Be The Light
by Joan Chittiser
Two stories happened in the same town: mine. In the first, a local man of limited mental capacity robbed a bank. Most shocking was that he had a live bomb attached to his body by a metal collar that somebody had locked around his neck. He was carrying a note written by his assailants ordering him to report to four different places after the robbery to receive instructions about what next to do in order to have the bomb defused.
He never made it past stop number one. Police intercepted this simple man in a parking lot almost immediately after he left the bank. He clearly was not racing to escape. Instead, he was begging for help. He told the police that he’d been forced to perform the robbery because the bomb locked to his neck was on a timer. But the local bomb squad didn’t reach the site fast enough to defuse it, so, in clear sight, this man blew up in a main street parking lot of a small American city on a sunny afternoon in the middle of summer.
This 46-year-old man lived, we learned later, in a tiny house alone with his cats. He earned very little; he spent very little. He had very little interest in money at all. What’s more, his friends and family told the police, he simply did not have the mental ability to plan something so devious, so technical. He made a simple living delivering pizza, the very circumstance that put him in a position to be lured to such a violent death in such an evil game.
It’s a bizarre tale, an astonishingly painful one for everybody concerned — not only for the family of this simple man, but also for the local police whose problems are more likely to revolve around diffusing barroom brawls than defusing bombs. And, also, for this town, which prides itself on being a great place to raise a family.
Such raw cruelty, such deep evil, lies beyond the imagination of most people in my town. They turn their faces away, wincing. The tragic circumstances of that poor man’s death, the unthinkable events surrounding it, the hapless individual involved — all ate at the townsfolk and took expression in a kind of communal grief.
The press moved in quickly. The story played on five national TV channels and ran in every major newspaper in the country, including on the homepage of The New York Times website. In fact, it received so much national attention that our local paper ran stories on the stories.
The second story is about a nun, a block full of young children, a small corner store, and an old neighborhood, once Polish, now African-American, in the drug center of the town. The nun, Sister Mary Lou Kownacki, lives there with her 90-year-old father because he simply refuses to move out. It’s his home, the place where he raised his children. He still sings Polish songs at funeral masses in the parish church next door where he has worshipped all his life. It’s a reservoir of memories and a touchstone to his past. And to hers, too.
So when Sister Mary Lou returned to this neighborhood where she had grown up, she immediately went to meet the new African-American neighbors, play with another generation of children, and organize a new set of after-school games. Before long, she was giving the African-American kids reading classes on the same front steps of the house where, as a young girl, she had organized school games for the Polish kids. Before long, they were tackling community projects together: picking up cans, filling garbage bags with papers, planting flowers along the curbs.
With the help of another sister, she organized a platoon of neighborhood children to perform regular tasks. They were paid in neighborhood dollars redeemable at the corner grocery store. They swept the street and planted grass. They poured concrete and leveled sidewalks. They cleaned, hauled, and painted. They changed the very nature of that block — and of the entire neighborhood.
The sisters called it the One-Block-at-a-Time Neighborhood Revitalization Project. They wanted to make it a permanent program, to see it spread to other neighborhoods. But that required money and publicity. The local paper gave this story good coverage, but the national press paid it no attention at all. No vans, lights, or cameras ever rushed in to cover it.
Small wonder. The bank story is about the evil, violent murder of a simple man. More than that, it is about the deterioration of the United States as a human community. The other story is about the rejuvenation of an old neighborhood by the still clear-eyed children living in the evil of its neglect, about the possibility of rebirth in American life. "People haven’t changed since I grew up in this neighborhood," Sister Mary Lou reflects. "There are still people here who just want to have good jobs, good families, and a good place to live." Maybe so. Maybe the people haven’t changed, but our country has. And the answer to why that is may tell us more about evil, more about ourselves, than we really care to know.
The Original Good in Evil
For centuries, the early Christian tradition offered two ways of understanding evil. Theologians in the West explained that original sin — that primal, prideful rebellion of humans against a broader, better, eternally wiser divine order — doomed us all to a lifelong struggle for holiness and wholeness. Eastern theologians blamed not original sin but original immaturity — the awareness that humans are born undeveloped and only grow slowly into God over time.
Either way, life was seen as an exercise in straining to be perfect enough — at least repentant enough — to satisfy a perfect God. Natural evil followed from moral evil, either due to original sin or original ignorance. One way or another, we deserved what we got and got what we deserved. The good of evil was that it would lead us to repentance.
For centuries this explanation satisfied. Then came the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, where the city and its people were systematically and indiscriminately destroyed. In a matter of minutes, every building, and every man, woman, and child for miles around, was crushed to death or burned to oblivion. And for what reason? For what sin? For what grave moral matter did God strike these innocent to punish the guilty, and what, by the way, was the guilt for which the people of Lisbon had been condemned in the first place?
"Like the buildings around it, traditional thought on the meaning and origins of evil were shaken to their foundations," explains philosopher Susan Neiman in Evil in Modern Thought. In the midst of the Enlightenment, on the brink of the scientific revolution, when it was becoming plain that natural disasters have natural causes, the nature and origin of evil became the compelling philosophical question. If God is all-powerful and all-good, how is it that evil exists at all? A good God could have created a perfect world and an all-powerful God could at least have conquered evil here and now. But evil does exist, so is God not all-good, or is God not all-powerful?
Philosophers rushed to defend the traditional notion of God. Leibniz and Kant and Rousseau all insisted in one way or another that whatever looked bad was really good underneath; we simply couldn’t see it yet. After all, answers were pouring out of scientists like sums on an abacus, so why not all these philosophical answers, too? Surely it was only a matter of time before evil would be conquered, unmasked, tamed by reason.
