'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free...

Happy 4th of July, friends.  I've been blazing through The Book of Mev, written by my friend Dr. Mark Chmiel about his late wife, Mev Puleo, in which Mark mentions that she used rosary beads every night to pray "gratitudes," coming up with one thing per bead that she was grateful for from that day.  Not a bad practice, that, especially on a day such as today, when we all celebrate what we have to be grateful for.  Out here in Klagetoh, there is no shortage of blessings that readily come to mind, but I think today I am most grateful for the ability to work with my hands - both that I have the physical health and energy to do so, but that in a place like this I can get out of the very cerebral world I too easily occupy.  Some friends in Albuquerque showed me an article about a guy who, after finishing his Ph.D., decided to open a motorcycle shop and now couldn't be happier.  How much does our educational system bore the pants off of young people who are naturally inclined to be physically active, engaged, mobile, by keeping them in a desk all day, every day?  Also, how much have we exalted clerical [cubicle?] work over important skills and knowledge bases that are less narrowly cerebral, like knowing how to work on a car, make something grow, repair faulty plumbing, etc?  We have been trained to hire someone else to do that.  I lament how few real-world skills I have apart from being able to read a lot of books, but that has been far and away the bulk of my educational career.  Here, however, there are always things to putter with, projects to work on, ways to get one's hands dirty, and for that I am grateful.  Today I replaced the faucet on a sink - not difficult, but dirty (just ask the half-decayed mouse corpse that was sharing the space under the sink with me!), and started putting in a screen door on the house.  As with everything else out here, the door frame is not the standard size or construction, so we have to fiddle with it to make it work, but even that is part of the fun.

(*top: new sink, installed; bottom: old sink, in pieces.*)

One of those real-world skills which I totally lack is cooking, but Br. John has that ability in spades, so while I am out here I get to learn from the master - never from a recipe, always, as he puts it, "Once in a lifetime, never to be repeated."  Whatever is in the house is fair game - last night it was spaghetti sauce made from artichoke hearts, habanero salsa, and a few other things from the back of the fridge, and Brussels sprouts sauteed with sweet peppers, almonds, and beer.  John's cooking is usually unusual, but somehow it is always amazing, like the old Bob Ross "Joy of Painting" shows: no mistakes, only happy accidents.

In the spirit of the day, a bit more on freedom: I just finished Erich Fromm's classic work Escape from Freedom, the basic premise of which is that while we have spent so much energy on the removal of external constraints in the name of freedom, we have yet to deal with the problem of psychic constraints that prevent real freedom - pressure to conform, fear of ambiguity and uncertainty, the sense of the individual as powerless, as a blip in the face of the overwhelming juggernaut of the world of our times.  With apologies for the pre-inclusive language of the quote, think about this little nugget: "modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want." (251)  So many of my students and even some of my adult colleagues and friends, despite living in a nation that prides itself on freedom, feel "stuck" - go to high school to go to a good college to get a well-paid job to make a lot of money to retire comfortably.  Not bad, per se, but, as I call it, "the sausage grinder," shoving people through a pre-packaged version of what they are supposed to want out of life.  This, coupled with the ease with which people sign on to movements which promise certitudes, absolutes, final answers, because the plurality of voices in our world can be not only scary but overwhelming.  So, as the bumper stickers say, "Freedom isn't free": not in the usual sense of justifying body counts in the name of preserving our freedoms from external constraints, but in the sense that dealing with internal constraints costs us everything we thought we held dear.  Hence the theological commonplace that Jesus on the cross is, paradoxically, the picture of a free man.  Not "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," but freedom as the capacity to not have one's life and choices dictated by convention or by one's own fears or need for control.  So, gratitudes abound here, and may they also for you...

Klagetoh

I’ve been back in the Navajo Nation for a few days now, and lots of fun things as well as some important things have happened along the way.  First, the 20-ish hour drive from New Orleans to Klagetoh was more or less uneventful, except for the travel center sign that read, "Eat here.  Get gas." (I can only presume they knew what they were doing) and that the 35-hour-long audiobook of The Brothers Karamozov that I brought with me has been disappointing so far; I know it’s a classic, but the writing style that spends entire chapters discussing someone’s appearance or some feature of the landscape just doesn’t do it for me.  Maybe that is me being impatient, but 6 CDs into the book, there has not been very much actual plot development; I’m still not quite sure what the plot actually is.

Thursday we (my friend and former co-worker Ben) went to St. Michael’s (the high school I used to teach at) to help the maintenance folks break up an old sidewalk – they had said we would be able to use a jackhammer, which was the main reason I wanted to go, but they had decided to put off getting the jackhammer until later on.  Anyway, they handed us sledgehammers and told us to go to work; not as much fun, but still a good way to spend a day.  We did get help from one of the maintenance guys with a Bobcat, so we broke up and hauled a lot of concrete that day, to the point that we were pretty wrecked that day and still not quite back to 100%.

