Welcome all! The meditation I am offering is drawn from my own Christian heritage but I hope it can be of use to everyone, believer or non believer, Christian or non-Christian.
My inspiration today comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a famous German Lutheran pastor who fought Nazism and the Nazi control of the German churches. He was arrested with the whole resistance network of Admiral Canaris and spent about 2 years in prison before being eventually executed in 1945. Bonheoffer was a theologian and he always remained strongly connected to the German Evangelical theological tradition. However because of the tough period of Nazism, Jewish holocaust and war, because of the attitude of the German churches in that period, he was brought to interesting conclusions about what tomorrow’s church would be like: he produced the theory of irreligious Christianity, a reality which he claimed he himself was only starting to understand.
I will now read an excerpt from a letter Bonhoeffer wrote from prison, Thoughts on the Baptism of D.W.R. (in Prisoner for God, Letters and Papers from Prison).
“But we too are being driven back to first principles. Atonement and redemption, regeneration, the Holy Ghost, the love of our enemies, the cross and resurrection, life in Christ and Christian discipleship all these things have become so problematic and so remote that we hardly dare any more to speak of them. In the traditional rite and ceremonies we are groping after something new and revolutionary without being able to understand it or utter it yet. That is our own fault. During these years the Church has fought for self-preservation as though it were an end in itself, and it has thereby lost its chance to speak a word of reconciliation to mankind and the world at large. So our traditional language must perforce become powerless and remain silent, and our Christianity today will be confined to praying for and doing right by our fellow men. Christian thinking, speaking and organization must be reborn out of this praying and this action.”
I have three reasons to be amazed by Bonhoeffer which I want to share with you.
First, it is amazing that Frank Buchman, the pragmatist, started to experiment what Bonhoeffer predicted.
By launching Moral Re-Armament in 1938, Buchman put his foot in the door of irreligious Christianity. For Buchman, who may still have been moved by his missionary training, it was essential to put the core of the Christian experience at the disposal of everyone, no matter their beliefs, to put people in touch with God and let Him do the rest.
Then it is amazing also that Frank Buchman’s formula is a philosophy which fits other religions. We are privileged to have had as successive global leaders of our network since in 1999, a Catholic, a Muslim and a Hindu. It also associates non-believers and most of the former Communists who joined IofC in the past did not become mystic saints all of the sudden although it must be said that some reconnected with faith.
No less amazing is the similarity between the Christian theologian Bonhoeffer and Frank Buchman; they lead us on the same path, the path outlined by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount – and these particular texts from the Bible remain a valid first step for personal and global change.
Bonhoeffer always called for a life of discipleship: what Jesus demanded of his followers we are supposed to really do – now. In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer’s most widely read book, the keyword is obedience, concrete, total and joyous obedience, putting one’s feet in the footstep of Jesus, becoming a real disciple of Jesus. In concrete terms, the life of discipleship advocated by Bonhoeffer is exactly the one advocated by Buchman. Frank Buchman offers the essentials of the Sermon on the Mount in the form of the famous Four Absolutes or Four Standards which we all know: absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love. As we know, this abstract of the Sermon on the Mount was the work of missionary Speer and theologian Wright. They introduced the word absolute to underline the utmost importance of concretely aligning our life with the demands of Jesus.
Both Bonhoeffer and Buchman left us with a message of great significance for our largely irreligious society. Bonhoeffer’s legacy is in his life and books, which I recommend you to read. Buchman’s legacy is among other things embodied in the modest, persistent and now developing again network called Initiatives of Change which caters to the essential need for a meeting space open to the whole world, allowing humankind to build trust beyond race, nation or religion, a prerequisite to tackling the daunting challenges of human survival in the 21st and 22nd centuries.
Since Bonhoeffer and Buchman based their moral vision on the same texts, it is worthwhile to revisit them and wonder what they had in mind since they often read and meditated on these texts.
So what does the Sermon on the Mount say? They are like the young people who wrote on the wall of the old Sorbonne University: “Be realistic, ask for the impossible”. These texts demand a lot, yet for each demand that you may deem impossible, it is a fact that ordinary people have accomplished extraordinary feats because they have taken these demands seriously. You know, something crazy like dedicating your whole life to abolishing human slavery and trade, or like saving five thousands Jews right in the face of the Nazis…
In the Sermon on the Mount, we are called to many more imperatives than IofC’s four absolutes. To start with, in the section which is called the Beatitudes:
- Kindness: Blessed are the meek (gentle, kind), for they will inherit the earth.
- Purity of intentions: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
- Peacemaking: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
- Justice seeking, which is a very important imperative since it is mentioned twice: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled; blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
- Courage: Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Further down in the text we are asked the following:
- Absolute respect: insult is equated with murder
- Imperative of reconciliation: reconciliation comes before worship (if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.)
- Absolute sexual purity since looking at someone with desire amounts to adultery.
- Absolute honesty: simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' be 'No'.
- Non-violence and generosity: if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
- Absolute discretion: in giving, fasting or prayer be discrete, do not show off.
- Absolute love: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Transcribed in modern language: if you love those who love you, what reward do you expect? Are not even the maffiosi doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Does not anyone do that?
I suggest we think about this ultimate imperative, the most radical of all. We too rarely do that, even those of us from within IofC, probably because we tend to start always in the same order and that are then exhausted by the first three absolutes:
- Do I love my enemies?
- Who do I despise?
- Who am I totally indifferent to?
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