Reflections on the Brothers Karamazov and Mimetic Violence

11 March 2013

Christ absolutely grates against the core of our culture. It is so much easier to hate than to love one's neighbor. It is so much either to damn the person who has wronged us than it is to reach out with forgiveness's embrace. It is so much easier to look at the criminal and, in an act of feigned human justice, sentence to prison or death than it is to try and rehabilitate. We so badly want to believe in the evil of humanity, that we will often not even allow for the possibility of good in another. We want to judge, to condemn, to ruin, for not only do we fail, but moreover we refuse to trust that justice is, in the end, God's. We want to point, blame, and watch as someone else burns, in order that we may look away from our own shortcomings, our own faults, our own lack of good. For it is much less challenging to see the sins of another than it is to be aware of our own. We ourselves do not have to change to see when someone else does harm. This makes no claim on ourselves. And perhaps we so desire not to see our own sinful natures because we know perfectly well that we can do nothing about them. It is only God who can change our broken selves.

We want to see the accused convicted because we want the easy way out. That is our American culture. This is our human culture. More, faster, easier, now. We do not want to deal with details. We do not want to do hard work. We do not want to examine ourselves, our hearts, our lives. We want the simplest solution, and we want it now. Yet Christ shows us this is not how God is. This is not how humans are intended to be. This is not how God spoke them into being and breathed the life of love into them. Christ shows us the way to the cross, the way of love. And this is something that will ultimately cost us our lives. For that is what love is: to lay down one's life for another, to love so fully that it cuts against the grain of our self-obsessed and overindulgent society and to such an extent, that this narcissistic culture will, in some way or another, crucify us. For the lover of self alone cannot stand to see someone else loved. The lover of self alone cannot bear to see self-sacrifice. It wants a victim other than itself, because then it has escaped a little longer from looking in the mirror and seeing the shallow, empty shadow of a human being that it is.

How do you awake such a barren soul, O God of hope? How do we love and give ourselves as an oblation to you, O Christ? How, O Spirit of truth, do we receive your grace to actually live as Christ?