Tag Archives: Deuteronomy 30:19

August 6: Light Eternal or Light Infernal?

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The Transfiguration of Christ (Sr. Abraham, Ethiopian community in Jerusalem, 1990)

I spent only one year in a world without nuclear weapons. My first birthday fell on July 16, 1945, the day of the initial atomic bomb test in New Mexico. A few weeks later, my country used the bomb to extinguish countless human lives on the Feast of the Transfiguration. With Transfiguration falling on a Sunday as Oppenheimer is playing in the theaters, a few comments are in order.

In an interpretive retelling of the Transfiguration by a 17th-century Anglican bishop, Moses and Elijah discuss the paradoxical mixture of evil and glory that permeates the Way of the Cross:

A strange opportunity … when [Jesus’] face shone like the sun, to tell him it must be blubbered and spat upon;… and whilst he was Transfigured on the Mount, to tell him how he must be Disfigured on the Cross! [i]

In the twentieth century, that paradox was tragically deepened when we dropped the atomic bomb at Hiroshima on the Feast of the Transfiguration. Two kinds of light, diabolic and divine, contending forever after for the soul of this world. Whose world is it, anyway? To which light do we belong? To which light do we pledge our allegiance?

In his novel Underworld, Don DeLillo chillingly mixes and confuses the primal images of divine and diabolical light when a nun, swept out of her conscious self into the informational totality of the Internet, has a visionary experience on a website devoted to the H-bomb:

She sees the flash, the thermal pulse . . . . She stands in the flash and feels the power. She sees the spray plume. She sees the fireball climbing, the superheated sphere of burning gas that can blind a person with its beauty, its dripping christblood colors, solar golds and red. She sees the shock wave and hears the high winds and feels the power of false faith, the faith of paranoia, then the mushroom cloud spreads around her, the pulverized mass of radioactive debris, eight miles high, ten miles, twenty, with skirted stem and platinum cap.

The jewels roll out of her eyes and she sees God . . . . 

No, wait, sorry. It is a Soviet bomb she sees . . . . [ii]

Seattle Times, July 16, 1995 (50th anniversary of the first atomic bomb).

I’ve not yet seen Oppenheimer, the film about the creator of the atomic bomb. But I was struck by this paragraph in a review by Adam Mullins-Khatib:

“Oppenheimer … is a searing portrait of a man plagued by visions of a world that can’t be seen, a theoretical world composed of the literal particles of his ideas. Driven by an unyielding need to bring his visions to light, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) struggles with the notion of bringing theory into practice … It’s a film about the creation of something not before seen and the consequences this entails.” [iii]

Something not before seen and the consequences this entails. That could describe both the coming of Christ and the invention of the Bomb: each brought into the world something not before seen, manifested in a moment of blinding brilliance. And each has had enormous consequences which are still very much with us. But only one of them is the Light eternal, pure brightness of the everlasting Love who loves us. 

To paraphrase the divine Voice in Deuteronomy 30:19, 

This day I set before you life and death, blessing and curse, 
the light eternal and the light infernal. 
Choose life. 
Or else. 

In 1944, one year before Hiroshima, Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky, wrote these words: 

“We live in a world of suffering, a world broken and disintegrated, in which Christ’s Transfiguration uncovers reality and reveals to our skeptical minds a new humanity that has either entered into the light of the Risen One or is still called to do so … [W]e need to put on a robe of light, the apparel of those who live without fear, since they have already conquered death and the multiple anxieties associated with it.” [iv]

In this troubled and darkened age, that is exactly how the friends of God must live. 

Let us put on the robe of light, 
and live without fear.

.

[i] Bishop Hall Joseph Hall, Contemplations upon the principal passages of the Old and New Testaments, 1612-28, found on Google Books, p. 383.

[ii] Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 825-6.

[iii] Adam Mullins-Khatib, Chicago Reader, July 26, 2003: https://chicagoreader.com/film/review-oppenheimer/

[iv] Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002, Originally published in French in 1944)), 151, 244.

On the Brink of War: “Choose life.”

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Matteo di Giovanni, The Slaughter of the Innocents (detail, floor panel, Siena cathedral, 1481)

A madman has brought us to the brink of war. No one can predict where we go from here. If we’re lucky, the U.S. and Iran will both back off and stand down. If we’re not, hello Armageddon. But the fact that a psychologically unstable and dangerously impulsive ignoramus is steering us toward disaster, while Congress and public seem powerless or unwilling to relieve him of his command, should both terrify and sicken us. The “shining city on a hill” has become a rogue state: cruel, murderous, and––if we allow ourselves to be drawn into a war with Iran––clearly insane. 

Politicians and pundits are debating the reasons and guessing the consequences, but who is talking about the madness of a president who commits murder during his golf vacation? Who is calling out the evil of a president who would invite apocalypse to evade impeachment? Pretending not to notice these things is a form of enabling, if not its own kind of madness. 

People say Soleimani deserved death for taking so many lives. Do we really want to go down that road? If the death toll from the administration’s dismantling of health care and environmental protections should produce more fatalities than those caused by the Iranian general, what then would Trump deserve? 

We must say no to murder, and no to war. State-sponsored assassination is both repugnant and counterproductive. And military violence has become virtually obsolete as an instrument of national policy, as we have seen over the last three decades of endless and fruitless conflict. Will we never learn?

Twenty-nine years ago this month, I preached against Desert Storm, four days after we began to assault Iraq with the terrifying technology of “shock and awe.” It was not a popular sermon––over 80% of Americans took the opposite view.

I cited a declaration of the Anglican conference of bishops in 1978: “War as a matter of settling disputes is incompatible with the teaching and example of our Lord Jesus Christ. The use of modern technology of war is the most striking example of corporate sin and the prostitution of God’s gifts.” But in 1991 our country was in love with our sophisticated weapons, and people were intoxicated by the smell of victory. 

For those who watched Desert Storm on television, it seemed like a video game. The “enemy” were just blips on the screen, bloodless and abstract, vaporized by noisy explosions. In my sermon, I tried to humanize the conflict: 

In Baghdad’s art center, there is a painting of Jesus, gazing at the world around him with an expression of profound sadness and pain. He wears a Palestinian scarf around his neck and he is handcuffed.

If a Christian bomber pilot knew Christ was in Baghdad, would he deliver his payload? Of course, war is not run by the personally motivated decisions of soldiers. War is organized from above. Soldiers just play their assigned part. But they can only function as long as the enemy remains a mere target, rather than a brother or a sister. They must practice indifference to the stories of their victims. Don’t see. Don’t feel.

But you and I cannot let this war be a video game. Instead, let us see and know that it is Christ being crucified in every victim. Let us watch Christ’s hands being pierced; let us hear his cry of anguish. Let us witness the Madonna and Child blown to bits in the air raid. 

As I said, it was not my most popular sermon. 

We pray every day to be delivered from evil. May that be so in our present danger. But if war comes, may we have the courage and the faith to choose Christ over the “powers” of this world, and say no to the violence. As Martin Luther King reminded us, “Our ultimate end must be the creation of the beloved community.” Ironically, Desert Storm began on Martin Luther King Day, seeming to mock the way of nonviolence. But faith takes the long view. Violence has no future. 

Today I give you the choice of life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life.

                         –– Deuteronomy 30:19 

Festo Kivengere, the Ugandan bishop whose people suffered greatly under the unspeakably barbaric rule of Idi Amin, was once asked: “If you were sitting in Idi Amin’s office with a gun in your hand, what would you do?”

“I would give him the gun, “Kivengere replied. “I would tell him, ‘This is your weapon. My weapon is love.’”