Cliff Loesch
December 30, 2012
The Golden Rule
I recently finished reading a novel called The Good Son, by Michael Gruber. The central character in the book is Sonia Bailey Laghari, an American woman who married a Pakistani man. After living for a while in Pakistan she did some traveling through parts of Asia and the Middle East and ended up in Switzerland where she became a trained therapist. As one reviewer put it, the plot “jump starts when Sonia, now living in America, leads an international team of academics back to Pakistan for a peace conference that gets ambushed by terrorists en route to its meeting spot. As it turns out, Sonia is more than the terrorists bargained for…” http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7667756-the-good-son
While in captivity, Sonia was beaten by the captors, but she also managed to communicate with them in ways that probably helped keep everyone alive. Among those invited to this peace conference were two Quakers—a man and his wife. Unfortunately, the Quaker man completely fell apart in this terrible situation. The thought of losing his life was more than he could bear and he had a mental breakdown. All he could do was close off from the others and weep. He could not speak or respond to any attempts by the others to reach out to him. It was a total breakdown. His wife handled the situation with much more strength. But she could hardly believe how this had affected her husband. He had managed peace negotiations in many parts of the world in the past. And now to see him falling apart was very difficult.
I tried not to take this personally—that the Quaker man in this novel fell apart when his own life was possibly about to end in violence. I mean, the breakdown could happen to anyone. I hope I would show much more courage and strength if anything so terrible happened to me. But who can say how they would actually react unless they faced the experience for themselves.
The end of the novel was a disappointment in some ways. Not only did it take some unexpected turns—but I was a little dismayed by the final message I thought was conveyed.
Sonia Bailey Laghari’s son was in the U.S. Army and was able to instigate a rescue mission for his mother and the others who were held hostage. I’ll skip all the details of how he managed to pull this off. But it was the direction things took after the rescue that I didn’t like. The son quit the U.S. military and decided to move back to join the Pakistani side of his family and he got involved with the family business. His uncle basically ran the company, but Theo was the muscle. And he protected the business with what we would call Mafia-style tactics—with lots of Mafia-style violence. Brutal violence. But in this new life, the son had finally achieved a kind of balance in life. And seemed happy.
So the message the book left to me was that violence is the way. If you want to have a peaceful life then you have to do it to them before they do it to you. You have to be comfortable with violence and you have to be willing to use violence to maintain your place—to keep all the evil and violence of others from getting to you.
I even began to reconsider how I viewed the Quaker breakdown. Maybe it really was a stab against Quakers. Or a jab at anyone who would recommend a non-violent approach to life. Maybe it was a way of saying that there is no place for non-violent negotiation in our world. It doesn’t work. It won’t ultimately change anything. Only violence is effective at restraining the forces of evil.
On the other hand, maybe the author pushed that point home at the end to get people to think. I mean, is this really the world that we want? A world where only violence can deliver some level of stability?
That is certainly not the world that I want. It may be the world that we’ve got to some extent. But it is not the world that we want.
Even this novel spent a little time talking about successful peace efforts. There have been many times and places around the globe where war has been avoided and where ethnic cleansings have been stopped cold with very little bloodshed during the intervention. Some of these were mentioned in the novel and we need to create many more such examples in our world today.
Even though each one of us have felt a little of the impotence and futility and fear that was represented in the breakdown of the Quaker man in that novel—now is not the time to give up on peacemaking. What can love do? What can goodness accomplish? How can these tame things face up against the overwhelming greed in our world? Or the levels of hate and violence that we see? But now is not the time to give up on peacemaking.
The way of Jesus may seem weak or ineffective against the chaos of our world—to love your enemy, to put others first, to lay down your life for your friends—but the Scriptures reveal that in the self-sacrificing way of Jesus there is resurrection power.
George Fox, the founder of the Quakers saw the reality of darkness and death—but he saw the other side as well. Fox said, “I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness…”
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him.”
William Penn once said, “Let us try, then, what love can do.”
It is time to expand our efforts to make a positive difference in our world. A couple of years ago People of Faith for Peace co-sponsored a couple of seminars on The Golden Rule and I think I gave at least one message on that topic.
It occurred to me recently that the Golden Rule may be a good topic to begin every new year. If anyone wants to be a follower of Christ—that’s a good place to begin. If anyone wants to grow in faith—getting back to this basic principle is also a good place to begin.
The Golden Rule, found in Matthew 7:12 says simply, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
Have you ever reflected on the question, “How, exactly, do you want other people to treat you?”
I found a story in Daily Guideposts recently where Madge Harrah told about being on a stroll one day. (September 19, 1986) She said she saw a boy of about ten walking toward her. Not long before she had encountered some mischievous teenagers who had teased her. Not wanting to risk another incident like that, she said she frowned and turned her head away as the boy passed. But then she heard the boy say, “Aren’t you gonna speak to me?”
She said, “I wheeled to find him peering toward me with a tentative smile. Immediately contrite, I said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry. Hello!’ His freckled face split open in a wide grin. ‘Hi. Have a nice day.’”
This was a small and simple incident. But there were several things that Madge Harrah realized from it—and a couple of things I noticed as well.
She noticed how she had completely turned around the Golden Rule. She had passed along the unfriendliness of the earlier group of kids—instead of treating this particular boy as she would like to be treated.
And I ask again: “How, exactly, do you want other people to treat you?”
I would submit that the little boy in this story was living the Golden Rule. He treated Madge exactly as he wants to be treated. He wants to be noticed by others, spoken to in a friendly way by others, and maybe even to have others challenge him and pull the friendliness out of him.
Ms. Harrah, on the other hand, treated the boy exactly the opposite of the way she would like to be treated.
How, exactly, do you want other people to treat you? And do you make an intentional and sustained effort to treat others exactly that way?
Living the Golden Rule will not change the world overnight. But living the Golden Rule will make a little difference in the short term—and possibly a lot of difference in the long run.
Cliff Loesch 