But reason only complicated matters. By the nineteenth century, the focus shifted from natural evil, such as earthquakes, to moral evil. Who was responsible and why? God was not the answer. God, in fact, was the problem. God — judged a scoundrel by some and found puny by others — was declared dead by Marx and Engels, Nietzsche and Freud. The world owned its own evil, finally. Now, evil was not about what God intended. Evil was about what we intended. Evil was personal and private; intention alone measured the degree of our guilt or innocence. But the world did not take on the responsibility for evil, except to do more evil on greater scales and call this evil good. World War I randomly exterminated a generation in the name of good. A generation later, the world did it again.
The Death of Meaning
With the ovens of the concentration camps and the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, things changed once more. As had happened after the Lisbon earthquake, a new consciousness of evil began to dawn. World War II was conceptually devastating. For the first time in history, in a world determined to find and measure guilt or innocence by personal intention, we had managed to industrialize evil to the point where total madness and collective evil could now be perpetrated with no intention at all. Like the Nazis who engaged everyone in the business of death — whether it was common German citizens who wished Jews no harm or Jews who ran the ghetto councils or slave labor camps — we had all become willing but intentionless death dealers.
Hannah Arendt, in her groundbreaking book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, discovered what she least expected and least wanted to face. During multiple interviews with Eichmann, the German Jewish author discovered that he was not a monster. He was not even an anti-Semitic maniac or a twisted, distorted demon of a man. Eichmann, she said, was a man who simply wanted to get ahead, to succeed in his life, to please his superiors, to be respected by his peers, to do his job well, to be patriotic, devoted, and responsible. Indeed, he had good intentions and he had learned obedience. Somehow, though, he had not learned goodness. The human goal now, she wrote, "is for us to find our way around in reality without selling our souls to it, the way people in earlier times sold their souls to the devil."
The Challenge of Our Time
Today, the breadth and depth of human complicity in mass murder knows no end. We have assembly-line systems that crank out sheet steel for bombs in one state and warheads for bombs in another, fins for missiles in a third state, and delivery systems of trains and ships and packing crates in the next. The profits of this system, reaped on Wall Street, leave us all innocent, all intentionless, and all guilty at the same time.
This is the new faceless evil of our time. It’s the compartmentalization of evil in corporate laboratories around the world that is now engaging us all in the service of death. We are all making seeds, making toxins, making spy satellites, making bunker blasters, making financial decisions that impoverish the rest of the world, silently, secretly, smilingly, smugly.
It is not the horror of evil intentions in our time that is evil, as Arendt teaches us. In fact, none of us really intend the racism or sexism or nuclear destruction or global hegemony that make possible incomprehensible wealth for us, but incomprehensible poverty for most others. No, it is not personal, private, individual intention — once the mainstay of evil — that now determines either our guilt or our innocence. It is the commonplaceness of evil. It is, in Arendt’s word, the very banality of evil that is the new evil with which this century must deal or die, if not in body at least in soul.
Desmond Tutu once said, "If an elephant steps on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you want to be neutral in this situation, the mouse will not appreciate your objectivity." When "I didn’t intend that" and "I didn’t know about it" and "I’m only one person" and "I can’t do anything about that" no longer can distance us from the evil of refusing to face the evils of the day, what shall we do?
If we look even further back in the Christian tradition — if we look, in fact, to the heart of the tradition — the model of our involvement, our response, and our responsibility, is clear. The model is Jesus, speaking to the multitudes on the mountaintop.
In his time, the imperial government was absorbing, intimidating, and breaking people everywhere. It was a time like ours, when questions were rife but answers were few, when the old world had broken down and the new was only dimly aborning.
Jesus the liberator challenged the people from the mountaintop not to flee the field in the name of distant insulted innocence, not to hide behind our good intentions. As the old world crumbled around him and the new one struggled to rise, the challenge, he said, was to stay in the midst of the struggle, as he did, to speak a prophet’s speech, as he did. Modern theologians call that moment "the giving of the beatitudes," and often plaster it over with pious platitudes. I call it the constitution of good in confrontation with evil (see box, page 49). Jesus tells us quite clearly how we are to deal with the banality of evil if we are to remain human, do good, and live spiritually.
A Revolution of Ideals
The beatitudes set a standard beyond the standards of the day. They are a revolution of ideals. They seek to create a better world rather than simply a more comfortable life, a more profitable life, a more secure life. They call for courage rather than complacency.
The challenge of the beatitudes for us is to pay the price, ignore the cost, and get involved. Be not a whisper that is lost in the wind, Modamyetz taught. Be a voice that is heard above the din of life. Jesus does not call us to sink into a spiritual cloud of soft, warm, cuddly prayer and call that holiness. He does not lead us to seek the security of the self and call that human.
The challenge, Jesus taught us, is to remain in the midst of the struggle and speak in a prophet’s voice to our own offices, at our own meetings, in our own churches, in our own homes, whatever the price, whatever the cost to ourselves, our public comfort, and our social status.
If the banality of evil in this time is to be confronted, you and I must come to understand that what the world is really missing is us. The banality of evil rests on our bland unawareness that we are the only thing between it and success. The fact is that every holocaust begins or ends with me and you.
The good in evil is not an argument that evil is good. The good in evil is only the good we bring to it, the good we do in the face of it.
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Joan D. Chittister, O.S.B., is a best-selling author and popular speaker. She wrote "How Shall We Live" in the December 2003 issue of S&H. Her books include Illuminated Life: Monastic Wisdom for Seekers of Light and Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today. She is founder and executive director of Benetvision: A Point of View with the Future in Mind (benetvision.org) and an active member of the International Peace Council.
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