In the Roman Catholic Latin Mass there is a prayer that occurs just before communion known as the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God).  In Latin it is “Agnus Dei qui tolis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.” This prayer is repeated three times with a slightly different ending in the third iteration. The English translation is: “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”

In Catholic belief, the Lamb of God is Christ who “takes away” (tolis) the “sins of the world” (peccata mundi) by His suffering and death, thus reuniting man to God.

And, boy, are the sins of the world ever present each and every day.   Until COVID-19 struck, we would hear about other events including:

• The intentional killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Syria leading to millions of refugees;
• the “reeducation” camps for 1 million Muslims in China;
• the sexual abuse of children by priests, scoutmasters and teachers;
• daily murders, rape, robberies and the like in our own communities.

In the Tulsa massacre of 1921, 40 square blocks of the Black neighborhood known as Greenwood were burned to the ground by white vigilantes. But, perhaps, the worst emblem of that event was the blind, double amputee black man who sold pencils on the street and who was chained to the back of a convertible and dragged down the street until he died.

In a few hours, Greenwood was gone and, so too, were 1,000 homes, five hotels, a hospital, a dozen churches and 31 restaurants.  The National Guard was called in to secure peace but, instead of rounding up the white vigilantes, the Guard placed black men defending their homes in detention.

In my parents’ generation, 6 million Jews, Gypsies and other “intolerables” were gassed to death and 5 million Ukrainians and Kazakhs were starved to death by Stalin and his henchmen because the Ukrainian harvest fell dramatically short of the quota set by the first Soviet “5 year plan”.

How to explain such evil? The major religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism) are in accord on one great teaching:  human beings are immortal. Their spirits come from an eternal or divine world and may eventually return there. All these religions hold that the way people have conducted themselves on earth will greatly influence their souls’ destinies upon death. 

For Christianity, evil is a problem to be overcome in the material world. The classic explanation is by Saint Augustine in The City of God.  In sum, there is a City of God and a City of Man.  For those who live a righteous life in the City of Man, there will be a reward in the City of God.

Archaeologists tell us that even Neanderthals buried their dead with tools, food and weapons presumably to assist in the next life.

To a great degree we are now living in a “post religious” world or even an anti-religious world.  The “post religious” world may best be summed up by the lyrics of the John Lennon song, “Imagine”.

(Verse 1)

Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us, only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today

(Verse 2)

Imagine there’s no countries

it isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

(Verse 3)

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world

There are many who believe in Lennon’s lyrics. For obvious reasons, this was not the soundtrack for the movie Hotel Rwanda which recounted the genocidal massacre where Hutus slaughtered between 500,000 to 1,000,000 million Tutsis in Rwanda in 3 months in 1994.

Whatever one thinks about religion, it is clear that the major religions have been a unifying and civilizing force in urging proper behavior and respect for others.

However, religious belief is not self-evident and cannot be proven. The prominent commentator David Brooks has recently said that religious belief is a difficult thing and that one would be lucky to wake up 3 days out of 10 having “faith.”  The notion of a next or eternal life requires a leap of faith, one which our ancestors have usually made whether they were Neanderthals, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists.

But what if you’re not willing to make that leap of faith? Perhaps you do not believe in God and think he or she is a construct created by man and that worshipping him or her is as silly as the mythical indigenous tribe which worshiped a Coke bottle which had fallen from the sky.

The only nontheistic system which has taken hold and currently holds sway is communism. It explicitly disavows a belief in God and in the eternal world and, instead, proposes to organize the material world in such a way that, in effect, it can create heaven on earth. The only problem is that the overseers of that system have repeatedly committed “peccata mundi.” whether that be a gulag in Siberia or a cleansing “cultural revolution” in China. Mass detentions and mass murders have regularly been ordered, all in the name of preserving the purity of the “revolution” and the dominance of the State.

Then, of course, there is the single individual who just doesn’t believe in God or an eternal life. He or she tries to do their best to live appropriately as that is defined in their particular time.

Gratefully, there is much more in our world than its “sins.” There are also wonderful things like love, generosity, empathy, decency, compassion, courage, honesty, selflessness, heroism, wisdom and all the creations of the human mind in art, literature and music.

A number of years ago, sitting in the Istanbul airport after spending 5 days in Jerusalem, I asked my friend why he was a believing Catholic. His reply was simple: Catholicism had been given to him by his parents and they hadn’t steered him wrong on anything else. At the time, I thought that was an odd response, one that could’ve been given by a good Jewish son, a good Muslim son, a good Hindu son, a good Buddhist son or, for that matter, the good son of an atheist.

However, upon reflection, I believe that there is great insight in that response in that it acknowledges the wisdom conveyed by all previous generations. It doesn’t settle the question of religious belief but it certainly frames it properly.

In wartime, they say that there are no atheists in foxholes. The same is true for most older people who are keenly aware of their approaching expiration date. Death is not only the great leveler but it pretty much demands that you sit up and take notice. In some cases, an older person’s newly found religion may be the equivalent of the sailor who sets an anchor to windward in the event of an unlikely but possible storm.

My meditation ends here. This is what I believe (at least today) and this seems to be a distillation of all that has been passed on to us by preceding generations. Human beings have an eternal or divine spark or soul and this demands that we behave appropriately and avoid “peccata mundi.” We will be rewarded for this. This is the accumulated wisdom handed on to Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist children by their parents.

As my friend said, his parents hadn’t steered him wrong on anything else.