Today (Saturday) was a trip to Canyon de Chelly, followed by a sweatlodge at the mission.  They asked me to be the fire man for the sweat, which means nothing more than that I got to dig white-hot rocks out of a blazing fire, close enough to scald me all over.  I spent a lot of time in there thinking about what has kept me coming back here all these years – certainly I love the landscape, the ritual life, the pace, and so on, but I think that the mentoring I get from Br. John, who runs the mission here, is something I crave.  John exudes what I would call Grandfather Energy – that unhurried wisdom that comes from a lifetime of living the religious life well, and even while I admit he isn’t perfect (and he wouldn’t be upset by me saying so), he gives young folks like me a space to “apprentice” with him.  That is, I spend my time here going with him to visit families, working with him to prepare meals for groups coming in, making trips into town for supplies, and other seemingly menial things that let me learn his way of doing things by directly watching him do it – something one does not do so easily as a teacher or a person working a desk job.

19 June 2009 - Feast of the Sacred Heart

Walter Brueggemann does a lecture on today’s reading from Hosea 11, imagining it to be rather like a parent who has to go to the police station at 3am to pick up his/her child. The selection in the Catholic Lectionary cuts out parts of the whole pericope, but the mood of the poem starts almost wistfully: “When Israel was a child I loved him, out of Egypt I called my son.” I kept reaching out to them, and they kept going further and further away, it continues, as if God is thinkning back on when Israel was a little boy and wondering where God went wrong as a parent. Somewhere between verses 4 and 5, Brueggemann says, the child says something smart-alecky while they are driving home from the police station, and the parent loses it: “God, though in unison they cry out to him, will not raise them up.” But then, and this is what I love, God finds new depths of compassion in God’s own self between verses 7 and 8: “How could I give you up, O Ephraim?” “I’m not gonna do this anymore,” God seems to say, aghast at seeing God’s own potential for violence revealed. And Brueggemann concludes that on the day Hosea wrote that, he went home for lunch and told his wife Gomer, “I wrote one hell of a poem today, and it’s going to help God out a lot.” That conflicted, heartbroken inner life of God is a far cry from what we usually expect to find in God in the Old Testament, but in its own way, I think it is more there than in the New Testament, in which God is much more of a behind-the-scenes kind of character. Today is the Feast of the Sacred Heart, so I think that reading fits pretty well – a God whose heart is torn apart by the sufferings caused by the people’s infidelity to a covenant of justice and mercy. Much of the devotional stuff regarding the Sacred Heart has been pretty sappy, but insofar as the Heart is broken by solidarity with those who suffer, it remains a viable symbol. I have suggested elsewhere that what makes Jesus’ heart different from ours is that we characteristically try to avoid pain and vulnerability via denial, numbing, and whatever other means of keeping the suffering of the world at arms’ length, whereas Jesus faces it all head-on and doesn’t run, doesn’t deny. The Heart of Jesus is sacred in that it is open to (and opened by) the unspeakable sufferings of the world. We as Christians (myself very much included) have somehow accustomed ourselves to glazing over a lot of suffering, and to silence in the face of a lot of injustice. Perhaps because our media are so loaded with the myriad atrocities of the world on a daily basis, or because of the ambiguities of so many of the moral issues presented us, we can get saturated, so we turn off, tune out, distract and deny. I have been reading a decent amount of Holocaust literature of late, and I can say from my own inner reactions, I understand the desire to push away. Every time I think I have seen it all, humanity surprises me with its capacity for inventive and sadistic means of inflicting pain and death.

What, then, is the point of not denying, if we are so drowned in violence? Speaking out seems to either be ignored (if we are lucky) or bring repercussions into our ordered little lives, but the Sacred Heart is about permeability to suffering – being hurt is less important than the demands of love for the wounded Other. In his book Torture and Eucharist, William Cavanaugh talks about how torture atomizes people, both because they are rendered too fearful to speak and because pain at that level is beyond verbal sharing, so people are isolated in their pain. The antidote, he suggests, based on the experience of the church in Colombia, is Eucharist: a re-membering of the Body of Christ by telling the stories of tortured, broken bodies, and not letting silence and fear have the final word. What that looks like in an affluent, safe church like our own is worth exploring, but some part of it has to be about solidarity that includes saying, “Stop torturing. Stop silencing those who suffer.” If we Brothers of the Sacred Heart can figure out some piece of that, we can reclaim the spirituality of the Heart of Jesus for a world that desperately needs it. Happy Feast Day, Brothers and friends. Ametur Cor Jesu.

summertime, and the living is easy...

