Fr. Seán ÓLaoire

You take a very complex phenomenon, you try to articulate it on a bumper sticker.

The second stage always is that you either identify or you create an enemy.

The third stage is that you dehumanize the enemy.

And the fourth stage is you make war on it.

And you see this happen again and again and again.

You saw it with Jews throughout human history.

The radical reduction of Judaism, you know, some bumper stickers.

The vilification, you know, calling them by all kinds of foul names and then making war on them.

You saw it in Rwanda in the 1990s between the Tutsis and the Hutus, you know, the very same thing that you radically reduce a complex tribal situation to a bumper sticker and then you start calling them cockroaches with the name that the Hutu had for the Tutsis, you know, and then you declare war on them and then you wipe them out.

There were like 950,000 people killed in a three-month period during that.

And I see that again, that the essence of fundamentalism is that you go through those four stages.

Simplification, defining or creating an enemy, dehumanizing the enemy, and then making war on the enemy.

And I see the exact opposite happening with mysticism.

And mysticism is a refusal to use cataphatic language.

Cataphatic language is, you know, the language that purports to describe God in infinite detail, who God is, what God had for breakfast.

And the opposite of that is apophatic, the language of neti neti.

X, God is not X. Y, God is not Y. How about Z?

God is not Z. You can't articulate God.

So instead of reducing the complex, you're realizing it's a mystery.

You have to embrace the mystery.