Storm center

Christian Century, May 31, 2003 by Peter J. Gomes

The world has always been a dangerous and precarious place. It's just that some of us have now discovered this terrible fact for ourselves. The shrinking world that has allowed us to export technology abroad has now' permitted terror to be imported to us. The question is how we stand and manage in a world less brave, less new.

Inner strength, I believe, comes from the sure conviction that God has placed us in the world to do the work of life, and not of death. This is what St. Paul says: "We are always facing death, but this means that we know more and more of life" (2 Cor. 4:11). Faith is not the opposite of doubt or of death, but the means whereby we face and endure doubt and death, and overcome our fear of them. We believe that neither death nor doubt nor fear is the last word. This is a sure conviction for Christian believers. Because that belief is testified to by the experience of our ancestors in the faith and our contemporaries who labor beside us and for God in the rubble, we are able to endure. We are able to go through the worst for the best, come what may. Endurance is what it takes when you have nothing left. Heavy loads have been placed upon us in these days, and even greater burdens and sacrifices are to come. Like Jesus in the Garden, we would be less than human if we did not pray that this cup might pass us by--but it won't. How will we manage?

Ernest Gordon, for many years dean of the chapel at Princeton, was captured on the River Kwai during World War II. While in a Japanese prison camp, Gordon and his fellow British captives were initially very religious, reading their Bibles, praying, singing hymns, witnessing and testifying to their faith. They were hoping and expecting that God would reward them and fortify them for their faith by freeing them or at least mitigating their captivity. God didn't deliver, however, and the men became both disillusioned and angry. They gave up on the outward display of their faith; but after a while, as the men began tending to the needs of their fellows--caring for them, protecting the weaker ones and in some cases dying for one another--they began to discern something of a spirit of God in their midst. They discovered that religion was not what you believed but what you did for others when it seemed that you could do nothing at all. Compassion gave them their inner strength, and their inner strength gave them compassion.

Could it be that amid the cries of vengeance and violence and warfare, the inner strength we so desperately seek is the strength that comes from hearing and heeding the cry of the other?

In The Beatitudes, Hugh Martin writes:

   Some people's strength is all drawn
   from themselves. They are like isolated
   pools with limited reserves.
   Others are more like rivers. They do
   not produce or contain the power,
   but it flows through them, like
   blood through the body. The more
   they give, the more they are able to
   draw in. That strength is theirs, but
   it is not their own. The strength that
   God gives is available to those who
   care for others, for they are showing
   the spirit of Jesus. The power of
   God's spirit fortifies them.