After a couple of weeks away from St. Louis, I am realizing that this is a much less structured summer than I have had in a long time. I have been spending a few days at a time here and there: Mississippi, Alabama, New Orleans, Baton Rouge. I’m off to Arizona in a couple of days, and I’ll be there for about 3 weeks, but even there I don’t have a lot of stuff planned, and once I get back, there is nothing on the agenda for almost three weeks. I like that a lot, it’s just unfamiliar to me. There are about 2 dozen books that I had assigned myself to read this summer, and I have gotten through about 6 of them so far, so that will be a big part of my task in the next couple of months. I just finished Kite Runner this afternoon, after having it on my shelf for months, and when I finished it I went right to Walter Brueggemann’s The Message of the Psalms. I mention that because it was an interesting connection to read Brueggemann’s comments on psalms of lament and see the line, “grievance addressed to an authorized partner does free us…we do not move beyond the repressed memory unless we speak it out loud to one with authority who hears.” (58) Given the tenor of Kite Runner, a fitting juxtaposition.

Elsewhere Brueggemann is talking about the Biblical presupposition that praying prompts God to do things that God would not do without the prayer. In one of his conferences online, he discusses how the faculty of a theological school, upon hearing him address them on this issue, got all worked up, with the Biblical folks on his side and the systematics folks unable to handle the idea that God was prompted by the act of praying to do other than God would have done had the prayer not happened. I’m interested in that, because most Christians seem to believe that God doesn’t change, but they act as if God does change (e.g. via intercessory prayer). I am well aware that the Biblical God-image is quite malleable, so prayer in the Biblical tradition can naturally operate this way, but most Christians I know seem to have a much more Platonic than Biblical God-image, so they don’t see God as mutable like Judaism would. Of course, in many of the lament psalms, the implication of why the person is suffering is “because of Yahweh’s irresponsible absence, which is regarded as not only unfortunate, but unfaithful to covenant.” (59) Jon Levenson’s book Creation and the Persistence of Evil pursues that idea, that life is good when God is attentive, but when God turns God’s attention away from us, chaos rushes in, so the task of the sufferer is to call God back to attentiveness. Again, something that I suspect most Christians would not necessarily know what to do with.

So, I ask, not rhetorically, how do you understand what you are doing when you pray? I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, but to pursue how people understand their own actions, since presumably people could do the same act (prayer) within very different theological frameworks. Do you expect that what you pray for will actually happen? We know how often we pray for people who are sick, for example, yet how often they still die, so are people numbed against the expectation that their prayers could actually be efficacious? Yet we keep on praying…Is prayer simply the acknowledgement that we have done all we can, an acknowledgement of our creatureliness, an act of humility against the self-importance of our managing minds? Is it some sort of psychological trick we play on ourselves? Mere social convention, done without thought or theological expectation? For the three or four people who actually ever read this pitiful attempt at a blog, please let me know what prayer, particularly prayer that seems oriented to "asking for stuff," means to you.

