Even in the bleakest winter months, the hope of Easter is always on the horizon.
This winter, as another blizzard was lumbering toward snow-banked New England cities and towns, the news was full of the latest outrage from the so-called Islamic State—this time its hydra head surfacing in Libya, where 21 Coptic laborers were murdered in gruesome fashion. In the United States, a middle-aged man was arrested for the similarly senseless killing of three Muslim neighbors, and a Las Vegas woman was shot in front of her home and children after a member of America’s well-armed militia ended yet another road rage incident with gunfire. A cease-fire in Ukraine was barely holding in what is fast becoming a failed state, and in Syria another week of a pointless civil war plodded on.
In ways small and large we seem a doomed, hateful species bent on self-destruction. Just ask the folks at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who have made a point of trying to concoct a rational measure of such stuff with their famous Doomsday Clock. As the year of our Lord 2015 dawned, the Bulletin adjusted the clock two minutes closer—at 11:57—to the dreaded midnight of all humanity.
We had spent a few years comfortably distanced from doom with the clock at 11:55. But indifference to climate change and a lack of progress on nuclear arms reduction provoked the reset.
We like to think of human progress as something of a historically inevitable process, but that is not so. Surveying history’s wreckage from his vantage—Iraq and Syrian refugee camps—a benumbed António Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, wondered in January if the world was reaching some terrible tipping point. “The Syria and Iraq megacrises, the multiplication of new crises, and the old crises that seem never to die have created the worst displacement situation in the world since World War II,” Guterres said during an address in Turkey.
Recounting other recent troubles that fall within his portfolio as the world’s chief first responder, he wondered aloud if “the international community has largely lost its capacity to prevent conflicts and solve conflicts.” Our world, he added, has become a “world where indeed unpredictability and impunity are rules of the game. This is a world where there is no effective leadership.” A remarkable admission coming from a man whose entire life is devoted to the promise of that leadership.
I sympathize with Guterres’ confusion and despair. But I also realize the bleakest point of midwinter, as snow swirls taunt across blue-iced lanes and freezing drifts climb up to the eaves of shuttered homes, is possibly the worst time of year to take account of humankind. We are in a terrible Good Friday thus far in 2015, but I know an Easter morning—and the diminishment of winter’s cruelty—awaits in the spring.
Perhaps the assessment of the forlorn Guterres is correct, and we are witnessing the winter of political global leadership—out of ideas, out of energy. But we who wait in joyful hope cannot surrender to such hopelessness. Maybe the exhaustion of the diplomats and the politicians leaves an opening for a different kind of leader and a different vision of the means and ends of leadership to emerge.
Pope Francis has used his unique pulpit to draw attention to human trafficking, the migration crisis, and global unemployment, especially among the young. He has brought old adversaries together. He has spoken for peace and dialogue in Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq. And throughout it all he has attempted to keep ecumenical and interreligious hands joined and lines of communications open.
Pope Francis describes our Easter hope, the “constant miracle,” as a “risky virtue.”
“Hope,” he said during a homily last October, “is what Mary, Mother of God, sheltered in her heart during the darkest time of her life: from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. That is hope: She had it. And that hope has renewed everything. May God grant us that grace.”
And the grace to put it to good use.
This column appeared in the April 2015 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 80, No. 4, page 39).
Image: ©Snapwire/Chandler Erisman
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