What Do We Expect Of Christ?

In a world given over to death, I ask myself: What is my expectation of Christ?

This week a child died in the cancer ward, after two years in our midst. He lay there comatose, a sublime vegetating beauty, a bud never to flower. Time after time, I saw his eyelids flutter; one eye unfocused, the other came to rest on me. It was as though he reposed or whirled in an orbit out of this world. But he never once spoke; his hands, their fingers bent back in spasm, were helpless evidence of his sleeping soul. So he lived, and so died.

Like everyone else who visited the ward, I was shaken to the core by his plight. A kind of wary silence took over; I held his hand, stroked his face, breathed a prayer, and departed. What was there to say--to him, to myself? Thought lay too deep for tears.

What is my expectation of Christ?

I never prayed for a miracle. I let the child go. Not knowing what else to do. Not being in command of the universe, or of a single life, including my own.

At the same time, I want to separate such reflections from any indifference or blunting. I hope my love for the child stands clear. Still, letting him go even as I took him to heart, the question remains: What do I expect of Christ?

Expectation, hope. The future, the Coming. Flat endurance, event. These words circle about in my brain.

Let me think of the unlikeliest event conceivable in this world; a tragedy, a loss, let us say. Let us say the death of a dear one has occurred; shocking, unexpected. Shortly thereafter, friends stand grieving at an open grave.

So far, so bad; an event anyone can admit as a possibility, for anyone in the world, including one's self.

Suddenly this scene of mute grief is brought to a halt, invaded, confronted. Someone is in the midst of the mourners; someone who is not mourning. The tears, the vertigo, the emotional welter of death, halt in midair. Someone stands there. He is also a friend, but he is no mourner.

Instead, he commands attention, shockingly, with power. "Lazarus, come forth."

We are fascinated, horrified even, attention wildly divided. The mouth of the grave, the face of the living?

Then the unthinkable occurs. A dead man stands in our midst, living.

But what of us today--who will never stand at such a scene, take it in? That scene, the dead, the newly risen? We commonly judge that we will have to deal only with death; and that, we say, is quite enough. Never in this world will we witness death undone, the once-dead standing in our midst, and we grown wild, beside ourselves with joy.

Never. And yet I think, it is against such an event as this that our expectation of Christ (which is also our expectation of ourselves) must be measured. The unlikeliest event in the world. The event we will never see with mortal eyes. The event we only hear of; one that we must take on the word of others, and they removed from us by nearly infinite vistas, centuries. An event we must take on the word of one who purportedly brought such a thing to pass. "Take it from me; I did this thing."

Never did I pray that the child might be healed; such a prayer seemed presumptuous to me. I never allowed myself the hope that the child would stand again, walk, one of us, healthy and restored. Letting the child go; letting go his hand, my hope for him. Standing in spirit at his grave. And I must report sorrowfully that I was right, the child died. I never witnessed a Lazarus moment.

The child died in the course of nature; as they say with a sigh, this is the way the world goes. No intervention. No reversal of the sad and slow tread, the pall bearers, the shuffle and weeping of the family, the stupified grief of those (myself included) who cannot understand, only half yield the child up (only half yield ourselves up).

Take this likely event of the child's death, the likeliest event in the world. And consider that in all the centuries since Lazarus, there has not been one unlikely intervention. People die, the young and innocent, the aged and tired. Death by violence, by malice, by misadventure; death wholesale, death one by one, death by genocide, by war, by roadside slaughter. And no unlikely intervention; not one. No Lazarus walks toward us.

Let me take this fact and omnipresence and pressing urgency and claimant death, and consider what is at hand for us. The likelihood that is, that death will so prevail as to call a halt, not to this or that life, nor even to a multitude, through some monstrous fault or failure in nature, some act of wanton terror. Nothing so small, so paltry. The area now ceded to death being the round of the earth itself, and all inhabitants; and finally, all living beings.

This is what draws near; not death as alternative to life, death as eventuality, death the "futurable," death taken more or less seriously, taken into account or no, well or badly prepared for, condemned or welcomed.

