There plays today a song with many “versus.” If this song was titled, it would be “Us Versus Them.”
So much has been written and said about how divided we are as Americans — or even as Catholics.
Father Charles Lachowitzer
There is a good argument to say that people have always been divided. There has always been a “them.” Every chapter of history has feuding families, antagonistic neighbors, and warring clans, tribes and nations.
It is our human nature to want to belong. It is our human nature that I don’t really know who “I” am until I know who “we” are. It is a human insecurity that we don’t know who “we” really are until there is a “them.” Us and them. It’s not just an old rock-n-roll song, it is our human condition. In the strangest equality of them all, everybody gets to be a “them.” In any way that anybody is different from whomever “we” are, then they get to be a “them” because they are not “us.”
Some point to the Bible to justify division. After all, did not Jesus say: “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on this earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” (Lk 12:51). Jesus expressed divine foreknowledge of the consequences of his mission on earth. Yes, family members would be against family members. But Jesus did not tell us to go out there and do the same. He did not excuse us from reconciling and making peace with one another. He did command us to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
At the time of Jesus, division was a long-practiced phenomenon. Sadducees versus Pharisees; Jews versus gentiles; the included versus the excluded. Jesus reached out to the outcast and the rejected. Jesus reached out to “them” and because of their faith, they became part of “us.”
The experts in this world may tell us that we need a “them” to be “us.” But the Holy Spirit elevates us out of these all-too-human categories so that we may be one in the Spirit. This happens at each and every Mass. In that mystical moment of grace, we are one body indeed, and we go out in the world to bring this unity, light and peace to our world.
Since that first original sin, when Adam and Eve were separated from God, we have been a divided people. It is nothing new. Perhaps what is new is that we have so many avenues of communication that we are bombarded with so many stories of division. What divided people long ago, and what divides people today, is not that we have differing beliefs and lives. What divides us is the deadly sin of wrath. Anger blinds us to a world of differences and justifies a world of hatred and violence.
There are serious issues over which we are divided. We can and must stand up and speak out for the sanctity and the protection of the unborn. We do this out of the conviction of our belief that God breathes the soul at conception. It is with great love that we are champions for life. We can and must stand up and speak out for the goodness and value of all God’s children, without exception. We do this out of the conviction of our belief that what God has created, we must not harm or destroy. It is with great love that we serve those most in need. Let us stand up and speak out for what we believe, period.
For we believe that no adjective in front of the words “human being” can undo what God has done. If God created us good and gifted, then what has a greater power than God to create us differently? If one answers, “sin!”, then one has not truly realized the power of the cross of Jesus Christ.
In this strange time of social distancing and covering our faces with masks, we are challenged to join the efforts for life, for justice, for unity in our Church, nation and world. Anyone can divide. But it takes a people of glad tidings and good news to work for the common good and thereby contribute to a more peaceful world. I would like to close with a reflection that still gives me a chill:
The Cold Within
By James Patrick KinneySix humans trapped in happenstance
In dark and bitter cold,
Each one possessed a stick of wood,
Or so the story’s told.
Their dying fire in need of logs,
The first woman held hers back,
For of the faces around the fire,
She noticed one was black.
The next man looking across the way
Saw not one of his church,
And couldn’t bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.
The third one sat in tattered clothes.
He gave his coat a hitch,
Why should his log be put to use,
To warm the idle rich?
The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store,
And how to keep what he had earned,
From the lazy, shiftless poor.
The black man’s face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from sight,
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.
The last man of this forlorn group
Did naught except for gain,
Giving only to those who gave,
Was how he played the game.
The logs held tight in death’s still hands,
Was proof of human sin,
They didn’t die from the cold without,
They died from the cold within.
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