppose they are not carriers. But this evil is very sly. It’s popular. It finds buddies. Actually, it’s the carriers who are the most dangerous. They attack everything and tear it apart.
There is no one word, I think, to name this evil, this sin. It’s so coarse that many words leap up to name it. It’s snarling and judgmental. It’s jealous and contentious. It’s hateful and vengeful. The humble are the first ones attacked. It‘s built into some institutions and organizations, by their practices and policies of exclusion. Some people even have personal theologies of exclusion. Their sin is frightful. It is the only sin that Jesus hated with a passion. Listen to Him. He warned against it with a curse. “If you indulge in it, judging others, I’ll use it on you, even at the day of your last chance.”
When God made us, He made us to fit together and to be happy. He made us to live in harmony with all creation. “What I have put together, let no one tear asunder.” Then into the world there comes this sin. It separates and divides, it rends all that God has joined together. Wife and husband. Child and father. Brother and sister. Monk and missionary. Clergy and Church. No wonder Jesus was furious. He meant business. He came to be the center of life. This sin keeps the little ones away from Him.
For some reason the sin of put-down, the quick sneer, finds easy entrance into “religious” people. It makes them violent and maniacal. Merciless. Even Jesus cannot calm them. They use His name as a curse. Watch out for them, and be afraid. They have an evil spirit. They blaspheme the Holy Spirit. Matthew 12:21.
But you do have protection. First, avoid the company of persons ill with the disease. Second, use an antidote. You have the antidote in you. You had an in-pouring of it at Confirmation. It’s called compassion. It’s a powerful gift.
It’s not a difficult treatment. It is just this word, “Jesus, take care of this person, and save him from his troubles.” You wish good things for him, and everyone is helped. You can’t lose.
Every holy and wise person who ever lived felt Compassion as Jesus did. They all spoke of it. Always in the same words there was the invitation. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Compassion sets no limits. It could not be compassion, if it were selective. It is unconditional love. It is consistent. If we simply love those who are well disposed toward us, there is no power or substance to our love. We are simply banking up our own egotism. We remain trapped in a selfishness that is cruel, violent.
Here is Karen Armstrong in her wonderful book “The Spiral Staircase”: “Compassion is not a popular virtue. Some feel there is no FUN in religion, if you can’t disapprove of other people? Some folks will feel obscurely cheated, if they get to heaven and find that everybody else is there as well.
“Religion is a constant struggle between our tendency to aggression and the mitigating virtue of compassion. Religiously inspired hatred has caused unimaginable suffering around the world. Auschwitz and the Gulag and the regime of Saddam Hussein show the fearful cruelty to which humanity is prone, when all sense of the sacred has been lost.”
We Americans live in a wonderful homeland of native people. Their word of greeting is “Hau Koda” or “Hau Mitakuye” “Hello, Friend” or “Hello, Relative.”
People from other states think we South Dakotans are quaint because on our country roads we greet each passer-by with a wave. Others have to understand, there is hope in us. I hope there is hope in our youth, too. There is hope for the fruits of compassion, “love, joy, peace, gentleness, self-control”.
As for the rest, “Let it not be so much as named among you.”