Dear Father Schwarz,

It's three hours after I came home from church, and I am still shaken. I couldn't help crying all the way home. Embarrassing. It was like something cried through me and I couldn't stop it.  After the homily I
had been thinking about the inner change, the growing-up process, the transformation/metanoia you discussed, imagining a world when enough people everywhere would have given up their primitive God image of a wrathful, narrow-minded tribal warlord  for the image of the Universal God of Love. 

I imagined what would happen if people all over the world were to live by the principle that God is Love and that loving oneself, loving one's neighbor, and loving God are ultimately one and the same. After all,
each one of us is someone else's neighbor, and the law of love which Jesus teaches is a live circle of caring, not a dead end street. If I love myself, and out of my fullness love others, and in love of self and
other love God, and if those persons love themselves, and out of that fullness love me and others, and through that double love come nearer to God, and if more and more people live this kind of life of reciprocal respect and caring, then the human community will gradually be transformed into an active web of love connecting us with each other and God. In that kind of environment, distrust, suspicion, intolerance, self-righteousness, fear, hatred, and cynicism would become less and less attractive. The more we allow love to fill our lives, the more fully we feel and think and know and speak in and through love, the less we are tempted to consider ourselves the sole possessors of THE TRUTH, to judge and condemn others, to fear the strange and different, to envy the successful, to wish divine retribution upon those who have harmed us, to counter violence with violence.  I thought of Lady Liberty with that wonderful invitation to the "huddled masses" of the world; I remembered how I wept with joy when I first saw her distant shape from the deck of the ship which was carrying me to the "promised land" almost
exactly 28 years ago.

The Eucharist was dry and stuck to the roof of my mouth. As saliva began to soften it I thought what a wonderful analogy this was. Jesus will stick in our craw, become a stumbling block unless we open ourselves fully to him, unless we allow ourselves to be softened, transformed by His Presence. It was my "water" which penetrated the wafer, but in reality, it was His Love which was transforming my very being.

Suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by, of all things, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- apocalyptic images of grapes of wrath and a terrible sword and flashing lighting and marching boots just like the Nazi armies of my childhood.  Exactly the kinds of images that have inspired crusades and witch hunts and wars, holy or otherwise, for centuries. I had never heard this "hymn" except for some old movie on T.V.; it hadn't occurred to me that people would actually sing those words anywhere except in a right-wing tent revival. The slaughter of the Civil War was terrible enough without having one side (the victor, one presumes) identifying with "The Truth."  In the civic sphere we seem unable to stop contaminating the celebration of the nation's birthday with militaristic imagery, to stop confusing patriotism with the glorification of war. But in church?

Don't get me wrong. I am not a complete pacifist. I believe that there are times when we must stand up for human rights, that we must be prepared to fight for our ideals, that the violent often understand
nothing except the language of violence. But we should never forget that violence breeds violence, and that the greatest military victory should not be a cause of celebration because it was inevitably purchased at the price of human lives, both the lives of those killed and those made into killers by the insanity of war. Justifiable military action is never more than the lesser of two evils. The hymns we share can be very powerful in affecting and transforming our ways of thinking and feeling. Why not chose those which tell of loving God and neighbor?

Peace,

Ingrid

25 September 2001