Ascension and postmodernity

Today was the Feast of the Ascension, which has always been interesting to me as a student of Biblical interpretation, because only the Lucan texts (Luke and Acts of the Apostles) recount the Ascension in their original forms (Mark’s gospel quickly mentions it, but only in the section that scholars generally agree was added later, and which was compiled from the post-resurrection accounts of the other gospels). Anyway, not only is it not mentioned by the other gospels, but within the Lucan tradition, the timeline given for how it operates differs: Luke’s gospel implicitly says that the Ascension happens on the evening of Easter Sunday (the road to Emmaus story happens on Sunday, they go from there right back to Jerusalem, Jesus shows up then and talks to them, takes them out to Emmaus and goes from there). Acts, on the other hand, explicitly says that Jesus taught them for forty days (symbolically significant as “a long time,” rather than a number to be taken at a literal level, but still more than one day). This is interesting to me not because the author of Luke-Acts can’t seem to keep his story straight, but because presumably he knows what he is doing. At the same time, other texts say exactly opposite stuff – for example, Acts has Jesus telling the disciples to stay in Jerusalem, but Matthew, Mark and John have them go to Galilee (that’s where they see Jesus, not in Jerusalem as in Luke-Acts). Again, the organizers of the canon presumably knew what they were doing; they were not stupid, in fact, they were extremely careful readers of Scripture. What we call postmodernity, which is in part about the end of overarching metanarratives that silence counter-testimonies, is in fact not simply a nineteenth- and twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon, but is woven into the very canon of Scripture – those who organized the canon of Scripture deliberately included in the canon texts that made differing claims, without having to take out or edit those problematic discrepancies. They were allowed to sit side by side in tension, without one final answer running roughshod over any of those multiple voices. That is maddening, of course, for people who want to be given one final claim about what “actually happened,” (as if the Bible is simply “camcorder theology”) but I would argue that the Bible reflects well that our lives are all lived in the context of multiple testimonies, none of which ever earns finality in the common discourse. We all know that political liberals and conservatives, for example, have different story lines about what our nation’s identity is about (and of course it isn't simply as clean as "liberal vs. conservative") – witness last week’s competing speeches by Barack Obama and Dick Cheney regarding “enhanced interrogation techniques” – and most of us choose one side in that issue and call that the genuine script of our nation, to the exclusion of the other, but there is no higher authority that finally settles the dispute for everyone. The Constitution theoretically serves that very purpose, people might say, but witness the degree to which it, or any other text or story that could serve as an adjudicating testimony, gets used as a political football by all parties in the debate. Similarly, the Bible gets used as a theological football by those who would see it making monolithic claims: “the Bible says” is a most unhelpful referent for lots of issues that people want to say the Bible is crystal clear about, insofar as there is a multiplicity of perspectives represented therein. Again, maddening for us who so often just want someone to deliver a final answer – I use the image of a person wearing a wristwatch: someone who is wearing one watch likely feels pretty confident about what time it is, but someone wearing multiple watches not only has no idea what time it is without some higher adjudication (looking out a window, for example), but is likely to lose faith in the very possibility of knowing what time it is. The claim that one might “boil down” from all the perspectives of the different gospels and Acts regarding the post-Easter Jesus is that Jesus really is alive with God, or that the totality of Jesus’ being has been taken up into the reality of God’s life, or that Luke-Acts is trying to explain for a Gentile audience what the other texts are trying to communicate for Jewish-Christian audiences, or something like that, but that runs the risk of too easily smoothing them all out into one claim, losing their very narrative quality in favor of seeing them simply as resources out of which Christians can mine doctrines. Were that to be the way we ought to see Scripture, there would be no point in having multiple gospels included in the canon – we would just choose one, or squeeze them all together into one common storyline (as has been attempted repeatedly throughout Christian history, presumably by people who are as uncomfortable with ambiguity as we are). However, life is endlessly (and inherently?) contestational, so that all we can do is keep going back to the various scripts that are there for our perusal and contesting the implications of the choices we make as individuals and as a society for the scripting of our lives...

Saturday, 16 May 2009

The reality of my impending departure from St. Louis is finally sinking in. I was so busy with grading exams and papers during the last week that I didn't really have time to think about it, but now grades are done, students have left, and graduation is over, and I am aware of how many people I have grown so close to over the past three years. Oddly enough, given that I have been living with the Marianists rather than men from my own order, this is the longest I have lived in any one place in thirteen years of religious life. That, plus the fact that I have enjoyed the work so much and have had so many varied opportunities to interact with students, means that there are a lot of people here who have become very special to me, so leaving is painful. That is as it should be, of course - to not miss anyone would mean there was no one whose presence I desired. This weekend has become a whirlwind of chances to see people - after commencement today, one of my students and his parents took me to eat, and then another graduation party this evening. Tomorrow, lunch with a colleague and former professor of mine, then two back-to-back parties for students or friends who just graduated. I genuinely can't wait to get started in Syracuse in the fall, but in the meantime saying farewells to people I have known and cared about for years hurts. Last week we had a closing event at my house for all the students in the Micah program, the residential service-learning community with which I have worked for three years. About fifty students took over the back yard, and included in all the goofing off were slideshows from the freshmen and from the upperclassmen - there are a lot of memories tied in to thatprogram and those people - so I'll post a few photos soon from those slideshows...
On a side note, I was just watching a video of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, and he was talking about his work before and during the Vietnam War to build a school of public service and to care for people who had been traumatized by the war. He referred to the number of widows and orphans that the war created, and as a teacher of Old Testament, my thoughts went to the endless repetitions of the obligation to care for widows, orphans, and aliens (see EX 22:20-21; EX 23:9; LV 19:33; DT 10:18; IS 1:16; IS 10:1-2; etc.) as groups that had no patron and so could easily fall through the cracks of society. While certainly any moment can produce orphans and widows, war naturally produces them in hyperabundance - Nhat Hanh as well as Torah seem to be pointing people to recognition of the underbelly of warfare. Our own community was founded in the wake of the French Revolution, when civil war had not only left large numbers of children orphans, but had decimated any social systems that might have been in a position to care for them. Our community was founded to care for orphans, and of course we have focused on schools for much of our history rather than orphanages (although we still had orphanages until not that long ago), but in a number of places in the global south, our Brothers are returning to that founding work and caring for orphans, although this time they are the product of the AIDS epidemic rather than armed conflict. I love working in the university setting and really (REALLY) want to continue doing so, but I have been reminded of late not to let myself get sucked into the parts of academia which, although attractive, are conducive to getting lost in the ivory tower: a focus on publishing for its own sake, producing "academic b.s." - that which may well be totally accurate but is completely worthless, and allowing myself to stay inside the "bubble" of the university rather than engaging with people living in far less pristine circumstances.

