The Long Defeat.

 

Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory. 

—J. R. R. Tolkien, (Letters 255).

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

—Tertullian

First they ignore you.  Then they laugh at you.  Then they fight you.  They they kill you.  Then you win.

—Attributed to Gandhi, paraphrasing labor activist Nicholas Klein

How can we look at history, especially the last century or so, and think otherwise than that Tolkien is right: human history is a long defeat?  Indeed, how can we hear about some events even of just the last couple of weeks, and not deeply mistrust the idea that things just keep getting better?  Ignorance and lies triumph in our politics.  Greed and exploitation characterize our economy.  (Even in sports, the winning team features a racist hand gesture.)  Martin Luther King said that the arch of history is long but it bends towards justice; sometimes it is quite exhausting and depressing to live in that bending.  

The opposite of the long defeat is Modernity’s ideology of progress.  And I admit that part of me would occasionally still harbor some hope that people would wise up, that through education, democracy, technology, and spiritual development we could build a better world for all.  But this is the lie we in the Western world are fed from birth.  For a time in our history, at the peak of European power at the end of the 19th century, it must have looked true, from the perspective of the comfortable victors.  History surely seemed like one triumphant advance after another.  

Now I am sure that this was just our white privilege showing.  It is easier to believe that things will always improve if the world is skewed to our benefit through the ruthless application of colonialism, capitalism, and militarism.  We can maintain the illusion of progress if billions of humans are forced to work to keep it seeming real for us.  Adam Smith can be amazed at the magical Invisible Hand creating prosperity, only because he was blind to the very Visible Fist that pounded wealth from the forced labor of millions in factories and colonies.  We have this smug and complacent expectation that the system will continue to keep us in the comfort to which we have become accustomed.  The truth is that Modern progress was all a product of exploitation and violence.  

The alternative to seeing things in terms of progress is to see apocalyptically.  This is the framework of the Bible.  It is where Tolkien’s view of the “long defeat” comes from.  Tolkien also mentions there are those “samples or glimpses of final victory” that do occur.   The Book of Revelation tells us that empires do a lot of damage in the course of inevitably and spectacularly disintegrating, but God’s truth emerges in the end.  That victory is the point.  And that is really important: the long defeat resolves in the ultimate triumph of truth and goodness.  

The only sense in which progress is real is as the way we live into this final victory, trusting in the “samples or glimpses” of it that we experience now.  In that trust we learn to follow Jesus.  And we may make progress, improve, and evolve, over time.   We can advance, as Paul says, from milk to solid food.  This is the progress of discipleship.  We grow into Christ; Christ emerges in us.  “Perfection consists in our never stopping in our growth in good,” said St. Gregory of Nyssa.

So amid this long defeat, we remain faithful to Jesus' life and justice.  We obey his commandments, which are all about love.  We witness to the truth revealed in him, in his ministry, his crucifixion and resurrection.  The world doesn’t necessarily get any better… but we do.  We grow into the mind of Christ.  We let go of our old selves, renouncing in Baptism “the ways of sin that separate us from the love of God.”  That is all we are responsible for, but it “demands my soul, my life, my all,” to quote a classic hymn.

Discipleship may or may not improve the world beyond our little corner of it.  (But it does improve our corner!)  That doesn’t matter.  We cherish no expectations in that regard.  The world as God made it is already a better place than we know; we just don’t see it… until we start living in the gentle and fragile light of those “samples” and “glimpses” of the victory.  So only discipleship matters.  It is what we have to do during the long defeat.

Jesus healed people.  He freed them from bondage.  He fed the hungry.  He welcomed and accepted the marginalized and outcast.  He commanded his followers to forgive without limit.  He said many things that mortally offended the religious, political, and economic establishment.  That’s why discipleship has to include what we call “political” work; it has to be expressed in the way we live together in communities, from the household to the world.  Feeding the hungry also means seeking to change or replace the sinful systems that cause inequalities and injustices in the first place. 

The final victory, as experienced in those “samples” and “glimpses,” is in a sense already here, among and within us.  Jesus proclaimed it at the beginning of his ministry (Mark 1:15).  The final victory is embedded and encoded in creation itself by the Creator, and in each and all of us.  It is always Present.  In the Church we seek to live together in conformity with the ultimate triumph of God.

In the movie, The Candidate, a political operator tries to convince Robert Redford, a community organizer, to run for the U. S. Senate.  He is reticent to do it until the consultant writes on the back of a matchbook the secret of a successful campaign:  “You lose.”  It is the renunciation of any expectation of winning that gives him the freedom to get his message out.  (And of course in the end he wins.)  

It is like this for the Lord Jesus.  He knew that what he was headed for in Jerusalem was an ignominious defeat, before rising on the third day.  And it is like this for the community of his disciples.  We are engaged in a long defeat.  We are going to lose battle after battle.  We are after all not fighting against flesh and blood but principalities and powers of darkness that have a grip on people, feeding their fear, shame, and anger, inciting violence and bigotry, ignorance and lies, spawning injustice, war, and ecological catastrophe.   

Our word for this defeat is martyrdom, which literally means “witness.”  We are called to witness, amid the long disintegration, to the truth of God’s love for the whole world, by expressing that love for others after Jesus' example.  In the final victory of his resurrection, we stand firm in or conviction that love always wins, in the end.

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