Ground Zero

Well, one thing is certain, revolutions rarely occur from just talking about revolutions. So I resolved to get into the fray. Where do I start?

The last thing I uttered before sleep last night was that the Lord expose all my violent doings, all these ways I fail to follow. It' s not the use of nonviolence to mediate problems as much as it is a belief that this is the best way to express faith in Jesus publically that leads to the kind of provactive confrontation that changes people. And that he help me to will and to do. I must have been very sleepy because in retrospect, that was one of those, get your crash helmet kind of prayers and I didn't grab mine.

I'd like to tell you that for a few hours the next morning, I put put up a valiant non-violent fight at work. But I failed before ever reaching there. For truly, even my dreams are filled with violent action starring of course me. Now, I'm not faulting myself for having a dream as much faulting the training of myself to feel comforted by violent fantasies. A demonstrative ego. The fantasy of heroic deeds of intense violence for the reward of fame and female worship. Rarely have I attempted to emulate the Saints who died in remote places, without fanfare so that the good new of Jesus reigning might be taken serious.

It's hard to fall asleep when the usual things that one deems heroic, and his attempts to emulate them are suddenly challenged.

Of course work environments present challenges very unique but no less violent. The violence of gossip, blame, scapegoating, greed, lust, envy, covetousness and folly are all there. There is economic violence, class warfare, racism, prejudice, intimidation and coercion. I am called to confront these all with Christ-likeness while never forgetting that I too, am also part of the problem. It will not do to tell the lowly worker soley to be Christ-like without also challenging the owner with his wealth to the same. How does that play out?

An so begins what I can only describe as a very lonely struggle. And yet there is a peace. There have been times in my life that I was surrounded by and busy with people but felt an intense solitude. Alone, as they say, in a crowded room. Today, I could not be more alone and yet, I feel a quiet satisfaction. Not in the loneliness. I have before been marginalized and out casted for my own actions and reasons. That is not what I speak of, a sort of zeal for being unique but instead in the wholly otherness that seems to permeate these actions. As if they belong not to me but the God who is, wholly other. Grandiose? Maybe. But invigorating.

We are to wage the warfare of faith, our only weapons those Paul speaks of: prayer, the Word of God, the justice of God, the zeal with which the gospel of peace endows us, the sword of the Spirit. . . .
And if we think this is easy, it is because we know nothing about life in Christ, because we are so sunk in our materialistic culture that we have quite forgotten the meaning of God's work in us, quite forgotten what we are called to in the world. For to wield Paul's weapons is certainly not to live a smug, event less life. The fight of faith demands sacrificing one's life, success, money, time, desires.

The fight of faith is perfectly peaceable, for it is fought by applying the Lord's commandments. Humanly speaking, to fight thus is to fight nakedly and weakly, but it
is precisely by fighting so that we strip bare and destroy the powers we are called to contend against.It is not by sequestering ourselves in our churches to say little prayers that we fight, but by changing human lives.

And it is truly a fight-not only against our own passions and interests and desires, but against a power that can be changed only by means which are the opposite of its own. - Jacques Ellul