Earth Day (belatedly)

A week or so ago, on Earth Day to be exact, the gospel for the day included John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever should believe in him might not perish but might have eternal life,” which of course famously appears in crudely scrawled letters on pieces of posterboard at any number of public events, from baseball games to pro wrestling tournaments (I almost said it appears at sporting events, but it’s a stretch to call pro wrestling a sport per se). Given that it was Earth Day, it was a particularly appropriate reading: the next verse, which doesn’t show up much at pro wrestling matches, reads, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” John’s gospel was written in part in response to Gnostic groups, which taught that the material world was evil, by contrast with the goodness of the soul, whose task was to escape the prison of the flesh and return to the spiritual realm, the true home of the soul. If that last line sounds something like what you have been taught, that’s because dualism, i.e. seeing the physical realm as evil or inferior to the spiritual, is perhaps the most widespread heresy in Christian history: it has shown up in any number of guises over the centuries, from Gnosticism to Manichaeism to Albigensianism to more modern overspiritualizing of the gospel. “The world” has a particular valence in Gnostic terms, as the defective realm that is to be left behind, so for John to say that God loves the world, and desires to save the world, is exactly not about getting souls out of this mess, but as a transformation of the entire cosmos. We continue too easily to fall prey to that sort of dualism, but Jesus’ own ministry is amazingly holistic – how much time does he spend talking about whether someone is going to heaven or not, and how much time does he spend responding to the sufferings of people’s quotidian lives? N.T. Wright, a widely respected scripture scholar and the Anglican bishop of Durham in England, recently wrote a book entitled Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, in which he argues that the consistent witness of the New Testament is not to heaven as our eschatological hope, but the resurrection. Indeed, Christians of almost every stripe recite the Nicene Creed at their liturgies, and it plainly includes the line, “We believe in the resurrection of the body,” but I have almost never come across a student who has the foggiest idea of what that means (most of them think it means heaven). That dualistic misunderstanding has fueled plenty of suffering in the Church’s history, particularly in the missionary practice of “killing the body to save the soul,” but also in overlooking injustice because the Church’s mission is “spiritual,” meaning uninvolved in overcoming the sufferings caused by social sin and oppression. Resurrection as a symbol points to the renewal and transformation of the entire created reality – rather than “body in the ground, soul in heaven,” the hope of the New Testament is to share in a resurrection like Jesus, who was the “firstborn from the dead (Col. 1:18). God loves the world, not just souls – salvation is not an individualistic reality, but a corporate and holistic one – the crushing weight of sin and suffering are to be saved or overcome, but so is the wrecking of the environment, the destruction of cultures, the abuse of women and children, the denigration of the goodness of our physical reality.

April 1, 2009

Another little piece from my presentation on Monday...

The other day I was in the television room and I came across this film The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey. This guy had been given a very safe reality – a lifelong reality show built around him, but he never knew it – set on an island inside this immense television studio. He had been socialized to stay on that island by keeping him constantly happy and by traumatizing him into fear of the water that surrounded the island. Sounds like the young life of Gautama the Buddha, before the Four Passing Sights led him to begin the quest for enlightenment, but it is also very Biblical. The Hebrew word tehom means both ocean and chaos, and in GN 1 God creates by ordering a preexistent chaotic ocean – which means that God is the provider of order, but also that outside of my neatly ordered world is a scary and dangerous place. Nice way to define boundaries. Anyway, in this film Truman finally can’t live inside the model of reality that had served him for so long – thirty years, the age Jesus starts his ministry, the age Gautama begins his search for enlightenment – so he decides to venture into the chaos, despite his fear, even if death is the result. The show’s producer, less an image of God and more a personification of a deadening and tyrannical order, virtually kills Truman with storms to scare him into going back to safe territory, but to no avail. That old model no longer works, so even if he were to go back, it would be a lie. He sails on until his boat runs into the dome of the “sky” that marks the edge of the massive set that the show is filmed on, and he decides to press on into the unknown world outside of the show. Having faced the chaos of the sea inside that bubble, he was prepared to face the unknown outside of the studio - like an initiation ritual that gives a taste of pain and death to point to the larger truths of both in our lives.

