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<\/p>\nOnce many years ago, a couple I was close friends with was having marital problems. For the first (and only) time in my life, I found myself frequently playing the role of telephone confessor and therapist for each of them\u2014I\u2019m quite sure that neither was aware that I was doing this with the other.\u00a0The phone calls became so frequent that one evening as I talked to the male in the relationship, the woman beeped in on call waiting. Toward the end of their relationship, she complained to me one evening that \u201cThere is no problem so great that he can\u2019t ignore it!\u201d These informal therapy sessions were unsuccessful; the couple soon divorced, one of them remarried, and both seem to have spent the past twenty-five years far happier than they were when together. Maybe that means my input was successful after all.<\/p>\n
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My friend\u2019s complaint about her husband was, unfortunately, all too recognizable as a typical human reaction to information or truths that we don\u2019t want to hear.\u00a0In the Gospel of John, Jesus is reported as having said \u201cYou will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.\u201d I don\u2019t think so. I think the real situation is more like what one of my students wrote in a recent intellectual notebook entry: \u201cThe truth doesn\u2019t set a person free, but it does complicate their life.\u201d So what is one to do when the truth about something is so obvious that it cannot be ignored\u2014and you don\u2019t want to deal with it?<\/p>\n
Along with a colleague from the history department, I am currently teaching a colloquium entitled\u00a0\u201c\u2018Love Never Fails\u2019: Grace, Freedom, and Truth during the Nazi Era.\u201d After several weeks of immersion in the world of the Nazis, including\u00a0Mein Kampf<\/em>\u00a0and Albert Speer\u2019s\u00a0Inside the Third Reich<\/em>, I could tell that everyone was feeling the same way I was\u2014worn out by exposure to human pain, suffering, and evil and how these are facilitated by deliberate ignorance and evasion created through the choices we make.<\/p>\n Then this past week, we returned from Spring Break to a different sort of story altogether: Philip Hallie\u2019s\u00a0Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed.<\/em>\u00a0 Hallie\u2019s book is the little-known story of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small and insignificant Protestant village in south-central France that, during the later years of World War II, \u201cbecame the safest place for Jews in Europe.\u201d\u00a0Between 1940 and 1943, the villagers of Le Chambon, with full knowledge of the Vichy police and the Gestapo, and at great risk to their own safety and lives, organized a complex network of protection through which they hid and saved the lives of at least five thousand Jewish refugees\u2014most of them women and children.<\/p>\n As a woman whose three children\u2019s lives were saved by these villagers told Philip Hallie decades later, \u201cThe Holocaust was storm, lightning, thunder, wind, rain\u2014and Le Chambon was the rainbow.\u201d Hallie comments that\u00a0\u201cThe rainbow reminds God and man that life is precious to God, that God offers not only sentimental hope, but a promise that living will have the last word, not killing. The rainbow means realistic hope,\u201d a hope that was incarnated in Le Chambon.<\/p>\n It is a beautiful story, one that is virtually unknown in comparison to more familiar and dramatic narratives. Everyone who cares about the human spirit should read it\u2014I dare you to make it through with dry eyes. My first question to the thirty-some students in the colloquium at our first class on this text yesterday was simply \u201cHow did this happen?\u201d There is nothing special about Le Chambon\u2014there are hundreds of similar rural villages throughout Europe. There were dozens of them within a short train ride of Le Chambon. Yet none of them did anything like what the Chambonnais did; indeed, many of them collaborated with the Vichy police and turned their Jewish neighbors and Jewish refugees in to the authorities as the occupying Nazis demanded. What made Le Chambon different?\u00a0How did goodness happen here?<\/p>\n According to the Chambonnais in virtually every interview Hallie conducted, there was nothing special about what they did at all. After being described as a \u201chero\u201d or simply as \u201cgood,\u201d Magda Trocm\u00e9, wife of the village\u2019s dynamic pastor Andr\u00e9 Trocm\u00e9, asked in annoyance<\/p>\n How can you call us \u2018good\u2019? We were doing what had to be done. Who else could help them? And what has all this to do with goodness? Things had to be done, that\u2019s all, and we happened to be there to do them. You must understand that it was the most natural thing in the world to help these people. Who else would have taken care of them if we didn\u2019t? They needed our help and they needed it\u00a0then<\/em>. Anyone else would have done the same thing.<\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n \u201cIs she right?\u201d I asked my students? \u201cHow many think anyone else would have done the same?\u201d Not a hand was raised\u2014certainly not mine. So the question remains. How did this happen? How did goodness happen here?