How do we seek the Kingdom?

A Reflection for the Memorial of Saint Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr

Find today’s readings here.

In his debut novel, Satan in Goray, Isaac Singer created a fable of the ruin and riot that will always be the reward when the faithful conspire to manage God’s time according to the calendar of their own desires.

Singer’s Goray was a fictional town, but students of the Yiddish short-story impresario say it resembles the real-life town of Goraj, in southeastern Poland. Goraj is about a 63-mile drive to the border with Ukraine, where cities are now under siege in the contemporary drama between the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

Heading about 500 miles in the opposite direction, north toward Belarus, a traveler will reach the town of Vitebsk, the place where St. Josaphat was killed in 1623. Nov. 12 is the memorial of this saint, bishop and martyr. He was murdered by Orthodox Christians infuriated by his determination to remain united with the Roman Church.

St. Josaphat was born in the land that is now part of modern-day Ukraine. The villagers in Singer’s Goray were Jewish strivers and peasants reeling during a period of unrest and Cossack-authored massacres of Jews and Poles during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648, not too many years after the martyrdom of St. Josaphat.

The region which now almost daily hosts appalling crimes upon noncombatants caught under Vladimir Putin’s merciless missiles has for centuries been a territory of unrest and human suffering and indifference to the same. During the brutal, impoverished times depicted in Singer’s novel, Polish Jews suffered a holocaust long before the Holocaust that was beginning when Satan in Goray was first published in 1935. Who can blame the Jews of Singer’s story—and his era—for believing they were inhabiting their own end times, people in desperate need of a messiah, even one incarnated by their own imagination and despair?

Singer’s peasant and merchant residents of Goray sought an escape from their relentless suffering and terror in a communal delusion of the messiah in their midst, acting in their time to save their people. Josaphat’s mob was enraged to have their vision of a celestial kingdom on earth challenged by the saintly remonstrance of a once beloved church leader.

Now Mr. Putin follows a self-conceived messianic mission, rampaging for a temporal kingdom that will restore the Russian imperial map across Europe.

How do we seek the Kingdom? Are we in our way bent on a command performance of a messiah, created and compelled to serve our desires? History and literature concur on the disastrous outcomes of such hubris and foolishness.

But if the Kingdom is not something we can command into being, Jesus reminds us that it is something we participate in all the same, not in obsession or arrogance, but in the way we lead our lives: faithful, patient, accepting thy will be done.

The Kingdom is beyond our temporal reality. At the same time, it lies within our reach. We do not have to seek out in desperate pilgrimage what is around us, nor can we ignore our obligation in faith and love to be builders of the Kingdom already among us and the future we will never see.

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