Photo by Reuters / Damir Sagolj
We gratefully remember you, Jesus,
because your life teaches us how to live as your disciples.
No matter how much we want to look away from this excruciatingly painful experience you were sentenced to undergo, Jesus, we cannot. Its demonic overtones have riddled history with unnecessary anguish superimposed on the ordinary, everyday trials of persons caught in the crosshairs of enmity and cruelty.
The cross looms starkly over a world plunged in terrorism. It has taken on proportions undreamed of until March of 2003, when the United States preemptively and savagely attacked Iraq with the deceptive claim that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Nonviolence is a strategy whose effectiveness dawned on Gandhi’s India over 70 years ago. Called the Mahatma (Great-Souled), Gandhi asserted humanity’s unity under one God by espousing Christian, Muslim, and Hindu scriptures. Our conflicted, prejudiced world needs to learn a strategy of nonviolence as it stretches to implement social justice as a world-wide reality to save itself from annihilation.
We must love our enemy, not because we fear war but because God loves them. - Dorothy Day
