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St. John of the Cross
St. John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic shown in this painting by Zurbaran, wrote of the soul's struggle toward union with God in "The Dark Night of the Soul," a similar sense of spiritual desolation that the Rev. Charles Moore seemed to indicate in notes written prior to his death.
How can we understand the death of someone like the Rev. Charles Moore, who set himself on fire June 23 in a small east Texas town as a final act of protest against the injustices of The United Methodist Church?
Hundreds of words have been written about the 79-year-old retired pastor who became overwhelmed with a sense that his life and ministry had failed to alleviate the world's suffering (see accompanying links). Some have been quick to condemn his self-immolation as the act of a madman, while others have been equated his death as a kind of martyrdom. Yet the horrific manner of his dying has achieved one of Rev. Moore's goals, namely causing those who hear the story of his death to stop and assess their own lives and practices as followers of Jesus.
On a human scale, many of us might consider Rev. Moore's self-immolation to be a selfish act. He left behind a loving wife, children and grandchildren, as well as friends, colleagues and a legacy of preaching, teaching and serving in ministries of social justice. He had pushed – some say agitated – for civil rights in the 1960s. He had revived dwindling churches with powerful sermons on social holiness, and had flung open church doors to include gays and lesbians in congregational leadership long before anyone else. In 1995, for example, he went on a 15-day hunger strike to protest United Methodism's stances holding homosexual practice to be "incompatible with Christian teaching" and barring LGBT people from ordination. His fast prompted the Council of Bishops to issue a statement saying they regretted their role in fostering stigma against gays and urging churches to welcome them, but the bans remained church law.
Such radical acts of protest punctuate history's long arc toward justice. The father of Indian independence, Mohandas K. Gandhi, called this type of discipline "satyagraha," a Sanskrit word roughly translated as "insistence on truth," or more colloquially, "soul force." The contemporary organization advocating LGBT rights, Soul Force, draws its name from this principle. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used Gandhi's principles of nonviolent resistance in the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, while other activists used it in the 1980s against South Africa's political system known as "apartheid" (an Afrikaans term meaning "racial separation").
Many people alive today remember how, in the 1950s and '60s, Buddhist monks immolated themselves in protest of the Vietnam War and of corruption by foreign-backed governments. More recently, Buddhists have immolated themselves in protest of China's occupation of Tibet.
Yet for all its allure of faithfulness unto death, the principles of such a discipline come under sharp criticism. Sir Richard Attenborough's 1980 film, "Gandhi," goes so far as to have more than one character question the rightness of doing violence to oneself as a means of drawing attention to injustice. "I know that you are right," one of Gandhi's disciples says as he fasts to stop riots between Hindus and Muslims. "I don't know that THIS is right."
This doubt is perhaps the greatest legacy of the Rev. Charles Moore's final act. He sacrificed all – wife, family, reputation, and life itself – to bear witness to the injustice of the world's prejudices against people of different races and sexual orientations. Such an act confronts and confounds us, because it challenges us to look both within and beyond ourselves as to how we live in community.
One of Rev. Moore's colleagues, the Rev. Sid Hall, pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Austin, Texas, told the Dallas Morning News recently that the hallmark of his friend's life and ministry was "radical inclusiveness." That term that has become trendy in church-growth principles of the past several years, but to Charles Moore and others, it far outstrips the concept of mere welcome.
Sadly, Rev. Moore's devotion to the idea that contentious, self-centered human beings should live together in radical welcome apparently tempted him into an ultimate act of separation – severing all human connections to family and friends in the hope that his death would bring about the redemption he believed was needed. In spiritual terms, Rev. Moore's condition resembles what St. John of the Cross termed "the dark night of the soul" – a profound sense of desolation, of separation from God.
Rev. Moore's choice to enact a painful death rather than continuing to struggle through life echoes the sacrifice of Jesus closely enough to make us squirm. In the laments of Rev. Moore's family and friends since his death, we hear Peter imploring Jesus not to go to Jerusalem where certain death awaits, and we hear Jesus' harsh reply, "Get behind me, Satan." Peter cannot bear to think of losing his friendship with Jesus, while Jesus sees a call to confront oppressive powers with God's truth, even at the risk of death, for the sake of others. This is an agony of compassion for others that engulfed the Rev. Charles Moore, and in his mind only his death could express it.
Rev. Moore's self-described rationale for his death limns what many can see as a crisis of faith. Somehow he couldn't trust any longer that God's love and justice would prevail over the world's cruelty. He took upon himself the kind of agony that only God can bear, and it overwhelmed him to the point of death. The immensity of such a burden demonstrates how much we need one another as we travel the journey of faith, because humans are incapable of standing up to this reality alone. In the midst of such darkness, we need the help of others to find our way. Sadly, Charles Moore apparently was unable to reach out for such communal benefit. In mourning his death, we can honor his life by being more compassionate, and more alert to those among us who need us to help bear their burdens.
Cynthia B. Astle is coordinator for United Methodist Insight.