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The Peril And Possibility of Peace

In the Greco-Roman world “savior” was a title bestowed upon kings and rulers who brought peace and prosperity to their realms. In particular, the emperor Augustus, in whose reign Jesus was born, was acclaimed paradigm savior on the grounds that his rule had brought peace—or at least the absence of war—to the entire world.

In the brief Gloria canticle at the birth of Jesus, a multitude of the heavenly army signal the birth of a Savior bringing peace of a different kind: "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those who enjoy God’s favor." This is not another offer of peace on the worlds terms...

Christians know that in this world a totally and permanently peaceful human society is unfortunately a utopia, and that ideologies that hold up that prospect as easily attainable are based on hopes that cannot be realized, whatever the reason behind them. It is a question of a mistaken view of the human condition, a lack of application in considering the question as a whole; or it may be a case of evasion in order to calm fear, or in still other cases a matter of calculated self-interest. Christians are convinced, if only because they have learned from personal experience, that these deceptive hopes lead straight to the false peace of totalitarian regimes.
MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESSPOPE JOHN PAUL II
FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE DAY OF PEACE

The Gospel is not setting Jesus as Savior over against the civil power (Rome, the US or any other source of power) in a hostile sense. But by placing the birth of Jesus within this context it claims the notions of salvation and peace for the divine project now under way. The true peace for which the world longs can only flow from the divine favor which the ministry of Jesus will unleash.

When you sense that specialness, the "something in the air" of Christmas, what you are experiencing are the first echoes of that divine hope. The hope that there is an actual and realistic possibility that the Peace for which we long, that Peace which is beyond our power to engeneer has been offered to humanity, and in Jesus has been accepted by humanity. We who live and die in Christ await, even in the midst of turmoil, Gods Peace to become the normal state of humanity when His Kingdom is brought to its fulfillment.

In this and in every age the coming of the real Savior remains a sign of joy and hope “for all the people.”

Fear Of Faith

In the twentieth century, the response to fear-filled religiosity has been atheism and fear-filled alienation from all things spiritual. Alienation may be a sixties word, but it's by no means a sixties concept. It is, after all, just a name for that basic atavistic feeling of not being "at home" in the world, a kind of cosmic homesickness. It was not born in the twentieth century, but it was certainly fed by existential philosophy and the denial of the existence of God.

Jean-Paul Satre celebrated this terrible emptiness: "Life has no meaning... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose." As the philosopher William Barrett puts it, "Satre's atheism states candidly ... that man is an alien in the universe, unjustified and unjustifiable, absurd in the simple sense that there is no...reason sufficient to explain why he or his universe exists."

Wow, if I thought that was the whole truth about our universe, I'd be pretty alienated and afraid and bummed out, too. And no amount of Satre and intellectual muscle-flexing would assuage my fears. Engaging in nonstop activity so I didn't have to think about it would at least push my fear to the background. But I wouldn't be getting rid of it - only masking it.

Sometimes the fear manifests as an anxiety that hangs over us, one that we cannot ascribe to any particular event. "Free-floating anxiety" is the term used by modern psychology, and by naming what we cannot explain by classifying the symptoms, we delude ourselves into thinking we somehow mastered the cause. Many years ago I read a column by a successful playwright recounting a day in his life that would be the envy of many, full of people and color and action and fun. I no longer remember his name, but his last line was burned into my brain: "I go to bed every night thinking that I have forgotten something." The nagging sensation of having forgotten something important, which disturbs our comfort and routine, both feeds our fear and is a product of it.

So for many the price of escaping from the prison of damnation-drenched religious conventions has been to lose touch with the spiritual truths from which they originally sprang. When that happens, our new reality is the fear-filled and barren terrain of sterile secular humanism. It's a false world in which the spiritual either gets taken over by fanatical fundamentalism or explained away by psychoanalysis as the residue of a damaged childhood. Indeed, one of Freud's most famous books about religion is entitled The Future of an Illusion.

Without faith in a higher order and the existence of something outside ourselves and our everyday lives, life can become emotionally unbearable and filled with fear. And this anxiety, even if we're not aware of it, will surface in other parts of our lives. Bernard Levin described it as "the gnawing feeling that ultimate reality lies elsewhere, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, sensed just beyond the light cast by the campfire, heard in the slow movement of a Mozart quartet, seen in the eyes of Rembrandt's last self-portraits, felt in the sudden stab of discovery in reading or seeing a Shakespeare play thought familiar in every line."

But we spend a large part of our lives barricading ourselves against this ultimate reality. In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche called himself "a man who wishes nothing more than daily to lose some reassuring belief, who seeks and finds his happiness in this daily greater liberation of the mind." But the freedom he was seeking, which was essentially the freedom from fear and convention, cannot be found through the mind, only through the soul.


This excerpt was originally published in On Becoming Fearless In Love, Work, And Life by Arianna Huffington.

Daily Life for St. Augustine

St. Augustine once described his daily life in the following terms: “The turbulent have to be corrected, the faint-hearted cheered up, the weak supported; the Gospel's opponents need to be refuted, its insidious enemies guarded against; the unlearned need to be taught, the indolent stirred up, the argumentative checked; the proud must be put in their place, the desperate set on their feet, those engaged in quarrels reconciled; the needy have to be helped, the oppressed to be liberated, the good to be encouraged, the bad to be tolerated; all must be loved.”

Hope Capable of Filling the Vacuum

Christianity spread through the ancient world in part because of the hope it awakened in a world engulfed in crisis. As the revelation of the Cross was freeing humanity from the spellbinding power of sacred violence and the myths and rituals that perpetuated it, the Resurrection was opening up a panorama of hope invulnerable to worldly disappointments. At the very moment when civil order seemed to be dissolving, and the barbarians were closing in on its besieged outposts, Christians – St. Augustine prominent among them – bore witness to a hope unlike anything the surrounding pagan world had ever known. In the 21st century, under similar circumstances, it will fall to those directly or indirectly inspired by Christianity to recover a hope capable of filling the vacuum left by the collapse of modernity’s naïve optimism, on one hand, and postmodernity’s erudition of despair, on the other.
Gil Bailie