Christian Piatt Blog

Christian Piatt column

Love can be as close or far as one condition away

A middle-aged mother faced a reality every parent prays to avoid, the premature death of her son.

She lost him to AIDS two years prior, but the pain she feels over the loss is still like a fresh wound. Even now, she receives dozens of sympathy and support cards from friends of his.

New cards arrive on birthdays, anniversaries and those holidays with images of family that only magnify her son’s absence, and therefore, her sorrow. Some family members offer comfort from a distance, while others try to ignore the death altogether. Though the judgment and awkwardness is hard, she tries to understand. She struggles with her own degree of shame about it all.

As she begins to learn more about parts of her son’s life he was reluctant to share, she befriends others within the gay and lesbian community who share her sense of grief. For them, her son is one of many friends and loved ones they have lost to AIDS in the past two decades. Knowing they hurt alongside her is of some solace, though she still hesitates to talk about his personal life.

After the death of yet another young friend of her son’s, she shuffles through the handful of condolence cards, wishing to find something conveying the empathy she has for them. She finally settles on one and takes it to the counter.

The clerk behind the register wears a bright smile and a rainbow bracelet. He asks how her day is and she lies, saying everything is fine. Noticing the card, he asks if she has lost someone special.

“No,” she pauses. “I mean, yes.” She explains that although this card is for another family, she lost her own son to AIDS two years prior, the word “AIDS” suppressed to a muted whisper as she casts her eyes toward the counter.

“You don’t have to whisper,” said the man, coming out from behind the counter, offering her a long, warm embrace. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I didn’t know that man,” she explains, “but in that moment, I loved him.” She carried that love he shared out into the world that day, resolving never again to speak of her son’s life, or death, with shame.

Another mother confronts her daughter, who has told her she is a lesbian, and confesses that she will never accept her as such. “I prayed she would change,” says the mother. “I felt she was committing a horrible sin.” She even took her daughter to corrective counseling, though it was clear the girl, only a teenager at the time, didn’t feel there was anything wrong with her that needed to be fixed.

As time went on, the distance between mother and daughter only grew, until the daughter stopped corresponding all together. The final words the mother received from her daughter were in the form of a letter that explained the irreparable damage she felt as the subject of her mother’s “shaming words.” She ended the letter with the words, “Heal thyself, mother.”

In 1997, the family received a call about their daughter’s suicide. She hanged herself in her closet, leaving no note. Through friends, the family learned their daughter had been undergoing treatment for depression for some time.

The woman’s parents began to study everything they could about homosexuality and the Bible the following year. “It was a big jump for us,” says the mother of their change of heart. “(But) in the end I found myself far away from the safe place I’d been all my life.”

Since then, she has started speaking publicly about the dangers of homophobia, creating an educational program called TEACH: To Educate About the Consequences of Homophobia.

“Now I know the value – the power – of unconditional love,” she explains, “and though it came too late for Anna, I believe she knows what we’re doing. And she is proud.”

Christian Piatt is the author of “MySpace to Sacred Space” and “Lost: A Search for Meaning.” For more information, visit www.christianpiatt.com.

Thoughts on satire, pop culture and the Gospel

I don’t usually use column space to respond to letters I get either in support of, or in opposition to, a piece I’ve written. However, the response I’ve received about my column last week on “The Golden Compass” has prompted me to add some more points to ponder.

To get everyone up to speed, “The Golden Compass” is a movie due out this holiday season that is at the heart of much controversy. The author of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, the inspiration for this movie, is a noted atheist who many claim is determined to destroy children’s faith through the propaganda in his books.

Last week, I drafted a satirical piece that poked fun at those who have such profound issues with this movie and the preceding books, yet who have not seen either, short of a commercial on television and some e-mail rumor that’s been spreading like wildfire across the Internet. In fact, there was an article in the paper to this effect a little more than a week ago.

While most people appreciated the humor of the piece, there actually were those who didn’t get somehow that it was satire. I got all kinds of angry e-mails calling me a hypocrite, accusing me of propagating a narrow-minded position that did more harm than good.

To those who haven’t read my columns at all over the past two years and just happened to pick this one up with no background, I can understand this misunderstanding. For anyone who has read my columns before, come on, you know me better than that.

There were more than a few responses from the “other side,” criticizing my attacks on people with more conservative ideology. One reader actually compared my satire to the Nazi propaganda cartoons published against Jews prior to World War II.

Ouch.

A word of caution about this sort of “slippery slope” argument: First, consider that the cartoons in Germany were not about a set of beliefs people of all backgrounds maintained, but rather castigation of an entire race of people for who they were by birth. While someone cannot be criticized for who they were born as, they certainly should be prepared to undergo some scrutiny for what they claim to believe, including me.

Also, it should be noted that much, if not all, of the anti-Semitic propaganda in Nazi Germany was state-sanctioned, which inherently means a manipulation of free speech. While some folks may object to my point of view, it’s not propaganda, because I’m free to write what I want. There’s a big difference, and one that is the cornerstone of our democracy, I think.

