Cosmic cowardice
                                      by Alexander F. C. Webster
                                                     Crisis
                                        Vol. 16 No. 3  Mar.1998
                                                     P.56 
                                            Copyright by Crisis

AMERICA IS quickly becoming Buddhist! It is, to be sure, a quiet, unwitting
conversion process conducted by the high priests of nirvana like Dr. Jack
Kevorkian, while Christians, Eastern and Western alike, remain distracted
by our less momentous internal squabbles.

When Orthodox Christians celebrate Pasca ("Easter")next month (once again,
alas, a week later than the Western churches), we shall sing our signature
hymn: "Christos Anesti!" In Greek, Slavonic, Romanian, and dozens of other
languages, the meaning of Christ's dramatic triumph over death is
unmistakable: "Christ is risen from the dead, by death trampling down
death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life."

I used to contrast the Eastern Orthodox focus on death and life to the
Catholic and Protestant preoccupation with sin and righteousness. The
soteriology of the Christian West seems more juridical and forensic, the
East more ontological and metaphysical. But this difference in emphasis is
really nothing more than a matter of style. Both East and West acknowledge
the power of sin, death, and Satan, all of which the Incarnate Word
overcame through his voluntary sacrifice on the cross and glorious bodily
resurrection from the dead.

This contrast pales in significance before the more radical difference
between the entire Christian world and the peculiar concerns of Buddhism.
And yet it is the ethos of the latter that seems to be, like Carl
Sandburg's fog, creeping on little cat feet into the popular culture. More
specifically, the Buddhist fear of and disdain for suffering has displaced
the classic Christian anxiety about death as the ultimate existential
concern of millions of Americans.

The Hemlock Society, Dr. Kevorkian, and their burgeoning minions of death
dealing acolytes have tapped into a very real American angst. Many
Americans would rather embrace death than endure physical suffering of
virtually any intensity. For them death is not "the last enemy to be
destroyed" ( 1 Corinthians 13:26), but rather a welcome friend, a release
(in truth, escape) from this mortal coil to which pain and suffering loom
as the greatest evil.

Like Buddhists, our death-seeking neighbors have come to regard the
physical world as illusory and unworthy of attachment. Unlike true
Buddhists, however, they do not seek the genuine enlightenment that,
through renunciation of all attachment, enables one to annihilate ignorance
and every evil; instead, they long for mere annihilation. They are, by any
honest spiritual measure, pseudo-Buddhists and cosmic cowards.

A century ago, the enigmatic Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov actually
foresaw the rise of Buddhism as a serious rival to Christianity, owing
partly to this nonethical view of good and evil. Life is much less
demanding when one can renounce universal love and simply dismiss hatred in
favor of an isolated life "devoted to a constant contemplative inactivity."

Contrast this Buddhist mentality-whether authentic, neo, or pseudo---to the
Christian spirituality of suffering epitomized in the Russian experience.
The great Russian Orthodox novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, agonized
spectacularly over the providential meaning of the needless suffering of
innocent children. Who can forget, for example, the poignant story of the
five year old girl tortured by her parents and kept in a privy that Ivan
relates in The Brothers Karamazov? It almost topples the faith of Ivan's
younger, more spiritual brother Alyosha, who still, happily, manages to
resist Ivan's rationalistic arguments.

But it was Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevsky's more liberal, Westernized
compatriot, who, a generation earlier in 1851, depicted the ideal Christian
view of suffering in his short story, "Living Relic," which he included in
Sketches From a Hunter's Album. The protagonist Lukeria, a neglected
invalid who, nonetheless, maintains a joyous love of God and the world,
responds to an incredulous visitor with this testimony of faith: "The Lord
God... knows better than I do what's good for me. He sent me a cross to
carry, which means he loves me. That's how we're ordained to understand our
suffering."

Suffering as a proof of God's love for us--now there's a notion! It's the
faithful, courageous, penitential response to our suffering, not cowardly
flight, that opens our souls to "forgiveness, reconciliation, and spiritual
healing."

We Christians can endure all manner of suffering, because we know by faith
that it has no hold on us, that it-and not the physical world contra
Buddhism--is ultimately illusory. The Lord who freely endured unspeakable,
unmerited suffering on the cross and died an ignominious death emptied both
death and suffering of their power. The empty tomb in Jerusalem revealed
this truth definitively and for all the world to see.