The Good Life Has Turned to Ashes in our Mouths

Let's get ready for Ash Wednesday.  This Ash Wednesday, let's engage in METANOIA, a change in one's way of thinking, in personal and societal change.

“Alinsky may not have been a theoretician, but his view of what was ailing post-war America influenced generations of community organizers.  When an interviewer asked him if he agreed with Nixon that there was a conservative “silent majority” that disdained everything about the sixties, he dismissed the idea, but said the country was in a state of terrible disruption and likely to move either toward a “native American fascism” or toward radical social change.

Right now they’re frozen, festering in apathy, leading what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.”  They’re oppressed by taxation and inflation, poisoned by pollution, terrorized by urban crime, frightened by the new youth culture, baffled by the computerized world around them.  They’ve worked all their lives to get their own little house in the suburbs, their, color TV, their two cars, and now their good life seems to have turned to ashes in their mouths.  Their personal lives are generally unfulfilling their jobs unsatisfying, they’ve succumbed to tranquilizers and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in long term endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces.  They’re losing their kids and they’re losing their dreams.  They’re alienated, depersonalized, without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they feel rejected and hopeless… All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social chaos (from an interview with Saul Alinsky in Playboy, March 1972).  [Quoted in Remnick, 2010, p.127-128]"

Bishop Seitz's Prophetic Pastoral Letter: "Night will Be No More"

Faith calls us to experience and analyze our world from the perspective of Christ’s Kingdom, a social order of peace and prosperity, joy and justice, hope and healing, faith and freedom, life and love. Anything in our hearts and minds, in our social systems, in our cultural ways of being, that counters the values and processes of God’s Reign must be prayerfully, and often politically, challenged and changed.

Bishop Mark Seitz, of El Paso TX, does exactly that in his pastoral letter “Night Will Be No More.”  He wrote in response to the racist massacre at the Wal Mart in El Paso last August.  Here are some quotes.  The link to the full document comes after these opening paragraphs from the letter

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1.  On August 3rd, 2019, El Paso was the scene of a massacre or matanza that left 22 dead, injured dozens and traumatized a binational community. Hate visited our community and Latino blood was spilled in sacrifice to the false god of white supremacy.

4.  After prayer and speaking with the People of God in the Church of El Paso, I have decided to write this letter on the theme of racism and white supremacy to reflect together on the evil that robbed us of 22 lives. God can only be calling our community to greater fidelity. Together we are called to discern the new paths of justice and mercy required of us and to rediscover our reasons for hope (cf. 1 Peter 3, 5).

5. This letter comes shortly after the recent pastoral letter against racism by the bishops in the United States, Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love, which I recommend to our priests and community. My brothers in the episcopate have also published penetrating reflections on the intersection of race and violence, especially Bishop Edward Braxton.1 This letter is an attempt to complement those efforts and to reflect on these issues from the perspective of the border.

9. How do we begin to understand the El Paso matanza? How should we think about racism and white supremacy? 

10. The never-ending mass shootings leave us feeling dazed, wounded, fearful and helpless. Causes and solutions seem evasive and our nation’s political life is broken. The Catholic Church in the United States supports the ban on assault weapons that lawmakers senselessly let expire in 2004 and our Church continues to advocate for reasonable regulations on firearms that Congress still won’t pass. The constant pressures on families and the embarrassing lack of access to mental healthcare in this country surely also play a role.

11. But the mystery of evil motivating attacks like the El Paso matanza goes deeper than these. It is something more complex than laws and policies alone can fix. What else explains the perversity of attacks on African Americans, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and other communities? 

12. This mystery of evil also includes the base belief that some of us are more important, deserving and worthy than others. It includes the ugly conviction that this country and its history and opportunities and resources as well as our economic and political life belong more properly to ‘white’ people than to people of color. This is a perverse way of thinking that divides people based on heritage and tone of skin into ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’, paving the way to dehumanization.

In other words, racism. 

13. Racism can make a home in our hearts, distort our imagination and will, and express itself in individual actions of hatred and discrimination. Racism is one’s failure to give others the respect they are due on account of being created in the image and likeness of God. And it is more than that. 

14. If we are honest, racism is really about advancing, shoring up, and failing to oppose a system of white privilege and advantage based on skin color. When this system begins to shape our public choices, structure our common life together and becomes a tool of class, this is rightly called institutionalized racism. Action to build this system of hate and inaction to oppose its dismantling are what we rightly call white supremacy. This is the evil one and the ‘father of lies’ (John 8, 44) incarnate in our everyday choices and lifestyles, and our laws and institutions.

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*  What moves in me as I sit with God and contemplate the sin of racism, and racist policies and structures?

*  How is God calling me/us to be anti-racist?  How do I/we hear the call to conversion?

https://www.hopeborder.org/nightwillbenomore 
Read the whole thing. Enough Said!