Wednesday, 30 March

A few nice things happened today: I started the day by giving a presentation to the faculty at Chaminade College Prep, a boys' high school in West County, run by the Marianists. A friend from my days in New Orleans is now a campus minister there, so he invited me to talk with them for a couple of hours. When I got back to SLU this afternoon, I had an email waiting for me, offering me a place in the doctoral program in Syracuse University's Religion Department, with an offer of four years of funding. Very exciting, and a huge relief from wondering what kind of jobs I might be able to find in Syracuse if I had not gotten into the program. Wheeee!

Here's a snippet from the talk I gave this morning, which was basically about "the two halves of life" -- what kind of manhood we are forming students into in a school like Chaminade, and what kind of adulthood are those of us further down the road aspiring to? I may include a few samples for the next few entries...

We love the packaging of religion, often, much more than we love the contents, because again, packaging gives us boundaries. We have for too long thought of “Catholic identity” as “what the Catholics do that the Protestants don’t do,” making relatively peripheral aspects of the tradition into the highlights: eating fish on Fridays in Lent, saying the rosary, doing “Mary stuff." In Matthew’s gospel, that’s what Jesus would call “straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel” – and if you think I just said those things don’t matter, remember that Jesus uses that saying to mean to focus on the big stuff without neglecting the rest. I don’t mean that Mary doesn’t matter, rosaries don’t matter, fish on Fridays don’t matter – those are the practices, the rituals, the symbols, that are the stuff of our culture as Catholics – but that they had better fit in to the larger scheme of the coming of the reign of God rather than replacing it. What is the real heart of Catholic identity is, in large part, the same as the heart of Protestant identity (I hope) – the overwhelming grace of God manifest in Jesus Christ, which calls us to forgiveness of enemies, hospitality toward the outsider, nonviolence, respect for the dignity of human life - not just innocent human life, which is fairly easy, but GUILTY human life too (if you don't like that so much, read today's gospel - the woman caught in adultery). Does anyone seriously doubt that any of that is right at the heart of the gospel? If we know anything about Jesus, it’s that he was nonviolent, but how many of our parishes lead training sessions or offer speakers on nonviolence? How many of those same parishes fry fish on Fridays in Lent? (*Note: as I was going to the high school this morning, I missed my turn and had to go through the parking lot of the church next door. Guess what the big sign out front was -- FISH FRY Fridays 4-7pm! Arg.*)

Tuesday, 17 March 2009

DN 3:25, 34-43
PS 25:4-5ab, 6, 7bc, 8-9
MT 18:21-35

I just got back from a campus ministry trip to the Navajo Nation, where I used to live for several years, and it always hurts to see the number of pawn shops and cash advance stores right on the edge of the reservation, as on the edge of every poor community I know. I have seen too many locals come to the Brothers' mission over the years looking for help paying the electric bill, feeding their children, fixing their truck, but I know that if the churches, including the Bro's, were not there to help, they would end up pawning off their heirlooms or getting squeezed on their next paycheck to stay afloat.

Just as it is now, debt was a big deal in the Ancient Near East – the prophets spend a lot of time railing about people who unjustly manipulate the poor into being in debt, and in the First Jewish-Roman War, which began in 66 AD, debt records were among the first things destroyed by the rebelling Jewish forces, because those records kept people in the grip of poverty and exploitation. Jesus talked about debt because just about everyone in his audience knew what it felt like to be in debt. In the parable in today’s gospel, the “huge amount” that the first servant owed to the master was ten thousand talents, literally more than one hundred fifty thousand years’ wages, such an unbelievable sum that, despite the servant’s words that he would repay in full, he would never even come close to repaying it. The second servant’s “much smaller amount,” literally one hundred denarii (one hundred days’ wages), was pitifully small by comparison. Even if the first servant were harassing the second servant so he could try to repay the master, those one hundred denarii would not even begin to make a dent.

We’ve heard all of that before, no doubt, and we know the usual reading of the story: God has forgiven us far more than the little stuff we must forgive each other for imposing on us. All certainly true, but I think the story is also pointing to something much more earthy than that. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr has said somewhere in his many writings that there are only two things that he knows of that really have much chance of teaching us wisdom: suffering and contemplative prayer. I think those two have to go together, because suffering can just as easily turn us in on ourselves, make us self-absorbed, paranoid, and small. That is exactly what happens to the first servant – it is no surprise that the words he uses to ask pardon of the master, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full,” are virtually identical to the words that the second servant uses to ask him for mercy: “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.” The first servant IS the second servant – fearful, disoriented, in need. He had the chance to identify with another person, to let his suffering teach him something about empathy with the rest of the world, and he threw it away, instead letting his suffering turn him in on his own concerns.

