On Christmas Day 1914, on the front lines of the trench warfare between Allied forces on one side and the German armies on the other, there was a brief truce. As the story goes, it was a German initiative, led by cries across the 30 yards or so that separated the two armies: “You no shoot, we no shoot!”
While this only happened in one small sector of the front lines, photographic evidence proves it was real, not the “myth” that military leadership declared it to be. Perhaps there was not a huge number of soldiers involved, and maybe they did not play the game of international soccer that some have suggested. But they did stand in no man’s land and exchange gifts, smoke a cigarette or two and try to communicate before returning to their trenches and resuming the shooting.
Though it is possible that in other places and in later stages of the war something similar happened, there is no concrete evidence. Certainly, generals on both sides were insistent that it should never happen again. Surely not. Because what would such a happening suggest?
Fifty years after the end of the Great War, the distinguished Czech philosopher Jan Patocka named what we have been recounting here “the solidarity of the shaken.” Patocka was involved with the Charter 77 human rights initiative in Soviet-controlled Prague alongside Vaclav Havel, who would become the president of Czechoslovakia in 1989. The charter was promoted by a loose association of individuals who shared the aim of improving civil and human rights but differed significantly on many other issues. Recognizing the attack upon human dignity that dwarfed ideological differences, they united against Soviet occupation.
Fleeting solidarity
Seeing similarities to the trench warfare of half a century earlier, Mr. Patocka noted that the opposing armies in the Great War had been made up of individuals who were “shaken” by the loss of meaning but who, despite their national differences and opposing positions in the conflict, had essentially the same experiences. So, Mr. Patocka wondered, what course of action might be necessary to protect and preserve the new freedom of clear thinking that shakenness had produced in the supporters of the charter? Resistance born of solidarity must in its turn resist normalization, in order that the normal itself can be overcome. (And lest we be tempted to think this is all so abstract, we should record that in the same year, Mr. Patocka died of injuries acquired in the course of a “lengthy interrogation” by security forces.)
The problem that Mr. Patocka identified in the generation who experienced trench warfare was that the solidarity did not last once the shakenness began to fade into the past. This would once again prove true in the aftermath of Charter 77, though Mr. Patocka died before he could witness it. If there was any cross-border loyalty among the troops in the Great War, it wasn’t long before sworn enmities re-emerged and the windup toward World War II began. And if the ideological differences of the anti-Soviet parties in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1970s could be put aside in favor of a united front, the harmony and even the unity of the state itself did not long survive, for all that Vaclav Havel tried to ensure it.
It seems as if “normalization” or a return to “the way things are” is just too strong, since it feeds individualism and undermines attention to the needs of the whole community. Mr. Patocka named the pressures to normalize “The Force.” Today we might think of what neoliberal market capitalism has brought to the world and how its unholy alliance with social media is producing a culture of private acquisitiveness.
Patocka’s reflections led the Anglican theologian Andrew Shanks to suggest that Christian theology might be a useful tool for moving forward, that the Christian story contains resources for furthering the solidarity of the shaken that might be more resistant to the power of normalization. If we want a paradigm of shakenness, thought Shanks, who better than Jesus, who pays the price of resistance to Roman imperialism in his crucifixion?
If Jesus is indeed the perfect exemplar of shakenness, then what might Christian discipleship look like, and how might such an understanding help overcome the virulent polarization currently affecting the U.S. Catholic Church? How, in particular, can the experience of faith trump simple reliance on doctrinal authority?
A perfect exemplar of shakenness
But what if we focused less on politics and attended instead to the anguished cry on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46).
With this exclamation, Jesus is revealed as an exemplar of shakenness. Everything he has taught has come to nothing. Naked and abandoned by his followers, he is overcome by a meaninglessness far deeper than the fact that Rome does not like unruly preachers. His death drives his closest followers into despair as they hide in fear, their hopes for Jesus destroyed. Their shakenness is clear to all, but even the news that Jesus is risen does not overcome their confusion, nor does it move them to concerted action and thus true solidarity. That has to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, after which they boldly proclaim the message of Jesus to anyone who will listen.
Like the disciples on the way to Emmaus, it is only when they grasp the meaning of the Shaken One’s shakenness that the task he bequeaths them engenders true solidarity. If their hearts are burning within them because of the stranger’s powers of exposition, the breaking of bread allows them to recognize and identify with him.
