Must We Be Counter-Cultural?

Google Image

I’ve never been a great fan of Charles Barkley. In his playing days in the National Basketball Association, I thought he was a jerk. I witnessed that first-hand years ago during a game between the Denver Nuggets and his Phoenix Suns when he was ejected from a game for fighting.

But either I was mistaken in my judgment or he has matured, or both. I was greatly impressed with a commentary he gave during the halftime of a recent NCAA tournament game. The other commentators were lamenting the fact that one of the teams in the tournament had to drop out because one or more of its players became infected with COVID-19. The other commentators remarked that the players on that team were surely heartbroken.

Barkley said something like: Let’s remember that basketball is only a game. Think of all the people in the country who have been suffering because of the pandemic during the past year; people who have lost their lives, lost family members, lost their jobs and their businesses. Those are the people who have really been hurting.

Having Their Faith Tested

Words of wisdom, putting things into perspective. I’ve wondered how many of those millions, hurting through the pandemic, have felt that God has forsaken them. Many – including, perhaps, some of you reading this blog – have undoubtedly had their faith tested. Many have surely asked, “Where is God in all this?”

I was reminded of this during last Sunday’s reading of the passion, in which Jesus in the midst of his suffering, quotes Psalm 22, praying “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus, it seems, reflected during various times in his life what Christians believe is his dual nature; sometimes showing himself to be human, and sometimes God.

When praying to his father this prayer of near despair, he was showing himself to be fully human, and we can all relate. Most of us, even though never in the circumstances in which Jesus found himself, have had similar feelings of abandonment by God.

Dirk Dunfee, SJ

In an extraordinarily moving homily at Denver’s St. Ignatius of Loyola Church on Palm Sunday, Father Dirk Dunfee, S.J. spoke about the victims of the recent shooting at the Kings Sooper supermarket in Boulder. I was also thinking about the vicious hammer killing of a guard and nurse at the Iowa penitentiary in Anamosa.

Since long before the time of Jesus, society has embraced violence to get revenge, aid in committing crimes, express hatred and “solve” problems, leaving behind millions of victims and their grieving families. God often takes the fall for these tragedies, being blamed for causing or allowing them. I believe they’re the result of our free will and the determination of God to allow the universe to function as designed.

So what should be the response of Christians – and all who are searching for God – to such suffering?  Empathy and solidarity, said Fr. Dunfee, just what I believe Charles Barkley prescribed. But just as in the time of Jesus, our society doesn’t embrace empathy and solidarity. Doing so, Dunfee said, is “counter cultural.”

Instead, we shrug our shoulders and watch and promote violent movies, videos and TV shows, allow our children to play violent video games and are blasé about any kind of gun control.

Can't Be True to God

Must Christians and people searching for God, then, be counter-cultural? Definitely, if you‘re talking about the anti-empathy, anti-solidarity aspects of our culture. We can’t be true to God if we go along with every evil aspect of society, which is not fully redeemed but fully redeemable.

Every year, in reading Jesus’ passion or hearing it read, I’m struck by the cruelty of the religious and secular authorities who ordered Jesus’ death and by all the people who days before hailed him as a king, then showed their lack of empathy and solidarity at the time of his death. I’m also struck by the ease with which Jesus’ own followers abandoned him when the going got tough. In so many ways, we are like them.

And like Jesus, I believe, we often feel most abandoned by God when we feel abandoned by others. I never thought I’d say this, but we all need to listen to Charles Barkley.