Oswald B. Firth OMI

(Ed. note: The writer is the director of the Centre for Society and Religion in Sri Lanka and the editor of Social Justice, the monthly journal published by the Centre.)

If you wish to encounter those that are courageous, it is propitious to meet those who are ready to forgive. If you wish to encounter the brave, search for those who eschew hatred and promote love instead of hatred. So will your observations become meaningful (Bhagawat Geetha). The brave and the courageous are rare specimens in a society where the worst of vices, viz violence, revenge, deception and fraud, masquerade as virtues viewed as necessary for survival. A cynic described the current heavily charged atmosphere in the country rather succinctly: "Instead of the politician saving the country, we may have to save the country from the politician!"

This is particularly true in the field of politics where the Hobbesian principle of the "survival of the fittest" has become the impetuous and ubiquitous juggernaught to which those seeking power at the forthcoming Provincial Council elections [in Sri Lanka] need to pay homage. Regardless of indictment and censure on errant candidates pledged by party leaders, the insatiable craving to "gain power or remain in power" has thrown all democratic decencies to the wind. While the voters are perplexed as to who is most deserving of their votes, candidates of the two major parties have already figured out for themselves ways of winning this election. However, in an era when violence has assumed the dimensions of "religious cult", saner counsel must prevail. The time is perhaps propitious for us to reiterate the words of the saint and sage Helder Camera: "My personal calling is to be a devotee of peace. Instead of being involved in the death of another, I prefer to be put to death a thousand times for a worthy cause. Choosing non-violence means to place one’s firm trust in truth, justice and love. I prefer to believe in the efficaciousness of truth and justice than in the weapons of hatred and war which are, in the long run, self-destructive."

An incident in the life of Gauthama Buddha is of immense significance to further drive home the fact that attempts to win one’s way through violence can only leave gaping wounds and indelible scars that take centuries to heal, if they ever heal at all. Addressing the Sakya and Koliya tribes that had their battle lines drawn in a bid to capture the waters of the Rohini river. "For whose gain will you engage your weapons? You are all agile warriors and many of you are bound to die in this war…you will be left with a generation of handicaps…and those who will reap the destructive results of this war will be those who come after you. There can be no victory gained by a war."

This has undoubtedly been the case with the numerous political and military revolutions that have dotted the course of human history, often accompanied by bloody massacres and the irretrievable destruction of property. The more recent military escapades in Kosovo and in our own land to destroy terrorism and usher in an ear of peace which people longed for have all too often resulted in disappointment and disillusionment. There has always been something wanting in such Machiavellian enterprises. Let the sagacious words of the Buddha serve as a challenge to all our political leaders: "There is no victory that can be gained by war." In the end, all attempts to achieve peace through military means are but perfunctory pronouncements of sycophants. They find no place in the inspirational words of wisdom of our religious sages.

The Art of the Impossible

For all intents and purposes religion and politics may appear to be strange bedfellows, but they should never be perceived as mutually exclusive. Whenever politics deteriorated into a turbulent state of lawlessness, then religion came to its rescue and reinstated it with those values that guaranteed humanitarian concern.

I have always been convinced that there is a religious dimension to politics as seen in one of the most sublime events in Christian history, the Resurrection of Jesus. This is an event of historic importance that Christians celebrate during this season of the year. As the contemporary German Theologian J.B. Metz states, the traditional Christian view of the Jesus event, which includes the resurrection, was to a large extent apolitical. Christian theology, before the 1960s, operated with the categories of the intimate, the private, the apolitical sphere. Religion and politics were quite different things and the Church’s mission was about the former. For the Church, the really important matters were spiritual, not political. Much water has passed under the bridge since then, and one could convincingly say that the Christians of today have crossed the Rubicon.

We need, however, to make a clear distinction here. Politics as practised by the secular powers has generally been referred to as the art of the humanly possible. It is the politics of compromise. On the contrary, politics when inspired by the values inherent in the religions, is the art of the "impossible dream". The heart of the humanly impossible made possible by the power of the sacred, or some energising religious force that pervades every historical event. This is why for the disciples of Jesus, fired with the power of the resurrection, no political force was insurmountable, no hurdle was too high to clear, and no opposition was too difficult to counter.

The struggle for equality and justice, the forerunners of peace and freedom, encapsulated in the resurrection, has its roots in the Exodus event of the Old Testament. The Exodus, says Harvey Cox, author of the widely read The Secular City, serves as the paradigm of all freedom struggles, achieved as a result of confrontation between religious values and State imperatives. That struggle was by all standards political. This saga, of immense significance to Christians and to many non-Christians as well, clearly demonstrates that serving a political leader is incompatible with the worship of the Sacred. Serving Pharaoh, Egypt’s protégé of the sun-god ­ intimates the Exodus - was none other than servitude to a political leader.

The loss of one’s dignity and the submission to slavery where a person demeans himself are the inevitable result of the political figure assuming and playing the role of god. Hence, the battle cry of the people coming through Moses, "Let my people go", was tantamount to a direct act of insurrection against a monarch, the political leader of Egypt. Since the Exodus ­ an insignificant people’s march to freedom ­ no royal house or political power has ever felt secure on its throne. The bitter lesson political powers have learnt from the Exodus event is that no political power can ever stand in the way of a people’s march to peace and freedom.

The Struggle to be Free

The march for peace and freedom often tends to become confused if people are not clear of the issues that galvanise their energies and motivate their march. In this instance, the issues involved are none other than the secularised world of injustice and corruption in which we live today ­ a world of sex and violence, nuclear bombs and sophisticated military armament, of ethnic conflicts and morals without values. This is the world of millions of refugees, where 85 per cent of the globe’s population are left with only 21 per cent of the world’s wealth, where 1.3 billion live on less than one US

dollar a day, where 25 children die of starvation every minute and 13 million every year, where the poor countries are reeking under the burden of debt for which cancellation and compensation for resources exploited are been demanded, where four US dollars are extracted for every dollar given on loan, a world where women hold up the sky with their earnings while they continue to be humiliated and dominated.

To say that Jesus (or for that matter any other religious leader) has no business with the affairs of this world is a contradiction in terms and the direct opposite of what is said in so many pages of the Bible (Isaiah 1:15-17; 3:14-15). It is into this world that Jesus comes with his resurrection, with his witness of love and self-sacrifice, with hope that people could rise up one day from the dungeon of slavery into which they have been forced to live for years. It is to them that the resurrection brings the spirit of peace and freedom.

The modern-day prophet, Martin Luther King, put through this message quite bluntly in his Jesus and the Politics of His Day, when he said: "Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial." To those who attempt to keep their "hands clean" and try to neglect the political dimension and concentrate only on what they call "spiritual" things, Oscar Romero, the murdered Archbishop of San Salvador has this to say, "It is practically illegal to be an authentic

Christian in our environment…precisely because the world which surrounds us is founded on an established disorder before which the mere proclamation of the Gospel is subversive."

The people of the world will enjoy true peace and freedom only when "the earth’s goods are divided fairly and the right of everyone to a just share comes first. Even the right of private property, and the right to free enterprise, must yield to justice" clamoured Pope Paul VI in his ground-breaking encyclical Populorum Progressio (The Development of Peoples). South American governments found this stuff too radical and prohibited its dissemination. But this is the central message relevant to the Third World and seminal to our times.