Getting Over a Really Bad Dream

In the early hours of October 28, 312, a man had a dream that changed the history of the church forever. As Lactantius reported it, the dream was of the first letters of Christ's name, superimposed on one another in the form of a cross, which made it look like a sword. Underneath the sword were the words: "By this sign you will conquer." The dreamer, Constantine, facing a battle to the death the next day for the imperial throne, took the dream seriously enough to have the symbol painted on his soldiers' helmets and shields. He won the battle, and gave our God the credit.

Things have not been the same since. What began as a new era of toleration for Christians throughout the Empire soon devolved into systematic, centuries-long, State-governed programs of imposing Christianity upon people by force. To the conquerors belonged the spoils --- including the right to dictate personal faith. "Constantinian Christianity" was a way of going out into the highways and by-ways and compelling people to come in, or else. Islam learned the lesson from us well; by the eighth century, Muslim leaders were doing the same thing.

We might still be doing it this way if some Christians had their say about it. For example: remember the last revision of the Hymnal? One of the biggest arguments in the committee was over what to do with "Onward Christian Soldiers." Nobody wants to give up that great tune. But the words are something else, e.g., "Like a mighty army moves the church of God…marching as to war."

Just what we need for the war on terrorism, and to play a mediating role in Jewish-Muslim conflicts. As James Carroll reminds us in his very disturbing book, Constantine's Sword, for well over a thousand years the cross has been to Jews a symbol of Christian persecution, and to Muslims a symbol of Christian imperialism. We might add to Carroll's analysis the observation that the modern expansion of Christianity by persuasion more than by force has not helped all that much. It has only made our Jewish and Muslim friends even more nervous about what our true motives are. They remember Constantine all too well. And tremble. If our words don't get them, our swords will.

Personally, I hope that Lactantius got Constantine's dream wrong. Down deep, I think he probably did; truly revelatory dreams tend to work more to up-build people than to divide and conquer them. Among the many outrages perpetrated on people in the name of the Christian cause, surely one of the most horrific is the use of a symbol for the cross on which our savior died for all as a battering ram to storm the sanctuaries of other peoples' sincere worship.

This Christmas season might be a good time, before we go back to our crosses, to leave up a little longer our crèches. St. Francis started something really promising at that midnight mass in 1223, bringing a manger scene right into the sanctuary. It was, and is, a scene of gentleness, that extols the wonders of faith shared by the poor and the powerless of the earth --- just the kind of people in whom our Lord seemed to be most especially interested.

I wish we could make Jesus more visible in our nativity scenes as the "swaddled" newborn that he was. Certainly, Luke didn't want us to miss seeing him this way. Usually an elegant writer, he slipped into repetitiveness in reporting, first, that Mary "swaddled the baby in swaddling clothes." And then, he emphasized it again: the angel told the shepherds that they would find the baby "swaddled in swaddling clothes." In other words, Mary wrapped him tightly. Just as Joseph of Arimathaea would, after he took Jesus' body down from the cross.

With all due respect to Constantine, the dream of Amahl, which I think is what Amahl and the Night Visitors is really all about, goes him one better. It gets Amahl to the crèche, long before anyone has to get to the cross. And it gets him there in the company of some pretty impressive people. Probably they weren't kings, notwithstanding our penchant for making them so. Nevertheless, you get the point. The place where the kings of the earth belong is not at the front of armies, but in a cave, paying homage to the real Prince of Peace. Or on a winding, congested street in Jerusalem, helping a beaten and dispirited man --- who was once swaddled in love by a mother wise enough to know that his life would be beyond all earthly protection --- to carry his cross.

The Tenth Commandment

Recently, I had an occasion to look again at Exodus 20, and especially at the way the Ten Commandments are expressed there. (Deuteronomy, for example, puts several of the commandments a little differently.) You remember those commandments, don't you? The ones we can't have up on courtroom walls? This time around, it was the 10^th on the list that captured my attention: the prohibition against coveting. Attached to the prohibition is a list of specific things not to covet, but the overall force of the commandment is still pretty clear: we are not to covet anything or anybody, period.

Like the other nine commandments, this one, too, has actions in mind, some to engage in assiduously, and some to avoid at all costs. But the 10^th commandment puts the emphasis less on actions themselves and more on the intention behind the actions. Thus: don't desire, pine for, lust after, whine about, or demand what you have no right to, and then you won't be tempted to grab it for yourself when no one is looking. Good advice. Yearning for things we do not and should not have, instead of giving thanks for things we do and should, corrupts the human spirit just as surely as violating any of the other commandments does.

The biggest problem that coveting leads to is a potentially lethal degradation of our God-given capacity to think responsibly about what we owe others and what they owe us. By means of the careful nurturing of envy, covetous people gradually convince themselves that whatever they want, whenever they want it, they have a permanent right to possess. And if they really can't have the object of their fantasies, then they believe it is still within their rights to ensure that nobody else gets it either.

This is the way abusive lovers think when the one(s) they abuse finally get over them. This is the way that sexual predators think when the objects of their craving refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of their demonic claims. This is the way that greedy corporate executives think when their compensation packages, their perks, and their colleagues' grudging admiration prove impotent to fill their howling inner emptiness. This is the way that terrorists think when societies of infidels keep reminding them by their very existence of how ignorant, backward, and hopeless their own ways of life ultimately are.

And this is also the way that too many people think when confronted with the stark facts about the distribution of resources, opportunities, and wealth today. The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer? No problem! Just elbow your way into the company of the rich. If you haven't got an off-shore, off-the-books operation running, get one! Doesn't God help those who help themselves? If it is to the little that some are only barely getting by on, I doubt it.

The wildly popular way of dealing with abusers, sexual and corporate predators, and terrorists these days is the way of the jail cell, military coups, and maybe even missiles. For the short run, this fairly limited strategy may have to do: we have a fundamental obligation before God to protect the innocent from harm. But it will really be too bad --- and in the long run, ineffective --- if this is all we can do. What else is needed? Getting to the underlying deprivations and pain that give rise to our enemies' covetousness in the first place. And being willing to examine our own covetousness along the way, the kind of covetousness that always asks what somebody else should be doing about the poor, the sick, the demoralized, and the despairing people in every society everywhere. Share the resources, the wealth, the technical know-how? Sure, so long as the resources we are talking about are yours and not mine.

One time I counseled with a man just released from prison. He hadn't changed much. Somewhat to my surprise, though, he was astonishingly candid with me. " Here it is, Reverend: I need what I need, and if I can't get it, so much for the worse for whoever's got it." I could not help wondering to myself whether St. Paul ever came upon anyone like this when he was in prison? He certainly would today, but not only in prison. My counselee expressed with painful accuracy just what covetousness has come to mean today in "polite society," as well as among people we lock up and out of our concern.

Is it society's fault that this man has come to look at everything so cynically? Of course not. His perspective is one that he carefully nurtured all on his own. Is it society's fault that he lacks a vision inspiring enough to make him want to change it? Now that's something worth thinking about, while we stare winsomely at our brilliantly lit Christmas trees.