“We believe they’ve been radicalized.”
These were the words used this week, to describe two men whose lives were seemingly quite normal, rather ordinary and relatively uneventful, until they say, something happened; something twisted and terrible and destination-altering for them and for our nation.
Somehow, an invisible poison had seeped into the places in their brains, where morality and decency reside, and contaminated everything in its path, to the point where it apparently made perfect sense on a beautiful Spring morning, to set down wired pressure cookers, filled with metal and broken glass, just inches from innocent mothers, grandfathers, sons, best friends, athletes, war veterans, college students, Christians, Muslims, and babies.
“Radicalized.” It’s become the go-to, quick fix, easy answer way to explain the unexplainable, and we are all so starved for answers, we lazily accept it.
But what can kind of influence can pervert a person so completely? Just how can any collection of words, be assembled in such a way that they incubate and birth the kind of indiscriminate hatred we witnessed in Boston this past week?
Like so many of us, as I have tried to wrap my mind around something that really, the mind in its right state can never ever conform to, I am left with an almost paralyzing helplessness; nearly overwhelmed beneath the weight of unanswerable questions and senseless grief.
And in the middle of the stagnant, putrid soup of misguided nationalism, racial intolerance and fear-fueled religion that has saturated social media since, the only thing that sustains me these days, is an odd, awkward, desperate prayer that I; that most of us never pray…
I am praying to be radicalized.
Yes, I want to get angry.
I want a tangible enemy.
I want someone to blame.
I want someone to pay dearly, and I want to have my normal world back to the way it was before.
We all do.
But that is not something we need to pray for. That stuff simply happens.
The hunger for retribution and revenge and payback, are almost involuntary emotional responses to horror; easy knee-jerk reactions to being violated and terrorized and shaken. But they’re not a place we were meant to stay.
I’ve seen so many Christians this week, stuck in that dangerous space; wildly flailing to assign blame, spraying cyberspace with status updates and photo shares and blog referrals, that vilify an entire religion for the sadistic actions of two young men, (as if the reprehensible acts of any two Christians ever defined them, their faith, or the Christ that they claim).
I am praying for them, and for myself, that we will respond to such moments as these, with the kind of counter-intuitive, lavish, irrational, confoundingly beautiful love of Jesus; not a flowery, greeting card expression, but the toughest kind of love that exists.
I am praying for us to actually be a people who resemble Christ; who want what we want, but yet defer to what he commands.
I’m tired of macho Christianity that demands a display of aggression in response to aggression.
I’m worn-out on “Don’t tread on me”, “Eye for an eye” versions, of the one who taught that the peacemakers would be blessed, and that prayer is the response to those who despise us.
I’m sick of those who twist Jesus into some kind of John Wayne, war-hero; who step around the powerful truth, that as he left the earth, started a church, not an army.
And I’ve grown weary of followers of Jesus, who in their blinding anger, have so distorted the Gospel, that it is now as far removed from Him, as those two sick young men are from the heart of Islam.
My prayer for myself, and for those in my dysfunctional extended family of faith, is greater forgiveness, deeper compassion and more mercy.
May we who claim Christ, as we face the horrors of the world, become extremists of love, brazen terrorists against the darkness, at war with the hatred outside us, and within us.
Today, I pray, that we are radicalized by Jesus.