Everything in history points to one dolorous conclusion. No weapon in history ever rusted or rotted unused. No weapon once created failed to create an enemy. No enemy so created failed to duplicate the weapon, and to improve on it. No weapons system since gun powder failed use in actual warfare. No war so provoked ever produced peace. The prophet Jeremiah puts the vicious cycle of death in a sentence: "Out of peace, war; out of war, more war; out of war never once peace."

All this is sobering enough. Still, in the past we could always comfort ourselves with the reflection: We have time, time to learn, time to repair, rebuild, time even to make peace now and then.

What we failed to realize was: It was the weapons that gave us time, and no wisdom of ours. This was a deep and bitter understanding which we,were fatally slow in coming to, because while we knew our weapons well (had we not, after all, created them?) we were fatally retarded in self knowledge. It was the weapons gave us time. They were vile and horrid, but they were merciful too, in measure; they knew limits.

Still, their mercy was no measure of our own. They would kill only one, or a few, or many, or a neighborhood, or bring down a city (even in their so-called conventional phase, let alone their nuclear phase). Thus they placed limits on us. But we must understand (the Bible understands), we, our merciless will, our malice, always tended toward more and more violence, total destruction, the end phase of life. We were hot after such weapons as would make Hitler's blitzkrieg look like the weapons of a back street thug.

The Bible teaches in many places, warns, illustrates, denounces, illumines this bitter truth; the violence of humans is in essence genocidal, mass suicidal; war is not itself until it is total war, laying claim to the total person, the human family in toto, the universe of life. Such a will, in our lifetime, creates weapons to match its madness; for once, the weapons match the will. They are merciless as ourselves, they at length resemble us, our alter ego.

Now we have death, the "final solution" to what has become, in all sobriety, a universal problem; the problem of life itself. Whether life is, as they say, worth living, whether the living regard life (their lives, all lives) as precious or cheap, a phenomenon of merely relative interest or a consummate value, a peak, a gift irreplaceable--or a burden, a night sweat, a nuisance...

We are not standing in spirit today at this or that grave, however deep our sense of loss, whatever halt to love or friendship or marriage has been called. We must understand it; the world itself is being plowed open; from a place of teeming life, to a cosmic grave. The world itself is grown Lazarine, the human race is rolled in a shroud.

And what now? What is our expectation of Christ? The above likelihood being admitted, as cold fact and strong probability, dallied with by straight faces and purportedly sane minds, the means of the monstrous crime being created day after day, the ideology to justify the crime being also prepared, hottened up, the president rattling the nuclear sword, the Congress rising to its feet with a roar, the people transfixed or assenting or merely perplexed; but in nearly every instance unable or unwilling to resist.

What now? What is our expectation of Christ? Has the likelihood of universal death so abused our sense of the sacred (of the truly human) that we now conclude that Christ too is transfixed or traumatized or plain helpless, but in any case, unable or unwilling to act? For my own part, I cannot separate out his activity in the world from my own. I see him in the gospel and the Eucharist; but also in the faithful--in the mirror of my own mind and the work of my hands.

To long for his intervention is to imply my own. I do not know of another way of regarding our impasse, or a possible breakthrough. This is why I am arrested again and again, and will never give up. This is why as I write this, my friends and family are in jail, or in the courts, or are so arranging their lives as to increase such likelihood. We believe that every office and charism granted us over the years--priest, teacher, writer, friend of the dying, spouse, parent--all and each of these must be verified, must test their will, against our expectation of Christ in the world.

I believe further that it is not the method of God to intervene in events; not miraculously. This is the evidence I gather from the Bible, as well as from those who live with their eyes open. Genuine hope turns our eyes in another direction than the miraculous. Let us say it turns our eyes in the direction of modest possibilities; which being faithfully pursued and clung to, make death bearable and grant courage to the living.

So believing, I deny to the politicians, the researchers, the generals, their way in the world. They will not prevail. My faith in Christ and my faith in my friends allows me to say this. The word of the death dealers is not the last word about our fate; other hands than theirs are in command of life and death.

The child, that dear friend who could never name me his friend, is dead. But I will see him again, and hear him utter a word his poor lips could not form in this world. And for his green memory, and for the sake of all children, our most endangered species, I will keep faith.

Daniel Berrigan was a poet and peace activist who worked with terminally ill cancer patients at St. Rose's Hospital in New York City when this article appeared.