It is tragic to see how the religious sentiment of the West has become so individualized that concepts such as “a contrite heart,” have come to refer only to personal experiences of guilt and the willingness to do penance for it. The awareness of our impurity in thoughts, words and deeds can indeed put us in a remorseful mood and create in us the hope for a forgiving gesture. But if the catastrophical events of our days, the wars, mass murders, unbridled violence, crowded prisons, torture chambers, the hunger and illness of millions of people and the unnamable misery of a major part of the human race is safely kept outside the solitude of our hearts, our contrition remains no more than a pious emotion.
The newspaper of the day on which this is written shows a picture of three Portuguese soldiers, two of whom are pulling out the arms of a naked prisoner while the third cuts off his head. That same paper reports that a Dallas policeman killed a twelve-year-old handcuffed boy while interrogating him in a patrol car, and that a Japanese 747 Jumbo Jet with 122 passengers was hijacked and flown to an unknown destination. It also reveals that the U. S. Air Force dropped 145 million dollars worth of bombs on Cambodia during a period in which the President declared publicly that the neutrality of that country was fully respected. It gives a gruesome description of the electrical torture techniques used in Greece and Turkey. All of that “news” is simply mentioned as secondary items whereas the headlines speak about break-ins, lies and the use of huge sums of money by the highest officials in the government, an event described as the greatest tragedy in the history of this country. And today’s newspaper is not different from yesterday’s and is not likely to differ much from tomorrow’s.
Shouldn’t that crush our hearts and make us bow our heads in an endless sorrow? Shouldn’t that bring all human beings who believe that life is worth living together in a common contrition and a public penance? Shouldn’t that bring us finally to a confession that we as a people have sinned and need forgiveness and healing? Shouldn’t this be enough to force us to break out of our individual pious shells and stretch out our arms with the words:
From the depths I call to you, Yahweh,
Lord, listen to my cry for help!
Listen compassionately
to my pleading!
If you never overlooked our sins, Yahweh,
Lord, could anyone survive?
But you do forgive us:
and for that we revere you.
I wait for Yahweh, my soul waits for him,
I rely on his promise,
my soul relies on the Lord
more than a watchman on the coming of dawn.
Let Israel rely on Yahweh
as much as the watchman on the dawn!
For it is with Yahweh that mercy is to be found,
and a generous redemption;
it is he who redeems Israel
from all their sins.
(Psalm 130)
~Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: the Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
