What the Pope Said About Charleston

News cycles being what they are, it seems that the Pope’s encyclical on the environment didn’t get the play it might have if there hadn’t been an eruption of hatred from the racist volcano last Wednesday night in Charleston. That’s how I think of it, an eruption of something that is active and insidious but that can go dormant – if we work at it. But it will take fresh imagination, a different vision of what it means to be human. Different subject, but the Pope seems to have cast such a vision . . . people don’t seem to like it much.

In fact really good people don’t seem to like it much, people for whom I have a great deal of respect. I’m not talking about the global warming deniers. I can’t wrap my head around the willful ignorance required to stand in that dark place. No, I’m talking about good people seeking productive answers to a persistent and perplexing set of problems. I thought David Brooks spoke well for them in his column Fracking and the Franciscans today. He spoke very well and the trouble is, it’s hard for a reasonable person to disagree with him.

What Mr. Brooks found “hardest to accept, though, is the moral premise implied throughout the encyclical: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on compassion, harmony and love, and that arrangements based on self-interest and competition are inherently destructive.” He was of course objecting to the Pope’s stand against the “cap and trade” programs that, at least up to now, seem to be quite effective in limiting carbon emissions. They, like the checks and balances of democracy embrace the human predilection for competition. He chides the Pope for missing “the obvious truth that the qualities that do harm can often, when carefully directed, do enormous good.” Like I said, it’s hard for a reasonable person to disagree.

But the key phrase in that sentence is, “when carefully directed,” and there’s the rub. Is humanity capable of “carefully directing” its self-interested, competitive nature? Nine people were shot and killed last Wednesday because the answer to that question is, “No.” Nine people were shot and killed because our self-interested, competitive and inevitably fearful vision of human society has been quite resistant to “careful direction.” The Pope is casting a different vision of human society, a vision for human society that is formed in what he calls “love.” That’s a tremendously misunderstood word. In the hands of a Pope there is more to it than the fleeting, hormone driven emotion we humans feel. No, love is the driving force, the creative impulse driving creation’s evolving story. (Granted, the Pope might not put it just that way.) Truth be told, it is the only vision that will bring about the creative wholeness we all so long for. But is it realistic?

I not only think it is possible for us to live into a vision of human society structured in love, I think it is inevitable. That said, I’d have to agree with Mr. Brooks; it’s not going to happen tomorrow. And that means we are indeed going to have to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” as Mr. Brooks quoted. But we make a serious error if we simply write off the Pope’s call to quickly. We make a mistake if we call it “surprisingly weak.” I get the need to be pragmatic to a point, but as we do so we are fools running against the tide of creation if we do not consistently examine, re-examine, and shift our world view so that it coheres more seamlessly with the One who interpenetrates creation, knitting all things together in perfect harmony.