God’s Grace

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

The present war against terrorism is not a conflict between “civilizations.”
There is a conflict between civilizations in the world today–indeed, there are many such conflicts. This situation is the background for the present crisis, but it is just that, a background for the manifestation of another conflict, one that has been present from the beginning of human history. The conflict with the terrorists feeds on this other conflict characteristic of the present time, but it is an ancient conflict. This deeper conflict is not between one civilization and another; this conflict is between all civilizations and an anti-civilization. Civilization is a triumph against the forces of indiscriminate violence, intolerance, and pursuit of power that can be embodied in terrorism, and terrorism has existed within all civilizations, threatening their best achievements.

This is a conflict at the religious level of human experience. The terrorists appeal to religion to justify their actions. They are willing to embrace their own death in obedience to God. It is amazing that the first global war of the twenty-first century, the beginning of the new millennium, is a war of religion. It shows that the twentieth century was not that secular after all; its secularism was also a religious stand. It was a religion without transcendence. This is a conflict within the religious world itself, of which this secularism is a part. It is a conflict between different forms of our relation to transcendence and Mystery. This conflict exists within Western civilization itself, as it exists within Islamic civilization. It exists within all human civilizations.

If the religious sense is not thrown off course in its search for the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, for the perfect fulfillment of the human heart's desire for truth, beauty, and freedom, it brings men and women to the recognition that this source of meaning, value, and purpose is found in a Mystery beyond anything that can be grasped or imagined by our understanding. However, because of the frustration of not being able to reach this Mystery, as well as the limitation of a mysterious wound–a malfunctioning–within the religious sense itself, this quest for the Mystery is cut short, and human beings equate the ultimate source of meaning with a reality that is not the Mystery. The despair that creates idols is also the source of “religious violence.” Religious violence is the sheer hatred of humanity, a hatred of the human condition and its inability to reach the true object of the heart’s desire.

According to the Christian faith, the ultimate origin of this derailment of religion is that wound, that malfunction in our humanity called “original sin,” something from which we cannot liberate ourselves, but from which we must be saved by God’s mercy or grace. Religion without grace turns against the world, against humanity.

We believe that the revelation of God’s grace began with the election of Abraham, just as Jews and Muslims claim. The religion of the terrorists rejects this grace and mercy. Hence, they are in conflict with Islam also, as well as with Christianity and Judaism. The terrorists represent a conflict within the Islamic world, just as other terrorists have represented conflicts within the Jewish and Christian worlds. Their idol in this case is an abstract ideology constructed by their distorted religious sense and identified as “Islamic civilization,” and we should not fall into the error of constructing our own idols and calling them “Western civilization.” Instead, as a civilization, ours has the same origin as that claimed by Islam, which is the election of Abraham. A true dialogue between the West and the Islamic world should be based on this common origin and its implications. For this, however, Western civilization must itself try to rediscover what its own origin in Abraham's call means in terms of its view of the religious sense.