– Back from vacations! I didn’t go anywhere exotic this past week, one of the things I did was used some of this time at home to make room on my shelves…After all, Advent is a penitential season and as I was looking around I thought: “Maybe I don’t need all that stuff” and I had a look at all the books I have purchased and not read yet. One of the books caught my attention. I started reading a few pages and I thought: No wonder I had left it aside. But this time I carried on and read through it. One of the hardest read of my life. Well written but relate the very tough / traumatizing experience of a boy soldier: Ishmael Beah. Maybe you’ve heard about him?
This is his story: 12 years old boy growing up in a village in Sierra Leone in the early 90’s. One day, he leaves with a few friends to visit his grandmother a few miles away from his home, and while they are away, his village is attacked by the rebels and all his family is killed. Beah flees, starts a long walk on his own and hides in the forest. Later, he meets a few other boys in the same situation and together they wander from deserted places to deserted places as everybody else is trying to escape from the rebels, trying to avoid being killed. As months pass by, the boys end up almost starving. But then one day, they finally arrive in a bigger village defended by government soldiers and they start hoping their lives will be better and safer. Unfortunately, it’s the opposite that happens. The soldier start training them to fight: They are brainwashed and taught how to kill: “We did nothing but fight, watch war movies and do drugs so strong I would not sleep for weeks”. Then the boys are sent on the front lines: “I can’t remember how many people I killed” says Beah, and he describes some of the atrocities he committed, destroying entire villages. It lasted for two years until he finally got “rescued” (even if it didn’t feel like rescue at the time) by the UN and placed in a rehab center with other boys soldiers.
The title of his story: “A long way gone”: I wondered what does it mean. Is he now long gone from the war / finally escaped or was he a long way gone and yet, he came back? Traumatized w/o hope of healing / sinned beyond any hope of redemption. Today, Beah lives a normal life in NYC advocating for peace and children’s rights.
– Reading Beah’s story in a parallel w/ our biblical lessons for today was fascinating for me. In our three first readings (OT, Psalm and Epistle), there is this promise that God will bring peace to the world. A peace that is not just the absence of conflict / escaping from a terrible situation, but reconciliation and harmony – against all odds, even against the laws of nature: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid…” etc. The author of the book of Isaiah wasn’t naive. This book was actually written in a time of war as well. In a time of destruction when there was no hope in sight.
This tells us that hope can’t always be seen but it can be found in God. In this time of the year when we await the coming of the Redeemer, we are reminded that Redemption is possible, even against all odds. We can survive, we can heal and we can turn our life around no matter what we have done or what others have done to us. A journey towards peace: This is the story of Beah – and even if we have never known such terrible things – this is our story too, the story of our world, the story God wants to write with us beyond sin, violence and suffering. We hear in the Gospel today John the Baptist calling us to repentance / which means: to return. We too are “a long way gone” but we can come back, by “Preparing the way of the Lord, [making] his path straight”.
How do we do that? JB: Baptizing and confessing are the way to prepare to let God act into our life / into our communities / in our world. Baptism and confession are sacraments / liturgical acts but they express realities we have to live out.
I learned a lot about baptizing and confessing reading Beah’s book, his own experience of Redemption.
Life was very tough in the rehab center. The boys were used to extreme violence and hooked on many drugs. At the beginning, they had a lot of outbursts, fights and were unkind to the staff and nurses taking care of them. Their only thought was to escape and find drugs and go back to the front lines (They missed the violence!). Yet, each time the boys did bad, instead of getting mad, the staff would tell them: “It’s not your fault”. Quiet amazing as you read Beah’s account of his time in rehab to hear these words again and again from the people around him: “It’s not your fault”.
It seems to me that those words hold a huge healing power. It was like balm on the children’s wounds and water on their fronts: It was like they were baptized again in innocence, brought back to their childhood that had been robbed from them. This is what baptism – as it has been brought to us by John on the banks of the Jordan and as it is still present in the church – do to us: It brings us back to our true identity as children of God, children who have been robbed of their divine filiation by the evil that is in the world. To us too, baptism tells us: It’s not your fault. Look at the liturgy in the BCP. It says that evil was there before us and we have been caught in the cycle of selfishness, hate and violence – but it’s not what we are meant to be and in Christ we have a way out.
It does not mean we have done anything or we haven’t done anything wrong. As the children were told: it’s not your fault, they started opening up and confessed what they had done. Removing the shame and the condemnation, showing unconditional love, the words opened up a space for confession and facing reality. For being finally able to look at their stories, to name what happened to them and what the army had them do. Beah’s book is also his confession, acknowledging what he has done, he found his way back to who he was meant to be in the first place.
Repentance is possible. We don’t have to be for ever the victims or the perpetrators of violence. Isaiah: No preys and predators anymore (They go together!). As we become aware of that, we are healed and can start mending the world.
– Advent is a time for hope and peace. To look at ourselves, at our neighbors and at our world with the beliefs that things can change, that we can change: that we can bear fruits worthy of repentance. JB describes the Redeemer as the one who can purify us from evil (fire images). Children at the rehab center were healed b/c the staff looked at them as children, in spite of what they had done. They believed they could change. John the Baptist and then Christ look at us trusting we can change.
– Do we believe change is really possible? Do we trust we can change / Others can change?
* Do we feel we are “beyond Redemption” because of what we have done or what has been done to us / even if it’s nothing as bad as Beah. I have a 60 years old friend who was telling me recently that after a lifetime of being abused by her mother, she is now choosing to look the future with optimism and let go of the anxiety her mother had fed her. She said to me: I am not the person my mother designed me to be. (= designed her daughter to meet her own needs). She starts to believe she can live a life that isn’t defined by enduring the pain of not being loved.
* Do we enable others to find their way back to their true selves? To our community? To God?Cf the movie “The Green Book”: The chauffeur says to his boss who is estranged from his brother: “The world is full of lonely people who are too afraid to take the first step”. Maybe Christmas will be an opportunity to seek out those from whom we have been estranged / who are a long way gone. Maybe they are just too ashamed to reach out to us. Do we look at those who hurt us with hope? (Does not mean we should be enablers! But we can call them back to be their true / their best selves, as did JB with the religious leaders). We can all “baptize” one another with words of healing, love / washing in innocence.
– Advent: The best is yet to come. “Do we really believe that? Are we just afraid that life will bring us more problems, and in the end sickness and death will have the last word, or do we trust that our life is a path towards God’s kingdom, that there is another horizon / a horizon of peace? Good fruit are to be borne / good things are to be born (Theme of our Quiet day).