I heard a story on NPR the other day about people having to go on welfare for the first time: professionals, people with graduate degrees, and so on, who have been brought so low, to such desperation, by the current global financial mess that they feel no recourse but to go on the dole. Some are applying over the Internet because they cannot bear the shame of being seen in public applying for welfare. This has something to say to us who are at a university – how many of us are here at SLU or any other university pursuing an education or a professional career at least in part to avoid the sort of financial uncertainty that these folks are now facing, presuming that earning that degree or having a job in a place like this will guarantee us perpetual economic stability? Certainly, I don’t wish unemployment or debt or being on the dole on anyone, but perhaps education does us a disservice to the degree that it takes us out of contact with the chaos and precariousness that is the daily bread of a large proportion of the people of the world. I make no claim to understanding the economy or this crisis, but it seems that Jesus’ warning today is coming true: that same system we have created is coming back to haunt us – not the wrath of God, per se, but the consequences of a system built on exploitation and greed. Unless we replace that system with one built on forgiveness, including forgiveness of debts (which is what the Our Father actually says) and solidarity with people whose lives are precarious, we will continue to erect systems that favor profits over people, and they will double back onto us, and we will destroy ourselves.

Thursday, 12 March-on the rez

I want to begin by saying thanks to everyone who has offered their commiserations regarding my last entry.  I'm fine, really - I basically just needed to blow off some steam and process a bit, so apologies to anyone who were worried I was going off the deep end (there are only about five people who ever read this blog, so to get the number of replies that I did makes me think that I overdid it).

I've been back in Klagetoh, in the Navajo Nation, for almost a week now, on a spring break trip with a group of SLU students, and it has been wonderful.  Not only have the students been great, not only has the schedule for the week worked flawlessly, but being in this place has been just what I needed to realign my perspective about not getting into Boston College or Harvard.  All of the game playing of academe, which I typically invest myself in far too heavily, just doesn't matter out here - I'm not going to say there is no game playing, but it is a very different kind of game...I remember reading something from Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, who spends a good portion of his year in a hermitage: he says something about how when he is in there he feels like if he never read another book or gave another talk, it would be ok.  Not because he is ignoring the world or navel-gazing, mind you, but because he sees the sufficiency of life being present to itself, not having to prove anything or think that reading any number of books will deal with the real problem to be solved in the human heart.  No one out here cares about how many books I have or have not read, how many degrees I do or do not have, what schools I did or did not get into.  Life here is lived on a much different scale: an adult child going to prison, an elderly person needing firewood chopped for her wood stove, a parent who comes by the mission because she has run out of food for her children or can't pay her electric bill.  The utter gratuity of my life comes back to me out here, as well as amazement at my own capacity for self-pity.  Today was an absolutely marvelous sweat lodge (challengingly hot, but not crushingly so) run by a guy from Ganado - Rex Begay - who spoke completely honestly about his own time in prison, his return while in prison to both Navajo rituals and Catholicism, and the healing and acknowledgement of one's own brokenness that can happen in the lodge.  This man, who I presume has never taken a theology class in his life, hit the nail more squarely on the head, with more honesty and matter-of-factness, than I do after umpteen years of taking and teaching theology classes.  So, last time I asked what was wrong with me that those schools didn't want me for their doctoral program, and here I am a week later asking myself what I would hope to find in such a setting were I to attend this or that school.  I certainly want to continue my education, but would it have the end result of distancing me from people like Rex Begay or Yolanda Curley or Ailema Benally, or would it give me the space to enter more fully into the formation process that, after thirteen years in community, may be almost ready to begin?

now what?

Over the past week I have gotten letters from Boston College and Harvard, politely telling me that they are very sorry, but they are not able to admit me to their doctoral programs for the fall. On one level that's fine, because the plan from the province is that I go to Syracuse in the fall and pursue doctoral work there, so not being admitted to places that I wasn't going to attend anyway is not a big deal. I can keep telling myself that, but admittedly it's both bruising to the ego and a little fear-inducing to get those letters. Good thing is that it has provided the occasion to observe my own screwy reactions, which I will try to record, but in a stream-of-consciousness pattern that doesn't really correspond to the actual stream of my consciousness. To set the record straight in advance, I'm really not as broken up as the following may suggest; this stuff has simply been in my mind at one point or another in the past week, and it's making me think outside of the nice ordered system I have just assumed would fall into place. So here goes: Getting rid of the letters fairly quickly so no one will see that I just got rejected. Thinking about people I know who have gotten into those places, feeling inferior or jealous or something, then wondering if there were just too many good applicants to admit, or if there was something genuinely deficient in my application. Maybe it's my writing sample, I think - all my papers were written in summer, or while I had a full-time job, so they are not as long or as polished as a full-time student could write. My GPA was good, test scores, competence in languages, teaching experience, cross-cultural work, so what else could the problem be? What does it say about me if I don't get in anywhere, regardless of whether I would choose go there or not?

