The Tower of Babel Syndrome
Good Morning Friends,
Yesterday a friend of mine got me to thinking about the challenges to becoming the Body of Christ together, which is by the way the mission of our Presbytery. For my Catholic friends the meaning of the Body of Christ is a reference to the church in both an organizational sense and spiritual sense. This morning I continued pondering how the Body of Christ can work together in and through us and the disappointment I have in witnessing the discord among denominations. I guess that God will be where God will be. Then I read a dialogue between Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (Now Pope Francis) and his friend Rabbi Abraham Skorka, held in 2010 and transcribed in the book “On Heaven and Earth.” I include the transcript below for you as a way of demonstrating the challenge and the path of communication for a world still afflicted with The
Tower of Babel Syndrome.
Scripture: Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. . . . This is the bread that came down from heaven, . . . the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
John 6:48, 58 (NRSV)
Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes, and I will observe it to the end.
Psalm 119:33 (NRSV)
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Genesis 11:1-9 (NRSV)
Message: Sindromé in Ancient Greek means contest, and it is a word which is used in medicine to define the whole set of symptoms characteristic to a given disease, so that by defining every one of them, the disease itself can be defined. Today’s message is about the Babel Syndrome, a social disease classified among neurosis by the Swiss psychologist Claude Piron. Interestingly Mr. Piron was also a translator for the United Nations from 1956 to 1961. After leaving the UN, he worked the world over for the World Health Organization and was a prolific author of Esperanto works… a language he spoke from childhood. He was attempting to subdue the problem of communication between cultures that speak different languages. We have the same problem among denomination. Friends, God gives us a task to subdue the earth…to turn creation into culture, but maybe why Esperanza never took on is that our addiction to our own language is too strong. It makes me wonder if something will always be lost with English as the dominant language. It makes me wonder if we will ever be willing to speak the language of love with our friends, sharing our deepest desires over a meal. True communication begins with the recognition of a common interest. Reconciliation means the restoring of the relationship to what God designed it to be. This is what Jesus Christ does in redemption. Unfortunately the church ceases to be spiritual when it becomes self-seeking, only interested in the development of its own organization. The reconciliation of the human race according to His plan means realizing Him not only in our lives individually, but also in our lives collectively. Jesus Christ sent apostles and teachers for this very purpose— that the corporate Person of Christ and His church, made up of many members, might be brought into being and made known. Friends it is ok to experience a spiritual life but we are not here for the sole purpose of enjoying a quiet spiritual retreat. We are here to have the full realization of Jesus Christ, for the purpose of building His body.
Pray we realize that modern sainthood must be inspired by the loftiest ideals and by the largest possibilities through the Spirit but at the same time be small things done with great love. Pray we are one in the Spirit. Pray we have balance of the gift and the task. Pray we have hope.
Blessings,
John Lawson
TRANSCRIPT
Skorka: It has been many years since we first met and a brotherly bond has been forged between us. While studying the books of the Talmud, I found one that says that friendship means sharing meals and spending time together, but in the end it points out that the sign of a real friendship is the ability to reveal what is in one’s heart to the other person. That is what happened over time with the two of us. I believe that undoubtedly the most important thing that brought us together was, and still is, God, who caused our paths to cross and allowed us to open our hearts to each other. Although we broached many topics during our regular conversations, we never spoke explicitly about God. Of course, it was always understood that He was present. It would be good to start this exchange, which we plan to leave as a testimony of our dialogue, by discussing Him who is so important in our lives.
Bergoglio: What a great word: “pathl.” In my personal experience with God I cannot do without the path. I would say that one encounters God walking, moving, seeking Him and allowing oneself to be sought by Him. They are two paths that meet. On one hand, there is our path that seeks Him, driven by that instinct that flows from the heart; and after, when we have encountered each other, we realize that He was the one who had been searching for us from the start. The initial religious experience is that of walking: walk to the land that I am going to give you [Genesis 12:1]. It is a promise that God makes to Abraham. In that promise, in this, in this walking, an alliance is established that consolidates over time. Because of this I say that my experience with God takes place along the path, both in the search and in allowing myself to be sought, even if it may be by diverse paths-of pain, of joy, of light, or of darkness.
Skorka: What you have said reminds me of a few biblical verses. For example, when God tells Abraham: “Walk in my presence and be blameless” [Genesis 17:1]. Or when the prophet Micah needed to explain to the Israelites what God wanted from them, and he tells them to “do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God” [Micah 6:8].
Without a doubt, experiencing God is dynamic, to use a word that we learn in our mutual study of basic science. [Abraham Skorka is a doctor of chemistry, and Jorge Bergoglio is a chemical technician.] However, what do you think we can say to people nowadays when we find the idea of God to be so mangled, profaned and diminished in importance?
Bergoglio: What every person must be told is to look inside himself. Distraction is an interior fracture. It will never lead the person to encounter himself for it impedes him from looking into the mirror of his heart. Collecting oneself is the beginning. That is where the dialogue begins. At times, one believes he has the only answer, but that’s not the case. I would tell the people of today to seek the experience of entering into the intimacy of their hearts, to know the experience, the face of God. That is why I love what Job says after his difficult experience and the dialogues that did not help him in any way: “By hearsay I had heard of you, but now my eye has seen you” [Job 42:5]. What I tell people is not to know God only by hearing. The Living God is He that you may see with your eyes within your heart
Skorka: The Book of Job teaches us a great lesson because – in short – it says that we can never know how God reveals Himself in specific circumstances. Job, a just, upright man, wanted to know why he had lost everything, even his health. His friends told him that God had punished him for his sins. He responds by saying that even if he had sinned, he had not been that bad. Job is comforted only when God appears to him. His questions are not answered, but the touch of God’s presence stays with him. We can find several things in this story that shape my personal perception of God. First, Job’s friends show themselves to be arrogant and nonsensical by espousing the theory that “You have sinned, therefore God has punished you,” transforming God into some sort of computer that calculates reward or punishment. At the end of the story, God tells Job – who had railed so much against the injustices of his Creator – that he should intercede and pray for his friends, because they had spoken falsely about Him [see Job 42:7-8]. Those who had cried out in suffering, demanding heavenly justice, were pleasing in God’s eyes. Those who insisted on a simplistic view of God’s nature were detested by Him. As I understand it, God reveals Himself to us subtly. Our current suffering might be an answer for others in the future. Or, perhaps we ourselves are the response to something from the past. In Judaism, God is honored by our compliance with the precepts that he revealed. As you mentioned, each person and each generation must find the path on which they can search for and feel His presence.
Bergoglio: Exactly. We receive creation in our hands as a gift. God gives it to us, but at the same time He gives us a task: that we subdue the Earth. This is the first form of non-culture: what man receives, the raw material that ought to be subdued to make culturelike the log that is transformed into a table. But there is a moment in which man goes too far in this task; he gets overly zealous and loses respect for nature. Then ecological problems arise, like global warming, which are new forms of non-culture. The work of man before God and before himself must maintain a constant balance between the gift and the task. When man keeps the gift alone and does not do the work, he does not complete his mission and remains primitive; when man becomes overly zealous with his work, he forgets about the gift, creating a constructivist ethic: he thinks that everything is the fruit of his labor and that there is no gift. It is what I call the Babel syndrome.
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