The point is for people on both sides of the argument to stop and think about what they believe, rather than reacting from the gut. No secular book or movie should dictate our beliefs, be it “The Da Vinci Code,” “Passion of the Christ,” “The Golden Compass,” “Harry Potter” or Kirk Cameron. Jesus challenged us to look beyond the written law even in Scripture, pushing us to find truth within ourselves. It’s easier to find it in a book or on TV, but that’s not Gospel.

I respect those with differing views and their right to air an opposing perspective, but for crying out loud, if you’re going to stand against something, know what it is that you’re condemning first. I can’t say whether or not “The Golden Compass” and the books on which it is based are good, bad, dangerous or a wonderful opportunity for rigorous debate.

Why not? Because I haven’t read them, and the movie hasn’t been released yet. My guess is, however, that New Line Cinema is as thrilled about this sort of uproar as Dan Brown and Ron Howard were about the controversy surrounding “The Da Vinci Code.” It’s the best free press they could hope for.

Each of us ultimately must decide for ourselves which movies and books are appropriate for us and our families. I don’t know if I’ll take my son to the movie or not; I have to know more about it first. But if I can read Nietzsche, who famously claimed “God is Dead,” all the way through college and still have faith, I’m pretty sure it will take more than a two-hour movie about a kids’ book to convince me to claim atheism.

Christian Piatt is the author of “MySpace to Sacred Space” and “Lost: A Search for Meaning.”  He can be reached through his website, www.christianpiatt.com.

How do we respond to violence?

Christian Piatt

In April 1945, Lutheran pastor and noted pacifist Dietrich Bonhoeffer was led naked to his execution in the gallows of a Nazi prison camp. He was 39 years old.

Though formal charges against him included trafficking Jews across the border to Switzerland, the ultimate justification for his death was his involvement in plans to assassinate Adolf Hitler. One of the central tenets of Bonhoeffer’s faith was submission to God’s will. How that is manifest in a world crippled by violence is an ongoing debate.

Bonhoeffer presented what he considered to be a theological dilemma when he said, “Responsible action is how Christians act in accordance with the will of God. The demand for responsible action is one that no Christian can ignore. Christians are, therefore, faced with a dilemma: When assaulted by evil, they must oppose it through direct action. They have no other option. Any failure to act is simply to condone evil.”

This principle of Christian justice raises debate about what constitutes appropriate direct action. To stand by while grave injustices are done is inherently un-Christian, according to Bonhoeffer. However, as arbiters of peace, how can we justify responding to individual or systemic acts of rape, genocide, and other human atrocities with more bloodshed?

I acknowledge an ongoing inner conflict around this issue, with which I have struggled for many years with respect to gun control. As a civil libertarian, I believe the government’s legislation of individual rights often is in opposition to the intent of the founding fathers. As a pacifist, I shudder at the consequence of the constitutional right to bear arms.

One reality of civil liberties is that any permissive system is vulnerable to abuse. Even Bonhoeffer’s dilemma has been co-opted by those who would stand on it to justify acts like the bombing of abortion clinics. The debate, then, comes down to whether the loss of personal liberty outweighs the ability of the greater society to conform human behavior to the majority’s value system.

Those who choose to lean on Bonhoeffer’s dilemma to justify a violent response to grave injustice should heed a word of caution, however. What Bonhoeffer claimed is that, when we recognize transgressions of justice, we must respond by taking action. This is all that he claimed in this statement. To jump to the justification of the use of force is a misappropriation of his point.

It is true that Bonhoeffer called us to action, though he did not say what sort of action is necessary. In the particular context of Hitler, he determined that an assassination attempt was his only option. Even in doing so, he recognized the sinfulness of his choice and submitted to God’s judgment for the consequences of that choice. He felt compelled, but he was anything but divinely justified in his choice.

Reality suggests that a nonviolent response to Hitler’s acts of evil would not have led to the desired change. It was, in fact, on the field of battle that the Nazis ultimately were weakened to the point of submission. One can look back now and easily justify the means by which we achieved a more peaceful end.

I would argue, however, that justifying human behavior based on outcomes is not what we are called to as Christians. Like Christ, we are called to action; but also like Christ, we are called to peace rather than violence. In doing so, we give up much control over the result of our actions, which none of us likes to do.

We jump to justifying the greater good in using force, whether it’s through capital punishment, preemptive strikes in Iraq, or challenging the corrupted government in Sudan. After all, wouldn’t Jesus have been justified in rallying forces against the Roman Empire? Certainly, history would have looked upon a Jewish revolution sympathetically. Even the majority of Christ’s followers expected such an overthrow, right up to Jesus’ final days.

But it never happened.

In the short term, some may have viewed Jesus’ peaceful confrontation of the Roman Empire as a failure. But in the greater context, long after the empirical reign dissolved, Christ’s gospel message endures.

Violence never redeems. It may yield the immediate result we desire; it may even save lives. It is a natural human response to injustice but, in my estimation, it never has been, and never will be, justifiable from a Christian standpoint.

Piatt is a nonprofit consultant, newspaper columnist, and author of Lost: A Search for Meaning (Chalice Press) and MySpace to Sacred Space (Chalice Press). He is minister of music at Milagro Christian Church in Pueblo, Colorado.