City Of God 11

First, something from the letter to Hebrews, in Spanish with English translation: In English translation: They all lived by faith, and died without receiving the promises; rather, they could see them from afar, and went in search of their homeland. Had they been thinking of that homeland from where they had come, they would have been able to return there. Rather, they were longing for a better country, which is to say, the heavenly,. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, and he is preparing for them a city....Interesting words, Gentle Reader, and we are not going to guess exactly what they mean, but I do want to focus on one particular theme in this little passage: this is the theme of longing. Of yearning for something better, something good, pure, sacred, beautiful. But also the place that is our true home. In Spanish patria, or our homeland. We seem to be, all of us, a people in pilgrimage, and I use this term in the most general sense. I imagine that the evolutionary anthropologists would have a neat and tidy explanation for this one, as the evolutionary whatever-they-want-to-prove-that-God-doesn't-exist, have neat and tidy explanations for everything. I imagine that some of them would claim that this restlessness and longing for a homeland that erupts in our lives like a nagging itch is simply our ancestral longing for the Africa that our most remote ancestors came out of some one hundred thousand years ago. Fair enough, though I have never experienced even a smidgeon of a longing to visit Africa. Nothing against Africa, Gentle Reader, but they just are not on my bucket list. What are we really longing for? The writer of this letter to the Hebrews, some two thousand years ago, claims that this is the City of God. The New Jerusalem. And this isn't just the purview of Christians nor only persons of whichever faith that sustains them. There appears to be something universal to this longing, and those of us who dedicate ourselves to a life of faith, for us, this longing becomes particularly focussed, and we dedicate our lives to knowing this place, to refining our journey in that direction, and to making this City a living reality in our present lives and situations. We are often, it seems, in search of improvements, of ways of making ourselves and our environment better. But it's all so much stumbling in the dark as we are tempted, delighted, tormented and mocked by this City of God that dangles like a mirage on our horizons. I am thinking of some of the really pathetic efforts in the twentieth century for making this real, particularly in communist experiments in Russia, China, North Korea and Cuba. Say what you want, but the architects of these revolutions, some of them anyway, really wanted to live out a vision of a kind of heaven on earth. Every one of those experiments has descended into a farce of oppression and brutality. I read some of the memoirs of Che Guevara, in Spanish, and I had to put the book down and leave it in one of my less accessible bookshelves, for the simple reason that I found what he was saying and the way he was saying it, to be particularly depressing. In his writings about revolution and the new man (sic) he repeated himself over and over again about the importance of purging the revolution, of taking out and killing anyone who didn't conform. So, this is how we build the City? We exile or murder whomsoever doesn't fit or conform to our vision? And this thinking often prevails in many religious undertakings. Perhaps not necessarily to kill everyone, but certainly to punish or drive into exile those who don't have the "right stuff." This happened to me. It is a horrendous and traumatizing experience, to be so brutally informed that you are not one of the chosen. You are defective. It is also sobering to think that really, there probably isn't anyone on the surface of the earth who would qualify because we are all flawed, damaged and imperfect. Every single on of us. Then how can this City be built. But I've already said, it can't be built. It can only be lived, however imperfectly in our feeble efforts to stumble forward. If God is love, then his City will be a City of Love, and for us to lay even the first brick in its wall, we must ourselves be transformed into a people of love, and love is made perfect in our flaws and human weakness.