Burning heretics

I already wrote about the Jesus Freak book, mentioning that some things took me aback. Here’s one: the author had a Christian friend who became a Santeria priest. The author readily acknowledged that this was a form of syncretism, but invited her readers to embrace Santeria as an expression of Christianity.

Syncretism is a fusion of different beliefs into a new system. In this case it was the fusion of Catholicism with the Nigerian Yoruba religion that worships nature. A person baptized Catholic begins to add to the rituals of Catholicism the rituals of Santeria, which include feeding powerful but mortal spirits called orishas with animal sacrifices so that they will give him energy to meet his destiny.  The orishas are given the names of Catholic saints, like St Lazarus or St Barbara, but they are not any saints that ever lived in flesh and blood on earth.

Robert and I see syncretism in Mexico all the time. Although the Mixtecs call the spirit they venerate St Mark, the only thing the god of rain and thunder has in common with the writer of the gospel is the day on which they are celebrated on the Catholic calendar. On St Mark’s day in the town we lived in, the celebration is not held in the Catholic Church but on a mountainside, and there are animals sacrificed on an altar. To join the procession to the altar requires drinking, and men carry cases of beer on their shoulders to make sure they are well intoxicated by the time the rituals begin, which include divination and speaking to the dead. Although everyone at the altar is Catholic, this is not a Christian ritual but a veneer of Catholic terms and rituals overlaying a pre-Colombian faith in nature spirits.

I think the Jesus Freak lady does right in welcoming everyone and anyone to dinner at her table, no matter what their creed or status or race. She’s had lots of practice at it and, I bet, does it better than anyone I know. I think Jesus asks this of all of us, and we have much to learn from those who do it well. Our churches should feel like home to anyone coming in the door. But embracing Santeria is another thing. Animal sacrifices pretty much deny the effectiveness of Jesus’ once and for all sacrifice.  This is one mixed up lady, someone who in the churches I frequent would be called a liberal heretic.

And what do we do with heretics? I think Jesus asks us to live out this terrible paradox. We are to welcome people even while we sharply disagree with them. How does one do this?  That’s my question. How do we welcome a Santeria priest and not her spirits? How do we greet her and explore together the truth about Jesus, who makes her orishas obsolete?  More difficult, how do we greet a liberal heretic minister and sharply disagree with her lifestyle and her syncretism without sending her to hell? It’s always harder to handle heretics.

Lord of Paradox, teach us!

I do not think we’ve mastered this skill. Either we rebuff those who believe differently, or we welcome their beliefs right along with them like this lady does. I think it takes practice to live a paradox. I think it takes lots of time and lots of practice, and just when we congratulate ourselves on getting it right, God puts a yet more difficult person in our way, someone even more impossible to eat with, and we have to start from scratch. I think it is so hard that only Jesus ever got it right, and we always fall off the horse on one side or the other. I think “this one only comes out by much prayer and fasting.”

I think the man left wounded on the road that the Samaritan found bleeding learned it, though. Who is my neighbor? The Samaritan was not just a racial half-breed, he was a heretic who didn’t worship in God’s Holy Place but came up with religions of his own. Conscious, the wounded man would have dropped the man’s loaf on the ground and shoved his olive oil aside. But somehow it wasn’t necessary to agree at all to be shown love. This is a crazy parable, because doggone it, we’re the wounded guy! Maybe that’s the only way we learn. Maybe it’s a liberal heretic hoisting us up on the donkey! Aaaaaahh!

All I know is if we get comfortable writing off heretics, especially from a position of power, just on hearsay, without listening to them first, sooner or later we’re going to end up writing off (as close to burning as we get) someone God intended us to listen to—a wacko like John the Baptist, or John Huss, or John Wycliffe or…  It always happens.