Today is International Human Rights Day, a day not exactly celebrated with gusto by most folks in the US. Sad, this year especially that the Senate failed to ratify the treaty on disability rights--the treaties modeled on our own Americans with Disabilities Act. In other words, men of the Senate (and I believe only men voted against it), we failed to ratify something that would have required us to do absolutely nothing different. Why? Because, according to some, it would "interfere with parents' rights to home school their children". Why? Because it means "surrendering our sovereignty". Why? Because it makes sense.
The first time I travelled to another country was in 1978, when I went to Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. We were in Mexico City on the 10th of December, and witnessed a demonstration of some very brave people calling for human rights abuses to stop. That struggle goes on, as it does in so many places, and I just wish that my dear nation would be a leader in that--here as in other places.
Today is also the anniversary of the death Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, writer and one of the most acute observers of our time (even though he died in 1968). Trappists live in silence most of the time, but Merton wrote some of the most insightful essays (and poems) about peace, justice and wounds of the modern world. Think about this quote from him:
“In our age everything has to be a ‘problem.’ Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.
Kind of sounds like us today, doesn't it? So much anxiety that we cling to our positions and refuse to even talk with "the other". Or we glum onto whatever distraction that will divert us for awhile. Merton called people to just sit in silence for awhile, and not worry about the contradictions of life, but just be. He pointed out to me a bunch of times that contradictions, let alone paradoxes, will not kill us.
Merton has a great essay called, "The Time of the End is the Time of No Room at the Inn." (I'm pretty sure it's in his book "Raids on the Unspeakable". Rather than anticipating some kind of cataclysmic apocalypse (and unfortunately, some of my Christian brothers and sisters seem to long for the violence to begin), he helps us see that there are always forces--both inside and outside us--that want to stop the child of love, the child of peace, the child of justice and reconciliation from being born in us.
So as we celebrate the birth of this child (and remember to see "La Natividad": www.hobt.org), I hope that we can let ourselves slough off some of our anxiety, and just sit there. I have to discipline myself to stop doing stuff and just be for awhile, but this time of dark, of cold (at least in Minnesota), of waiting is a good time to try.
Be justice. Be beauty. Be silence.
Patrick
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