31 January
This week our minister, Marius Louw, invited John-Harmen Valk to write a reflection:
I write this message from Canada in the aftermath of Nicolas Maduro’s capture and amidst the Trump administration’s continued threats to annex Greenland. The country in which I grew up, which in my lifetime has generally enjoyed peace and stability, is on edge. Might we be next?
Nietzsche famously critiqued religion—Christianity most certainly—in two respects. One, for its perceived inability to face reality and to bear it. “And they blink”, he said. Blinking, that automatic twitch in the face of a loud clap, the unexpected, the frightful, and, for Nietzsche, the vain rearguard attempt for consolation and comfort. Two, for its response, resulting from that inability to face reality and to bear it, which he perceived as driven by resentment and bitterness rather than affirmative joy. Nietzsche would, presumably, have sensed resentment coursing through such praise as this: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea”.
The Church has traditionally thought differently. In this season of Epiphany, we are presented with imagery of bright light and scales falling from eyes. Reality becomes manifest, its possibilities become visible. Will we face reality for what it truly is? Dare we bear it?
On January 19th it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States. King’s nonviolence was grounded in his belief that the universe bends towards justice, and that one must doggedly hold faith in the divine goodness in the other that might serve as the seed for transformation. King faced the world with eyes wide open, a stance for which he paid the price of his life. But the reality he faced and bore was markedly distinct from reality as proclaimed by Nietzsche—the eternal return of the will to power.
In my currently unsettled state, I fear that the world may be moving in a direction such that faith will become increasingly costly, at least for those of us in the West whose faith has sat well with our bourgeois comforts. It may require of us an unavoidable stand. It might be wise, then, to revisit examples like King. And, in returning, to undergo a turn (metanoia) that enables us to face reality as it most fundamentally is. To be surprised by a joy that empowers us to bear it, such that love (caritas, agape) becomes the substance enfolding us together in unity rather than the pursuit of power and wealth an absence tearing us apart.
John-Harmen