Saints as suicide bombers

SORRY to hijack your attention. But let me explain.

Precisely because of a biting sense of helplessness, of being on the brink, we often wonder what to do with suicide bombers. We try to understand these creatures. We overwhelmingly disagree with their actions and motivations. But we cannot deny the glaring fact that they do it out of a sense of commitment.

Distorted, completely wrong… These can immediately come to mind to describe that sense of commitment. Still, the reality remains that, right or wrong, they do it in their own subjective calculation as an act of heroism. It can be their ideal for sainthood.

We even try to downgrade that part by claiming that these suicide bombers are mad, out of their own will, completely deprived of reason, made an automaton, etc.

Granted they are true, still the people around them, those who manage and direct them undeniably hold a burning sense of commitment that they extend to a human instrument, whose freedom cannot be totally wiped out no matter what the conditioning.

This realization certainly disturbs us. The often unspoken conclusion is whether we too can have that sense of commitment, of the kind that goes all the way to death, even if we follow a route different from the terrorists’ kind of life offering.

In my reading of the lives of saints, the answer can be found. A common element in many of them is precisely their willingness to offer their lives for the salvation of souls.

It’s their ultimate and total sacrifice, which they do consciously and freely. Of course, the standard here is no one else than Christ himself who offered his life lovingly for our redemption. Remember what our Lord said:

‘No man takes my life away from me. I lay it down of myself, and I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it up again.” (Jn 10,18)

The saints believe in these words of Christ, and follow them. They are convinced that if they die with Christ, they also will rise with Christ. Death for them acquires a very special meaning, infused with powerful redemptive value.

We need to penetrate into this reality of our life and death. We cannot remain in the superficial, in the level of self-serving reasoning, confined only in the fields of politics, diplomacy, pragmatism, etc. They certainly are important, and also indispensable, but they are not meant to be everything.

Death, to a consistent Christian believer, is not simply the end of one’s earthly life. It can be his final act of love and reconciliation with God. It has tremendous nuclear power to effect goodness in the whole network of humanity known in Christian doctrine as the communion of saints.

The little act of love, done even in isolation, affects not only the one who does it, but also everybody else. And somehow an element of dying is involved in loving, not matter how little that loving is.

This is simply because love involves a certain self-denial to be able to give oneself to others. That is the ultimate essence of love. It entails a dying to oneself to be able to give oneself to the other.

Thus, the example of our Lord who told us to learn of him, “for I am meek and humble of heart.” (Mt 11,29) There’s a mysterious constructive force that is released whenever one dies to himself through humility, obedience, meekness, and ultimately our physical death. This is what St. Paul said to refer to this truth:

“The foolish things of the world has God chosen, that he may confound the wise. The weak things of the world has God chosen that he may confound the strong.

“And the base things of the world, the things that are contemptible, has God chosen, and things that are not, that he might bring to nought things that are.” (1 Cor 1,27-28)

We have to learn to relate all our human efforts to solve our problems here on earth, including terrorism, to the requirements of the spiritual and supernatural character of our human condition.

Our life cannot be viewed only on its temporal and material dimensions alone. Our life is one and indivisible. It has natural and supernatural dimensions that we need to learn how to integrate together. Death is actually not an end nor a rupture, but a transition, a passage from time to eternity.

That’s why saints are not afraid to die. They welcome it.