That this website is called The Quiet Voice is a mild joke (or more) to most who know me. I live by words. I talk about everything almost all the time, and when I am not talking I am writing. In writing, I am way more serious, as the printed word reaches much deeper than chatter, but still, here I am, smacking down words often to things that defy words. This is not really an oxymoron, though, as at least words have identified for me an obstacle to my own wisdom, although this is done by words. And in the end, even the quiet man – who is usually not me – does need words. They anchor thoughts and allow them greater depth, even if they might also hinder wisdom at times. We need, most of us, both words and quiet reflection.
So it is that when I am doing things alone that require physical labor, be it cooking or fixing a fence or repeating scales on the guitar, I like to keep words rolling in the background. I do this with talk radio, as TV demands too much from the senses (vision) and is not nearly as portable. Talk radio, however, has become too painful to hear. It is not the side it takes that bothers me, which is usually to the right, although NPR has its left-ish say, but rather the frantic tone it has taken of late. As if we in America were dying of hunger, or smothering each other with plastic bag or hacking each other apart with machetes by the hundreds of thousands.
I have found new friends, however, in Christian radio stations, both of the evangelical and the Catholic variety. Their programming brings not only new meaning to scripture, which would not be of universal interest, but also news and testimonials to what has happened and is happening in the world on a very personal level. They have their own biases, of course, but they are not clouded by vitriol. They truly desire what is best for the world, as the experiences rendered to us by their members in faith attest to so graphically.
This morning, while trying to memorize a dozen or more Christmas songs on guitar, I heard two testimonials to history and faith that were particularly moving. Each involved an atrocity of astounding proportions.
Cambodia. If you ever have the chance to see the movie “The Killing Fields,” don’t – unless you have a very strong emotional stomach. It shows what the Marxist murderer Pol Pot did to his fellow Cambodians after the US left Vietnam in the 70’s. Many are aware that he killed 2 million Cambodians, a third of the population, to make way for his paradise on earth. Gratefully, he was so extreme that even the Marxist government of Vietnam could not handle him, and helped send him back to a hidden jungle retreat where he died ignominiously. Most, though - at least me - never thought of the scared and scarred people he left behind to live.
Enter our speaker. He was a child when he was able to fly off with the US military as Pol Pot was killing his way (often by suffocation with plastic bags) through the capital city of Phnom Penh, leaving his mother (and his dead father) behind. He was adopted by a Protestant couple in Minnesota, where he remained happy and safe until his upbringing called to him to evangelize. He still spoke Cambodian, and Cambodia was a non-Christian mess of wreckage and poverty, so off he went. He realized his mistake the moment he stepped off the plane onto the bleak tarmac and into the tropical heat. The memories came back and all he wanted to do was run back to Minnesota.
Those on the his team there – I believe they were Cambodian converts although I did not hear that on the show - quickly set out to help him find his birth mother, although he admitted to not being too keen on any of his past. They found her and left him with her as she spent hours telling him of her torture by the Pol Pot regime, showing him her many scars. This made him want to leave all the more, but this was minor compared to what was to come next. Back at the mission, people dropped off their starving small children by the score, until they could handle no more. So it was when a desperate mother came to him with a bundle of filthy rags. He knew what was in them, and told her they could not take the child. Then she unwrapped the bundle, showing a baby of two weeks so weak from hunger that he could not open his eyes. She prostrated herself before him and, crying, wrapped her arms around his legs and kissed his feet. Of course he could not refuse.
They tried to save the child but it was too late, which brought the missionary to real tears. Because they were “believers,” they were not allowed to bury the body in the Buddhist temple, and so had to plead for a tiny bit of land nearby to bury him. At the moment when he was to read a passage from the Bible over the grave, loudspeakers next to him blurted out a litany from the temple that blocked his attempt. He felt broken at that moment, but then gained the strength to continue as he realized that this was precisely what other missionaries had once faced world – wide. He then understood his mission, both of physical and spiritual compassion, and has continued there to this day.
