they are ash now

swear allegiance to what is nighest

To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to blow up a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. [...] To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

— Omar El Akkad, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Pope Francis’ condition, right now, reminds me of my grandmothers’. You know when the end of the pilgrimage is near. Perhaps you get several months or several days. But there is a long, slow walk that you begin to the threshold of death (if you are so lucky) and you know what the first steps look like when you see them. They have a sense to them. We are mammals after all, and we can smell fear, new life, and the ending of one just as cats and dogs can.

But what can you feel except gratitude to a man who has given everything he can to a thankless episcopal position—the last monarchy, as Anne O’Hare McCormick liked to call it—and he is presumably leaving his post having been a net positive for the world. Oh, of course, half the U.S. church hates him for whatever alleged sin of wokeness or liberalism he has committed—caring about the poor and truly believing persons with brown skin are persons and trying to induct a bevy of king-mongerers into an ecclesial rhythm of “synodality”—and of course he bungled the clerical abuse scandals of the pre-pandemic years. But he demonstrated the grace to have a conversion of heart when a journalist pushed him on his response. How rare for a public figure—most don’t even have the excuse of being considered infallible to fall back on—to accept a critique, graciously, publicly. To change, to convert: how Christian of him.

So what can you feel but gratitude? Selfishly, of course, we beg: stay longer. Do not leave us orphan. We shall need him so often, but seek for him in vain, as Joseph Ratzinger said of the passing of his friend Hans Urs Von Balthasar.

But, the point of being Christian is not that you have a hero who shows you the way. The point of being Christian is something much more interior and communal than that.

As I pray for Francis’ longer life, I think of Mary clinging to Christ. The Apostles so wanted Jesus to stay with them. Of course they did: look at what they were left with. We love to paper over how absolutely idiotic the Apostles are, but they were grade-A morons. Jesus, were those freaks really the best you can do? I wonder as I page through the Gospels. But they were. The Gospel is for idiots—that’s the Good News. And it’s still attracting absolute nincompoops to this very day. Read a headline, you’ll see what I mean.

But, somehow, a dozen people—no matter their stupidity or limitations—who truly believed that Jesus is alive and among them; that Christ walks, alive, in God, and we, baptized, walk in him and he in us, well—just a dozen stupid men who truly believed in this, who believed that the Resurrection shows us a new way of living: they changed the entire world.

That’s what Resurrection does. It doesn’t choose the best and brightest to remake the world in the image of expertise. She had the greater power because of her greater love.

I don’t know if this is a vote of confidence in the power of one dozen stupid men or rather a confession of belief in the Resurrection: that Christ, alive again, offers this way of living that is so transformative it can set the world on fire. That is what love can do: the stupidest among us can become a vessel of new life.

And now, living in a world on fire, it’s time for us to re-discover this transformation.

In his new book, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad critiques U.S. Empire, and he poses the essential question to those who might otherwise resist the narrative that the U.S. is an empire: “Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?”

One thinks of Black men, killed for walking on the wrong roads or in the wrong way. I think of Allison Hill, our neighborhood, a place that is not considered a real place with real people by many of our surrounding communities. It is Crime. It is A Bad Neighborhood. And what this means is that nothing that happens there counts, it does not happen to real people, real Americans, our neighbors, whose good is bound up in our own. They are not part of the common good. It happens to people whose nonexistence is necessary for us to go on believing that our country is what it says it is.

Akkad notes how we have exercised, over and over again, this muscle that separates our neighbors into deserving and undeserving of our concern. These muscles of apathy have become very strong. We have grown very good at distinguishing which suffering is bound up in our own and which suffering is the price that has to be paid for our lives.

“It is the purpose of Westerners to contend with stakes, it is the purpose of everyone else to establish them,” Akkad writes.

Akkad pleads with his readers to strengthen their muscles of empathy—the small exercise of one’s conscience that says: this is wrong. This suffering is being done to another human, and the idea that some humans are connected to me and my fate and other humans are sealed off to me is a lie. The common good is common to us all: we will never flourish if our neighbor is languishing. We are sold so many lies that tell us our life can only be bought by others’ death.

And this is exactly the lie that the Resurrection denies.

Akkad believes that we have allowed ourselves to close our eyes to the suffering our country causes because our country is Good and Right and such sad prices for Righteousness are part of The Cost of Doing Business.

Do we all still believe that? he wonders. After all that we have seen? Or all that the rest of the world has seen, that we close our eyes to?

Akkad probably has never heard of Dorothy Day or Peter Maurin, but he makes a strong case for Peter’s program: to care for the poor—the marginalized, suffering, those made to be ‘non-persons’ by the state—at a personal sacrifice, to see them as ambassadors of our Resurrected God. Day’s message: “We need to change the rotten, decadent, putrid industrialist capitalist system which causes such suffering,” and her solutions:

“This teaching, the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ involves today the issue of unions (where men call each other brothers); it involves the racial question; it involves cooperatives, credit unions, crafts; it involves Houses of Hospitality and Farming Communes. It is with all these means that we can live as though we believed indeed that we are all members one of another, knowing that when “the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered.” This faith of ours in brotherhood means that we must recognize functional classes in a society where class war is being bitterly fought out throughout the world.”

could serve as a fine sequel to Akkad’s work.

[The Resurrection] is a new type of event. It can be attested by witnesses as an event of entirely new kind. Indeed, apostolic preaching with all its boldness and passion would be unthinkable unless the witnesses had experienced a real encounter, coming to them from outside, with something entirely new and unforeseen.

—Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Volume II

So be like Wendell Berry’s fox, practice Resurrection: look at the person you would rather look away from. Open your ears to suffering that you want to believe is foreign but is actually part and parcel of your own. Let yourself be vulnerable to the nails of this world—they are terrifying and evil, but it is not for us to let some of our sisters and brothers die so that the nation might live.

This is what it means to be a person of the Resurrection (something many Catholics seem to have forgotten right now) it means that love is not cloistered off into small little pockets or distributed in a systematic manner that mirrors the will of your own ego: love has turned the world upside down and caught us all up into a new life of grace. What if—hear me out—we lived as though that grace were real?

Perhaps, if twelve of us very stupid people decide to live in that grace, perhaps if just twelve believed like the idiot fishermen from Galilee, that it is more important to love with the love that crafted our very bodies and souls, and a universe to boot, than it is to be comfortable or right or even breathing, then perhaps we will also change the world from a cruel concrete jail into the thing it was made to be: immensely good and truly beautiful.