Living under the sign of the cross
Shakenness is not so much an emotion to get beyond, still less one to abandon for the everyday, than it is a condition to live within. Shakenness might well be described as living under the sign of the cross. The sign of the cross is not most fundamentally about simple physical suffering, though that is so often part of it, so much as it is about the struggle to believe and to remain faithful to that belief. Jesus is under the sign of the cross when he begs for release from it in the garden at Gethsemane; and when he abandons himself to the will of God, he embraces the condition of shakenness, even unto death.
The Roman Catholic Church has changed so remarkably over the past 60 years that most church members have at some point experienced shakenness. Dramatic change causes profound emotions to emerge, and although those on the right and on the left experience the shakenness differently, what they have in common is a sense of the precariousness of belief. Uncertainty is common to both perspectives, but at the same time both are marked by love of their church, even if they imagine that church somewhat differently.
What many lack—and this is the primary cause of ecclesial polarization—is identification with the shakenness of Jesus. It is not that the cross is the solution, but it is to say that only through the cross is a solution even thinkable. Both groups need to focus on the kenotic Christ, the broken and shaken figure on the cross, and abandon the sterility that comes from making themselves comfortable in their respective trenches. So, what positive proposal can we make that would overcome polarization without papering over the serious differences in their views of the church that they love?
Kenosis
This might be the moment to look more closely at the high Christology of kenosis: Christ emptying himself to enter into human nature. Though kenosis might seem once again to be an emphasis on the humanity of Christ, it is God who “empties himself,” taking on the human condition. And this is where the possibility of a true solidarity of the shaken emerges, because while “low” Christologies are often favored by progressive Catholics, kenosis can unite both the progressive focus on the humanity of Jesus with more traditional Christologies that stress the divine initiative in the act of Incarnation, but see the majesty of the act in the becoming truly human that it entails.
It is also the moment at which the Christian ideal of kenosis can come to the aid of the secular world. Kenosis is the divine abandonment of absolutes and the transfer to fallible humanity of the responsibility to embrace ambiguity in search of solutions to the struggle for a better world, the world that Christians refer to as an anticipation of the reign of God.
Why does such a suggestion seem to be an exercise in futility? Perhaps too many of us have forgotten that the starting point of our faith is in Jesus Christ, in whom God is made weak, not mighty, or, in the words of the biblical scholar Hans Frei, marked by “powerful powerlessness.” Jesus Christ is the self-emptied God who shares fully in the human condition: buffeted by history, assailed by doubt and ambiguity, subject to mortality and called to hope despite of—and maybe because of—the inescapable fragility of life. Sharing this human condition, our hope does not rest in a God who will swoop down and rescue us from this situation. Rather, it is hope in Jesus Christ in whom God calls us to friendship sealed in the Spirit that Christ promised would be with us for all time. Faith is nurtured in the potting-soil of love, joy, grief, friendship, generosity and even doubt, and fertilized by the Spirit of Christ. This is the way the reign of God just might emerge in history.
Graced self-doubt
Why this forgetfulness has occurred is a matter for speculation, no doubt, but it has at least in part to do with the conviction of moral certitude that can afflict those of any and every perspective. What Charles Curran has called “the albatross of certitude” can perhaps be overcome by recourse to Margaret Farley, R.S.M.’s category of “the grace of self-doubt,” or what in more secular guise we might label epistemic humility.
As Farley suggests, “graced self-doubt” is particularly necessary to the powerful, whose second-greatest temptation is “grasping for certitude” (the first is self-righteousness, the temptation of those in any position of authority). The “self-doubt” Farley encourages is not the cultivation of some sort of psychic weakness; rather, it suggests the healthy self-knowledge that comes with accepting the possibility that one could always be wrong. It is not the product of a weak ego so much as the remedy for one that is overactive. And its importance lies in its being “the basic condition for communal as well as individual moral discernment.”
Theologically speaking, the grace of self-doubt is nothing but the internalization of kenosis in discipleship of the kenotic one, the Shaken One himself. The God who has subordinated himself to the human condition in the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is the perfect exemplar of epistemic humility, and hence discipleship of Jesus entails the free acceptance of the grace of self-doubt. The drama of the paschal mystery itself suggests a way forward. The anguished cry of Jesus on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” is transformed in the epistemic humility of “it is accomplished” (Jn 19:30), making way for transformation into the new life of resurrection. No Christian of any political or ecclesial persuasion can gainsay the heart of the Gospel story.
