Hagia Sophia, Confederate Statues, and Batman

“As long as we dwell on how someone offends us, we have no peace” ~Elder Thaddeus

All cards face up and I will push them to the center of the table: I am an Orthodox Christian. I am white from a southern heritage. And I love Batman (the Christopher Nolan one). What do these three have in common? They represent a way of life that is valued for its good. They are also reflective of a type of moral place in society that battles for truth and justice.

What makes these ideals difficult, even diabolical, depends upon the viewpoint and the lens through which these cultures and beliefs are experienced. If you are an Orthodox Christian, you will likely view Hagia Sophia differently than if you are Muslim. If you are a white Southerner, you will likely view a Confederate statue differently than if you are an African-American. This emotional dichotomy drives—even torments—the character of Bruce Wayne between what he is (the heir of a corrupt politician who favors the rich) and the person he wants to be (a legend of truth and justice). 

I am using the Hagia Sophia, Confederate statues, and Batman as literary illustrations of a basic human psychological phenomenon. Truth be known, I am a convert to Orthodoxy and have never visited the Middle East. I was born and reared in Oklahoma which was not even a state during the Civil War (though partial credit is given in that my mother was from Alabama). And I am not sure of the difference between Marvel and DC Comics. (Please don’t stop reading—I was joking about the comics.) We are never quite everything that we believe we are.

The need to convert or kill who we fear, to tear down a grievous sin or trauma, or to put a mask over the person we wish we weren’t is part of the mental scaffolding of the human condition. In psychological terms, we would call it “denial” or “projection.” Our anger, misbehavior, and destruction is the language of the wounded. How do we bring healing to these wounds in ourselves and others?

David, the King of Israel and the arbitrator of Divine retribution, is also the adulterer of Bathsheba and the murderer of her husband. And yet we pray and sing his songs as the foundation of our Christian worship. We call him “a man after God’s own heart.” Does he not deserve to be “canceled”? In Psalm 50 (Septuagint), Saint David says, “My sin is ever before me.”

Remembering is the first necessary act of repentance: “Don’t you remember when you….”And remembering is the central act of Christian worship: “Do this in remembrance of Me.” No transformation can take place without remembrance. Remembrance is not simple recall. Remembrance is entering into another time with emotion, thought, and will. Remembrance is cohabitating with past history. We take a pilgrimage back in order to move forward with a peace that heals. One submits to history transforming us, without us transforming it.

We do not visit the past to forget or destroy it. We visit the past so that, by the mercy of God, it stays ever before us—both individually and communally, its light and its darkness. Forgiveness and resilience are not produced by guilt held onto—they are born from guilt faced, so that you can be set free.

The primary agony with the Hagia Sophia is not that it has been turned back into a mosque with drapes covering the icon of Christ. Rather, it’s that most Christians throughout the world have no idea what the Hagia Sophia is. And while they may have some vague recall of it being a church in Turkey, we do not remember the Hagia Sophia. We don’t visit it with our soul. It is a meaningless relic of Church history that we have not made part of our personal history. To become outraged now, knowing nothing more than “the Muslims have taken over our Church,” seems disingenuous.

And the same can be said of Confederate statutes. The problem is not the statues of white generals who owned slaves that are put in public parks; it is that most of us have never stopped to look at the statue. And even fewer have gone home to read about the “guy” in the statue. 

I understand the righteous anger of destroying a statue or structure that symbolizes slavery or an oppressed way of life (like a statue of Lenin or a Berlin Wall). But the desire to “ethnically cleanse” the Confederate South by destroying any statues or monuments of people who owned slaves is counterproductive to “changing the hearts and minds” of those in our culture. You don’t destroy the evil of history by destroying the history. You destroy the evil by keeping the history—by staring at it, and remembering it ever before me. If you want to wake up a Christian Southern white boy like me, keep showing me the photographs of the young black man hanging from a tree with white Christian men around him who could be my grandfather. Make sure I see that. Just tearing up a picture of my grandfather does nothing but incite me to strike back.

And as for Batman, he is driven by his childhood memory that he cannot escape. He is a dark knight who is much more like the villains than he can bare to admit. The sin of “being just like my enemy” is ever before him. He even dresses like his inner demons. Batman is plagued because he cannot stop remembering. But Batman, unlike King David, struggles with receiving mercy. Justice is the shackle on his soul.

There is a Russian proverb in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, “Look at history and lose an eye. Neglect history and you will go blind.” We need history, both personal and communal. We need monuments, statues, symbols, and images from history, especially the shameful ones, so they can “be ever before us.” We desperately need to tell stories of the full, complicated, and often dark, incongruent lives behind the curtains, buried underneath the monuments. We must come to the realization that we have been on both sides of the drapes which separate the Koran from Christ. When we see the white Confederate statue, we must know that any of us, regardless of the color of our skin, has the capacity to put one man in stone and another in chains. In a sense, we are all Batman, a dark complex figure, as much villain as hero, as much criminal as king, as much sinner as saint. We do not become our “better selves” by tearing down and covering up our worst self; nor by putting on a mask and becoming a vigilante. 

Admittedly, I have taken three topics of which I know little only to make the point that we must see the enemy in us, and we must see ourselves in our enemy. We must make peace with that enemy. Only by the grace of God can we then “come to ourselves,” turn around and face ourselves, take down the curtains and the capes, walk humbly with our sin ever before us, and remember the love and mercy of the Father who gives us the freedom to live with ourselves.