Dear Friends,
We hope that you are safe and well.
Today's Meditation was a gift from God: as I did my morning prayer with Give Us This Day, God gave me the gift of revisiting mystic and political theologian Dorothee Soelle. I invite you to this spiritual delight.
We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in the church, in healthcare, in the workplace--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.
In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that it is God's economy of abundance: when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.
We hope and pray that you find peace, healing, hope and the infusion of joy in your life!
With our love and care,
Ron and Jean
MEDITATION 656: Dorothee Soelle reflects
Blessed Among Us
Dorothee Soelle, Theologian (1929–2003)
Dorothee Soelle was born in Cologne, Germany. She was only fifteen when the war ended; nevertheless, as revelations unfolded about Nazi crimes, she was filled with an “ineradicable shame”: the shame of “belonging to this people, speaking the language of the concentration camp guards.” Her young adulthood was spent reflecting on the great question of her generation: “How could this have happened?” It instilled in her the duty to question authority, to rebel, and to remember “the lessons of the dead.”
She became one of the principal voices of “political theology”—an effort to counter the privatized and spiritualized character of “bourgeois” religion through the subversive memory of Jesus and his social message. In particular, she criticized an understanding of sin confined to personal morality. “Sin,” she wrote, “has to do not just with what we do, but with what we allow to happen.”
Soelle’s theology was inflected with poetry and drew widely on art and literature. Her experience as the mother of four children strengthened her hope for the future and her work for peace, while reminding her that pain and joy are inextricably combined in the struggle for new life. In her later work she spoke of the need to join mysticism and political commitment. She defined mysticism not as a new vision of God, “but a different relationship to the world—one that has borrowed the eyes of God.”
She died on April 27, 2003.
“Religion does not confirm that there are hungry people in the world; it interprets the hungry to be our brethren whom we allow to starve.”—Dorothee Soelle
Michael Iafrate writes:
I was reading excerpts tonight from the late German feminist and political theologian and activist Dorothee Soelle — who coined the term Christofascism — and thought I would share just a few provocative passages.
“I suspect that the post-Christians do not want to have anything to do with the dialectic of a religious institution. But it is just this self-contradictory experience of the church as traitor and the church as sister that stares me in the face, and I have to live with it. Post-Christianity seems to me like a slick formula that covers up the two-sided encounter with the church and reduces it to the ‘church from above.’ Then the church from below is forgotten, and with it what tradition has identified as the ‘mystical body of Christ.'”
(From “Christianity and Post-Marxism” in The Window of Vulnerability: A Political Spirituality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), pp. 24-5)
“I am often impatient when believers ask me: ‘Are you a Marxist?’ The best reply I can think of is a counter-question: ‘Do you brush your teeth? I mean, since the toothbrush has been invented?’ How can anyone read Amos and Isaiah, and not Marx and Engels? That would be absolute ingratitude toward a God who sends us prophets with the message that to know YHWH means to do justice. Are we not obliged to do use every analytic tool that can help us to comprehend injustice and at the same time reveal the victims of injustice as the possible forces for change that can break the spell of oppression for both the oppressors and the oppressed? Can we afford to ignore Marx at a time when I ought to be clear to every attentive observer of the misery of the Third World that capitalism neither can nor will satisfy hunger? Our economic system works for the rich, not for the other two-thirds of the human family.”
(Ibid., pp. 25-6)
“If we do not [use our tradition], it will use us.”
(Ibid., p. 27)
“Reagan was a master at playing on the deep-seated anxieties of people caught up in massive technological change. He exploited their fear of inflation and the loss of jobs and turned it toward a different point — namely, sexuality. It is not the nuclear bomb that threatens our survival: it is love between two men or two women that endangers everything we have achieved!”
(From “Christofascism,” in The Window of Vulnerability: A Political Spirituality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), p. 138)
“In a theological perspective it is evident that the content of this fascist religion [right wing Christianity] contradicts the message of the Jewish-Christian tradition. The God of the prophets did not preach the nation-state, but community between strangers and natives. The apostle Paul did not base the justification of sinners on the Protestant work ethic, but on grace, which appears for young and old, for diligent and for lazy people! And Jesus did not make the family the central value of human life, but the solidarity of those deprived of their rights. The most important norms of the Moral Majority are not contained in Christian faith, as we can see from the many critical remarks against the family that appear in the gospels. It is characteristic of Christofascism that it cuts off all the roots that Christianity has in the Old Testament, in the Jewish Bible. No word about justice, no mention of the poor, whom God comes to aid, very little about guilt and suffering. No hope for the messianic reign. Hope is completely individualized and reduced to personal success. Jesus, cut loose from the Old Testament, becomes a sentimental figure. The empty repetition of his name works like a drug: it changes nothing and nobody. Therefore, since not everybody can be successful, beautiful, male, and rich, there have to be hate objects who can take the disappointment on themselves. Jesus, who suffered hunger and poverty, who practiced solidarity with the oppressed, has nothing to do with this religion.
Quotation by Dorothee Soelle
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If the most essential element of Christian faith is sin and not our capacity for love, if the first thing that should come to our minds in church and in our religious life is our impotence, our weakness, our guilt, our repeated failures, then the die is already cast. Then we cultivate our own fears and coddle our own need for security. We deny that human beings are capable of making peace; we abandon the unarmed Christ and run away just as the disciples did when Jesus was taken captive and when it became clear that protection and weapons were useless now. We are tempted to look for other masters who offer more protection and security.
The old vicious circle takes this form: we are weak and we feel weak. We are afraid and we teach others to be afraid. We seek safety — that is, we wall ourselves in and hide behind the armor plate of power, hide in the control towers of devastation, feel weak again, and therefore feel compelled to press the button.
Christ broke out of the vicious circle in which we still live, this vicious circle of weakness, fear, need for protection, need for security, need for violence. It is not true, he told us, that you are weak. You can do whatever you want if you have faith. You are strong; you are beautiful. You do not need to build any walls to hide behind. You can live without armaments. Because you are strong, you can put the neurotic need for security behind you. You do not need to defend you life like a lunatic. For the love of the poor, Jesus says, you can give your life away and spread it around. The mechanism that runs its course from weakness to a need for security to violence is unsound. God is in you. You do not need to protect yourself. It is possible to live without violence and without weapons.
— Dorothee Soelle, Dorothee Soelle: Essential Writings by Dorothee Soelle, Dianne L. Oliver, editor