Faith: July 2020 Archives
Malcolm Gladwell: How I Rediscovered Faith - Relevant
"Le Chambon is an area of France called the Vivarais Plateay - a remote mountainous region near the Italian and Swiss borders. For many centuries, the area has been home to dissident Protestant groups, principally the Huguenots, and during the Nazi occupation of France, Le Chambon become a very open and central pocket of resistance....
"Where did the people of Le Chambon find the strength to defy the Nazis? The same place the Derksens found strength to forgive. They were armed with the weapons of the spirit. For over 100 years, in the 17th and 18th centuries, they had been ruthlessly persecuted by the state. Hugeunot pastors had been hanged and tortured, their wives sent to prison and their children taken from them. They had learned how to hide in the forests and escape to Switzerland and conduct their services in secrecy. They had learned how to stick together.
"They saw just about the worst kind of persecution that anyone can see. And what did they discover? That the strength granted to them by their faith in God gave them the power to stand up to the soldiers and guns and laws of that state....
"What I understand now is that I was one of those who did not appreciate the weapons of the spirit. I have always been someone attracted to the quantifiable and the physical. I hate to admit it. But I don't think I would have been able to do what the Huguenots did in Le Chambon. I would have counted up the number of soldiers and guns on each side and concluded it was too dangerous. I have always believed in God. I have grasped the logic of Christian faith. What I have had a hard time seeing is God's power.
"I put that sentence in the past tense because something happened to me when I sat in Wilma Derksen's garden. It was one thing to read in a history book about people empowered by their faith. But it is quite another to meet an otherwise very ordinary person, in the backyard of a very ordinary house, who has managed to do something utterly extraordinary.
"Their daughter was murdered. And the first thing the Derksens did was to stand up at the press conference and talk about the path to forgiveness. 'We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people's lives.'
"Maybe we have difficulty seeing the weapons of the spirit because we don't know where to look, or because we are distracted by the louder claims of material advantage. But I've seen them now, and I will never be the same."
