I continue to read Eugene Peterson’s The Jesus Way . This morning I was challenged by his comments on zealotry.
Zealotry continues. It continues to be admired by many. It is hard to eradicate it from the human spirit, especially the religious human spirit. When we believe that God is on our Side, that we have a mission to perform sanctioned by God, it is easy to do anything that we think will he effective using force, pushing, bullying, manipulating, and, YE’S, killing – to bring victory to God. It is virtually irresistible when the opposition is identified as evil.
Thomas Merton is blunt and uncompromising in his warning:
We must be on our guard against a kind of blind and immature zeal-the zeal of the enthusiast or the zealot which represents precisely a frantic compensation for the deeply personal qualities which are lacking to us. The zealot is man who “loses himself” in his cause in such a way that he can no longer “find himself” at all. Yet paradoxically this “loss” of himself is not the salutary selfforgetfulness commanded by Christ. It is rather an immersion in his own willfulness conceived of as the will of an abstract, nonpersonal force: the force of a project or program.