Meanwhile, the brief news at the top of the hour told me that they continued to bicker over the votes in Broward County, Florida.
The next story was told by a priest with an African accent of his work in Rwanda. I did not hear if he had been there during the atrocities. Rwanda is populated primarily by two large tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis (or Watutsis for those who remember them from early sixties. I believe a dance was named after them), who have hated each other for generations. In the early 90’s, the Hutus killed off hundreds of thousands of their Tutsi neighbors with machetes and other common household instruments. The Tutsis then struck back, and in all, nearly one million people, almost all civilians including children and babies, were killed. The priest talked of one man whose neighbor was one of those who helped to slaughter his side. When asked how he could live beside him, the man said that they had to learn to live together. There was no other way except more killing, and that, he hoped, was finished.
Rwanda is the site of a very active Marian shrine, in which she appeared a decade before the slaughter. Now, Rwanda is one of the safest countries in Africa, and is growing a large tourist industry. The people have killed in astounding numbers but now appear to be done with it. After all, for many there seems to be no other way.
There is a subtlety in these stories that attracted me but remained elusive. Yes, it is clear that we are all capable of such things, as we can see from Nazi Germany to Serbia to Cambodia to Rwanda, and even to the halls of Montezuma (the Aztecs). But we glide, thinking that we are too far from that. This might seem like simple willed blindness or false complacency, which is something we all understand, but it is much more than that, and here is where we hit the hard part: in not realizing the depth of our potential depravity, we also do not realize our potential to reach the heavens as beacons of light. In living in the uneventful middle, we as a people forget the infinite height and depth of the universe and those of us in it. In living as we now do, we rarely grasp what we were born to grasp as Homo sapiens, literally, “the only species that thinks.”
I was helped in my understanding of this immeasurably by an exorcist just yesterday morning. As I sat to write, a message came unbidden from our church priest to me and to others with an hour-long video of another priest who is an exorcist, giving a sermon on his dealings with demons. Father Ripperger, the exorcist, was a friend of our local priest from their days in the seminary, and somehow the timing from one to the other to me – and perhaps to others – was supernaturally perfect. I have only listened to the first 6 plus minutes of the sermon so far but here is what he said in these short minutes (with some of my paraphrasing):
“Perfection comes through diabolical intervention, which becomes an instrument for our sanctification. This is true of the whole of spiritual life. Those who have only venial (mild) sins become complacent, but in the realm of the spiritual, as in most of life, one is either going up or going down. Demonic interference within us or in our lives forces us to fight, to become active, and so to become stronger.
“It is exactly where our weakness(es) is that the demon will strike. This is where we need extra strength - which we receive from our increased need, and therefore desire, of faith. This is meant to send us in the direction of greater perfection.”
This makes me think again of that poor evangelical in Cambodia whose weakness, understandably, was to forget the horrors of his past. Yet fate and his quiet willingness sent him exactly into the lion’s den. As he was plunged deeper into its horrors, he wished to run away, but his heart was caught by the tears of a mother with her dying child. As the megaphones blasted away during the solemnity of the burial, he sunk to such a depth of horror that the responding light was all the more brilliant. He had to go to the depths – to be tested by the worst demons of destruction and death and cruelty, even unto his mother – to realize the depth, or height, of grace within himself. This brought him to see, that is, what infinite good God had wrought in his creation through the contrast given by evil. If not, he would have remained unresolved in his wounds, hiding in the safe suburbs of Minneapolis while his past ground slowly away at his superficial happiness.
It is the only way, this way (as Christians say) of the Cross. Without our testing, we fall away never realizing our humanity; without our testing, faith is superficial and grace an afterthought. Without that tension, we remain flaccid, bored, and easy prey for the demons of profane mediocrity. No test is valid where we are guaranteed to pass. Life is not only a struggle in the jungle for physical survival, but also a spiritual struggle to rise above the jungle. It is only through this spiritual struggle that most of us can realize the wonder of our being, of our image in the likeness of God.