\u00a0According to Hallie, the most important reason that goodness happened in Le Chambon is so simple and basic that it cannot be overlooked. <\/span><\/p>\n The Chambonnais believed one fundamental thing concerning human beings\u2014that all human life, whether French, Jewish, or Nazi, is fundamentally precious and must not be harmed. Period. Many people, then and now, profess to believe this; the Chambonnais not only believed it\u2014they acted on it. Consistently and regularly. Without questioning or equivocation. For such people, Hallie describes, \u201cThe good of others becomes a thing naturally and necessarily attended to, like any of the physical conditions of our existence. For certain people, helping the distressed is as natural and necessary as feeding themselves.\u201d\u00a0The villagers of Le Chambon were such people.<\/p>\n The source of this simple but powerful lived commitment depended on the person. For Pastor Andr\u00e9 Trocm\u00e9, on the one hand, his commitment to nonviolence and active goodness was rooted in his commitment to emulate Jesus and to take seriously, in a remarkably straightforward way, the message of the gospel. During his theological training, for instance, he was taught by his professors that the\u00a0Sermon on the Mount is intended to be read as an allegory or as a standard set impossibly high so we can understand our sins and failures more clearly. Andr\u00e9 had no patience for such evasions. In a book written shortly after the end of the war, he asks<\/p>\n If Jesus really walked upon this earth, why do we keep treating him as if he were a disembodied, impossibly idealistic ethical theory? If he was a real man, then the Sermon on the Mount was made for people on this earth; and if he existed, God has shown us in flesh and blood what goodness is for flesh-and-blood people.<\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n Andr\u00e9\u2019s wife Magda, on the other hand, had no patience for doctrine, religion, or any esoteric debate that might take her attention away from what was right in front of her.\u00a0She did not believe that something was evil because it violated God\u2019s commands. She believed that something is evil simply because it hurts people. A person\u2019s need was the basis of her moral vision, not any sentimental love she might or might not feel for the person in need, and certainly not any calling to moral or religious excellence. There is a need and I will address it was her motivating energy. Simple as that.<\/p>\n I have taught this book a number of times; as I worked through the story with my students last week, I realized with a new depth just how disturbing and shocking the story of Le Chambon is. \u201cThese people make me uncomfortable,\u201d I told the students. \u201cThey let me know just how wide a gap there is between what I say I believe and what I actually do.\u201d When the truth of what I profess is laid out in front of me in a way that I cannot ignore, I want to look away. I shift into philosopher mode\u2014\u201cThis is idealistic, this won\u2019t work in real life, real human beings won\u2019t treat each other this way,\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n My students would have been very happy to be told all of this, because they were just as uncomfortable with the Chambonnais as I was and am.\u00a0But goodness did happen there in the midst of some of the worst evil humans have ever manufactured. Real people created goodness in the midst of evil by actually taking what they believed seriously enough to do it. The best I can do is to make Hallie\u2019s closing words in\u00a0Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed<\/em>\u00a0my own and invite my students to come along.<\/p>\n I, who share Trocme\u2019s and the Chambonnais\u2019 beliefs in the \u00a0preciousness of human life, may never have the moral strength to be much like the Chambonnais or like\u00a0<\/strong><\/b>Trocm\u00e9; but I know I want to have the power to be. I know that I want to have a door in the depths of my being, a door that is not locked against the faces of all other human beings. I know that I want to be able to say, from the depths, \u201cNaturally, come in, and come in.\u201d<\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once many years ago, a couple I was close friends with was having marital problems. For the first (and only) time in my life, I found myself frequently playing the role of telephone confessor and therapist for each of them\u2014I\u2019m quite sure that neither was aware that I was doing this with the other.\u00a0The phone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":15961,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,11,14,21,30,35,40,45,48,57,61,75,91,101],"tags":[169,221,242,289,326,382,394,469],"class_list":["post-15922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belief","category-bible","category-books","category-christianity","category-ethics","category-faith","category-god","category-history","category-human-nature","category-jesus","category-literature","category-politics","category-stories","category-truth","tag-christianity","tag-faith","tag-god","tag-jesus","tag-literature","tag-phillip-hallie","tag-providence-college","tag-theology"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2019\/03\/LIBBS-198x300.jpg\")
The subtitle of Hallie\u2019s remarkable book is \u201cThe Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There.\u201d It is, in many ways, more challenging and disturbing than being immersed in the depths of human depravity.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2019\/03\/Le-Chambon-300x168.jpg\")
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