The hope is of course that this won’t feed the cycle, but it probably will.
This is the cycle. I know it well.
It only ends when we stop and decide to love, to give, to be a living sacrifice.
This most reminds me of the kind of fight between a divorced couple who can’t let each other go. The world watches in painful fascination until the fight just starts to look insane.
The Cross
I think it is the cross where the cycle ends. Jesus hangs wearing the wounds of his enemies, spittle of mockers surrounded by the jeers of those who called him evil. He saves others by not saving himself.
Becoming a Person
The moment we become a person is the moment we wake up to our misery regardless of a million causes and excuses. We own our sin. We know it is ours regardless of the failures and responsibilities of others.
Then we see the naked sinless man emptied of all but love surrounded by mockers and we realize he did it for me, he did it for us.
It is from gratitude that we love the jerk, the idiot, the criminal, and my enemy. We love the sinner freely, just like we are loved.
The Fumie, Again, It can’t be said enough
Japanese author Shusaku Endo wrote the book “Silence“. It is novel based around the attempt to end Christianity in Japan during the 17th century. In the novel a young priest is sent to investigate the apostasy of a Jesuit brother.
Japanese Fumi
Christians are being arrested, tortured and killed. Those alive are being coerced to renounce their face by stepping on the “fumie”, a crudely carved image of Christ.
In the climax of the novel Christ breaks his silence and invites the priest to trample upon him.
Yet the face was different from that on which the priest had gazed so often in Portugal, in Rome, in Goa and in Macau. It was not Christ whose face was filled with majesty and glory; neither was it a face made beautiful by endurance to pain; nor was it a face with strength of a will that has repelled temptation. The face of the man who then lay at his feet [in the fumie] was sunken and utterly exhausted…The sorrow it had gazed up at him [Rodrigues] as the eyes spoke appealingly: ‘Trample! Trample! It is to be trampled on by you that I am here.’[4]
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