Tolerating the Intolerable

I'm not yet used to using the Rite One prayers that my little Episcopal Church here in the North Country still follow. Over time, the Episcopal Church has moved theologically to less groveling and more confidence in our public worship. Most of us now stand before God in the prayers and when receiving the Eucharist, instead of kneel in submission. And when we do confess our sins (which may be omitted), we confess only that we have done things we shouldn't and left undone things we should, and that we have not loved with our whole heart. We rarely talk to God anymore about our grievous sins provoking just wrath, much less "bewail" them. I do understand and generally agree with the Gospel of confidence, but I don't know, this week I still can't shake The Ashen Rainbow (Who could? --see my Aug 29 blog), and I wonder if sometimes we aren't just a little too quick to overlook our individual and collective capacity for utter, unqualified evil. What other episode in human history so clearly shows our talent for tolerating the intolerable, looking away when we calculate that the cost of truly seeing is more than we are willing to bear?


I also haven't been able to shake the image from the very end of Godspell where Jesus, who has been crucified on an electric fence is cut down and carried off on a bier to the chorus of "Long Live God." There doesn't seem to be any historical reason to believe that this musical was every associated in anyone's mind with Holocaust Art--nothing I could find, anyway. But the image for me of this buoyant and hopeful musical retelling of the optimism of the Christ story, which culminates with the death and subsequent exit of God on an electric fence, is a apt metaphor for the two millennia Christian experiment culminating with the death of 6 million Jews under the Nazi "final solution."


Before anyone gets too incensed, I realize that the Nazi ideology was thoroughly pagan, and that there were many Christian heroes and Christian martyrs who were engulfed in those years, and that many other groups besides Jews were targeted by the Nazis. I also think that neither God nor society have much need for self-indulgent brow-beating or even much in the way of active response at this point, except that we take up the responsibility for a clear eyed gaze at where we have been and where we might return if we again allow ourselves to cultivate the talent of the incremental tolerance of the intolerable.


But, I do say that thinking Christians would do well to ask ourselves whether this Christian experiment has failed. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were supposed to usher in a new age of the Spirit of God manifest on the earth in the community of the Church, God's new "light to the nations." Surely after a couple thousand years, it's reasonable to take out a tally sheet and ask, "Ok, overall impact: Good or bad? What's our score? Was there really something to this new cult of Jesus?" There is much on the positive side, of course, but there are these troubling little interludes like the Crusades and the Inquisition, for instance, or the subjugation of women, the defense of slavery... And, then, in the case of the Holocaust, there is the little problem of entrenched Christian antisemitism that cannot be explained away. If we sing Ein Feste Burg and take shelter in God's "Mighty Fortress," then we cannot overlook that Martin Luther believed and taught that the Jews are "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."* -- This is our Christian lineage; not an aberration, but the natural continuation of centuries of animosity and scapegoating that created a climate in which the utterly unimaginable and intolerable became inescapable history.

At the end of Godspell, Jesus cries out "Oh God, I'm dying" and the chorus answers "Oh God, you're dying." His lifeless body is carried off on the fence from which he was crucified, to the strains of "Long Live God," and a reprise of "Prepare ye the Way of the Lord." I hear the echo of "The King is dead. Long live the King!" and I at least have to ask, what is there to show that Christianity isn't dead and should be supplanted by some new, perhaps less tragically flawed religion? Are we an ultimately failed experiment in living out the incomparable vision of a great prophet who died too soon?

For me, the jury is still out on that question, although, on the other hand, I can bring myself to do nothing other than continue as a Christian. I am too thoroughly culturally grounded in Christian myth, symbolism, language, metaphor -- Christianity is so completely the vehicle that has conveyed me in my struggle to make sense of the world and my place in it that I don't think I could be separated from that identity and still be me. This background is still the filter through which I process and respond to the world. But, in all honesty, I still have to ask... And if, by some great mercy of the God I'm not so sure I still believe, the answer is that Christianity is still viable, then perhaps, on occasion, we would do well to be seriously troubled about the deeds against the "divine Majesty" of God's original chosen people that are on our heads and were (in the sense that we believe we are living members of each other in the community of believers) committed by our own hands:

"We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins

and wickedness,

which we from time to time most grievously have committed,

by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty,

provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.

We do earnestly repent,

and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;

the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,

the burden of them is intolerable.

Have mercy upon us!"

* Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies, 154, 167, 229, cited in Michael, Robert. Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 111.