This morning as I walked toward the front door of the End of Time, I noticed some people down the street preparing for some kind of event. There were American flags bundled in a box, presumably to hand out to the revelers who would soon join in a public celebration of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
I entered the café and saw The Forb and Limerick Bill in their usual spot. The Forb was lecturing Bill on something and I wasn’t in the mood for joining them. At the other side of the room, adjacent to my regular booth, sat Father Gene, the priest I met briefly the other day. He saw me come in and waved at me. Relieved to not have to hear one of Bill’s dirty limericks, especially today, I went to say hello to Father Gene.
“Hello, Maxwell,” said Father Gene. “Would you join me today?”
I looked over at The Forb and Limerick Bill, both of whom had spotted me.
“Sure, that would be great,” I said.
Father Gene looked to be about the same age as The Forb, except that he looked reasonably sane. His hair was whitish and cut short, not like a drill sergeant but more like someone who couldn’t be bothered with too much style. He was slender and looked like a guy who stayed in shape. That was interesting to me, since I had always thought of the priestly life as being fairly sedentary and bookish.
“Big news today,” said the priest.
“Yup,” I said. “Looks like a big party is brewing outside.”
At that moment a couple of excited young men marched past the front window of the café, holding up a large paper sign with Osama Bin Laden’s picture on it, with the words “Better Off Dead” painted in red underneath it. I could hear them whooping it up through the glass. A couple of people in the café gave them a thumbs up in response.
“Are you going to write about this in your column, Maxwell?” asked Father Gene.
“I’ve been thinking about it. I’m not really sure what I’ll say, if I do. It’s tough to find humor in this kind of news.”
Father Gene continued to look out the window, and I could see him slip into a pensive zone that I figured priests visited with some regularity.
“What do you think about all this?” I asked.
He remained in his zone for a few seconds, and then turned his attention back to me.
“Well,” he said, “I understand the emotion behind this death. Bin Laden was responsible for engineering the destruction of a lot of people—most, I’ve heard, were Muslims. There is a deep evil in the orchestration of violence and killing for the sake of ideology. People in this country have lost loved ones because of this, so I can appreciate the desire to celebrate.
“However, for people like me—and, I suspect, people like you, Maxwell—there has to be something different going on. While we might appreciate the inevitability of Bin Laden’s death (after all, it was Jesus who said, ‘Those who take the sword will perish by the sword’), we cannot join in with the dancing. This death is part of the cycle of tragedy upon tragedy, a cycle that never seems to end. The only thing that ever breaks that cycle is love.”
“How do you get people to love in circumstances like these,” I asked, “when there has been so much suffering inflicted on the innocent?”
“There is no such thing as ‘getting’ people to love, Maxwell,” he said. “Love is God’s realm, and it comes before anything. We get to participate in the love of God that has always been there. When Jesus says, ‘Love you enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven,’ he wasn’t calling for love as a forced action; it was a call to participate in the love that God has for all people.”
“So God loves Osama Bin Laden?” I asked.
“I believe so. That doesn’t mean that Bin Laden’s actions are not evil, or that his death wasn’t a consequence of what he had done. What it means is that people who claim to follow Jesus have to follow him to the tragic place that love takes us. We might see our friends and family tango on Main Street because Bin Laden is dead, but we can’t join in. There is no party for us, only grief that one loved by God acted so wrongly and violently, and that his life was drawn into the hideous cycle that he had helped to create.”
At that moment Winnie came through the door, dressed in her usual relaxed and unsexy way. She saw me, her face lit up, and she almost ran to the booth where Father Gene and I were sitting.
“Maxwell, I got the job!” she squealed. She noticed that there was another human being with me, and added, “Sorry. But I’m SO excited.”
Winnie fluttered for another minute then went to tell The Forb the good news. I hoped that Limerick Bill would refrain from writing a pornographic sonnet about Winnie’s good fortune.
“You know, Father Gene,” I said, “I don’t know if I’m ready to write about something like this, at least not the way that you talk about it. Maybe I’ll write about Winnie’s job or something. I guess it sounds pretty wimpy in light of the big news of the hour.”
“Well,” he said, “maybe something pleasant and normal like that is what people need right now. Most folks will forget about Bin Laden pretty soon and then start worrying about his inevitable replacements. Celebrating Winnie’s new adventure might re-humanize the day.”
I like Father Gene. His eyes are wide open but he seems to be looking beyond the horizon where my eyes normally stop. I think I can learn some things from him.
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