THINKING ANEW:FORMER United States president Jimmy Carter held office from 1977 to 1981, a difficult time for his country at home and abroad. He failed to win a second term and was succeeded by the more popular Ronald Reagan.
Upon leaving office he, together with his wife Rosalynn, founded the Carter Centre, a non-profit organisation committed to resolving conflicts across the world and promoting human rights. A committed evangelical Christian, his spiritual roots were in the conservative Southern Baptist Convention where race was a divisive issue so Carter moved to a more inclusive Baptist community where he served as deacon and Sunday school teacher for many years.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2002 for his humanitarian work, the only US president to have been so honoured after leaving office. In his acceptance speech he spoke of his concern for the way in which religion was becoming a divisive and negative influence in so many parts of the world. For him this was “a challenging and disturbing time for those whose lives are shaped by religious faith based on kindness towards each other.” Asked to explain what he meant, he pointed to the trend towards fundamentalism in America and elsewhere in all religions.
“That tendency has created throughout the world intense religious conflicts. Those Christians who resist the inclination towards fundamentalism and who truly follow the nature, actions and words of Jesus Christ should encompass people who are different from us with our care, generosity, forgiveness, compassion and unselfish love.”
Carter found it very difficult to understand how people in his own country who were passionate about their belief in God could justify racism which was the very contradiction of what Jesus taught and lived.
For him the Christian religion “should provide the way to heal the differences that separate people, based on the paramount law that Jesus taught to love our neighbours as ourselves.” He insisted that loving God and loving other people is inseparable; that it is part of the act of incarnation that God and human beings are indissolubly linked. The first and great commandment, as we read tomorrow, is to love God, but the second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” It is easy to respond to God as the perfection of beauty, truth and goodness and to offer our worship and adoration. We do it in liturgies, in art, in music and in less formal ways. But what we so often find difficult to handle is that this very same God in the person of Jesus Christ has totally identified himself with very fallible human beings.
We talk about the “real presence” in Eucharistic theology but too often ignore that other “real presence” where Jesus told us he would be found in “the least of these my brethren”. There is a strange irony in the fact that there are plenty of religious people who will speak with enthusiasm about universal brotherhood and world peace but who cannot get on with their own families and neighbours. The Christian call to love is not an easy option; it is tough and demanding and this may be part of our difficulty.
Leonard Wilson, Anglican bishop of Singapore when the Japanese invaded during the second World War was interned in the infamous Changi prison where under torture his hands were badly damaged. After the war, while conducting a Confirmation Service, a middle- aged man knelt before him to receive the laying on of hands, those once-wounded hands. As the man stood up the bishop realised that this was the man who had tortured him in Changi. For the bishop loving that man was his duty, it was costly, it was demanding; there was nothing soft or sloppy about it. The bishop was putting into action what Martin Luther King would later put into words: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
– GORDON LINNEY