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The poem that I quoted, Death Fugue, ends with the following line: "Your golden hair, Margarita — your ashen hair, Shulamite." It is clear who "Margarita" is: the blond-haired German girl, the romantic ideal drawn from Goethe's poetry, of whom the executioner tenderly daydreams. But who is "Shulamite"? Shulamite is no ash blonde, but the black and comely maiden of the Song of Songs, whose hair has grown pale because the ash of burning has fallen on it. Shulamite is the Jewish people, experiencing the most horrid events in their history. When, in Death Fugue, Paul Celan puts together Margarita and Shulamite, nothing can reconcile them — they stand next to each other as symbols of the unbridgeable gap created by unspeakable evil.

Now it is understandable why this would be so for Celan; when he wrote this poem, the ovens that had sent his own parents and many of his kin into their grave in the air had barely cooled down. But the issue remains for us today. Can we simply leave Margarita and Shulamite side by side as symbols of the unreconciliation that governs so prominently in our world. Or can we do something to reconcile estranged individuals and peoples? Sometimes it feels as if very little—almost nothing—can be done to make our world a more peaceful place, nothing except maybe to keep "containing the situation" — until the next outburst of violence.

I want to draw your attention to the resources offered by the Christian faith for fostering more peaceful social environments. One such resource is signaled in the theme of my talk: the theme of reconciliation — the reconciliation of humanity to God and the reconciliation of peoples and individuals to one another.

Now some of you might object—that objection has been in fact mentioned already today—that religion often is not a positive influence in the world of social relations. Religion, Christianity included, can and does cause conflicts.

In my experience, however, Christianity is a factor in conflict (1) when it is regarded as primarily a cultural resource, a marker of a particular group's identity, in the name of which they then struggle against another group, rather than as the living faith of individuals and of whole communities; and (2) when there is only a superficial (though not necessarily lukewarm!) relationship to that faith, when one has not been inducted into, sustained and nurtured by a longstanding tradition of that faith. Those who have been nurtured in the Christian tradition are more likely to became agents of peace than perpetrators of violence. That is a controversial claim, I know. But there are recent studies that have shown that to be the case. A similar claim could probably be made by other religions, but, at any rate, I think it stands for the Christian religion.

So it is important to look at the resources for creating more peaceful social environments that lie at the center of the Christian faith. One of them, as I mentioned, is the notion of reconciliation. I want first to dispose of two unacceptable notions of reconciliation and then to advocate a third one.

One unacceptable notion of reconciliation is what some people have called cheap reconciliation. Cheap reconciliation sets in contrast justice and peace. To pursue this sort of "reconciliation" means to give up the struggle for freedom, to give up the pursuit of justice. It means to put up with oppression. If we were to pursue such cheap reconciliation, it is clear that this would amount to the betrayal of those who suffer injustice, violence, and deception. But I think also that this would amount to the betrayal of the Christian faith. As I read the Christian message, a prophetic strand which denounces injustice has a prominent place in it. You cannot take away that prophetic strand from the Christian faith without gravely distorting it.

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September (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45