What do I do, then, if I don't get in anywhere? Would I be able to get a job in this market? Would I be able to pull my own weight for the province? If I don't get in anywhere, maybe using this as an excuse to ask for an assignment to the missions - I've said for ten years that I would go back to Africa in a heartbeat. But then would that spell the end of my academic career if I were to get out of the system now? Is that just me looking for a consolation prize so I could say, "Well, I didn't get this honor, so let me go for this other honorable thing," so I could exit stage left and still look like I've done something noteworthy?

I just finished Joan Chittister's book Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, which deals with a refusal from her community to pursue a graduate degree when she was young, and she works a lot of this stuff to death, but my community isn't the problem - then I could just get mad at them - but they've been great with all this stuff. My angstier reaction is that there is something wrong with me, not just that these places don't have room for me but that I'm not cut out for higher studies, despite reasons I could list to the contrary to massage my ego a bit. I thought her book was a bit melodramatic when I read it, but as I look back over this post, maybe it wasn't so melodramatic after all, or maybe I'm just even more melodramatic than she was...

Reflection for 1 March 2009

Another faculty member was supposed to do today's reflection for SLU's Lenten website (http://www.slu.edu/lent), but he forgot, so I threw something together on the quick. It's not particularly reflective, but maybe there's something salvageable in there...

The students in my Theological Foundations class just finished reading Into the Wild, and as part of their reflection on the book, I had them take about half an hour or so of “unplugging” from all the people and devices that are part of their normal lives – cell phones, IPods, Facebook, and so on. Most of them in their papers commented on how difficult it was to not have all those distractions around, and a number of them said that too much solitude simply cannot be a good thing, that the weeks and months that Chris McCandless, the protagonist of Into the Wild, spent alone in Alaska must have done harm to his personality. They concluded almost to a person that they could not imagine spending weeks or months away from human contact, and in truth, I have rarely gone more than a week without speaking to anyone, even on silent retreats. Next week I will be taking a group of students on a spring break trip to the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona, where I used to live and work, and we plan to take a “desert day” as part of cultivating the spiritual life of the place. Still, even that one day is pretty tame compared to the lives of many of the greats of the Biblical tradition who spent forty days (i.e., a long time) in the wilderness, away from other people: Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, Jesus. The paradox of the desert in the Bible is that while it is the place where demons live, it is also the place of encounter with God: it is in the desert that Israel learns how to be God’s people, where Jesus grows into his experience of being called beloved Son. Similarly, the monastic tradition in Christianity began with people escaping to the desert, the eremos in Greek, from which we get the word “hermit,” and the literature of those desert fathers and mothers abounds with the struggle with demons, whether presented psychologically or metaphysically, which led to wisdom and humility.
Today’s reading from 1 Peter uses the unusual image of the eight people in the ark being “saved through water.” We would tend to think of the flood as a cataclysm, a massive destruction of life rather than the occasion of the salvation of those eight survivors, but imagining those weeks and months on the ark, living in chaos (literally: tehom in Hebrew means both “sea” and “chaos”), I can believe that surviving such a harsh environment would be both an encounter with the demonic and with God. SLU’s own Dr. Belden Lane, a professor in the Theological Studies department, writes in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes about the capacity of barren and harsh environments to strip away the falsehoods of our lives, and psychologist Jordan Peterson says that “The place where you least want to go is the place where you find everything you need” – it is precisely in facing our demons, those things which most frighten us, that we find the living God. While none of us may well spend forty days in the desert this Lent, we are called back to asceticism in the best sense of the word – not self-punishment, but discipline, like athletes in training, consciously refraining from the “comfort foods” that feed our egos. As Abby Braun pointed out in her beautiful and compelling reflection on Friday, the goal is right relationship: not to get away from people, not a sense of superiority, but precisely the attempt to nakedly encounter God, free from the demands of a society that favors conformity over prophecy, to break through the prison of the false self and emerge into compassion for the world.

Ash Wednesday

One of the formulae that the minister uses in the distribution of ashes is “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That line has roots in Genesis 3:19 and recalls the Hebrew wordplay that the adam, the human being, comes from the adamah, the dust or soil. However, in that story, gaining the knowledge of good and evil brings with it fear and pride and shame, a need to hide our nakedness from God. We can’t stand to let God or other people or even ourselves see how deep our brokenness really goes, so we “clothe” our egos, not only with more “superficial” coverings like being amongst “the beautiful people,” but also with more sophisticated coverings like how many books we have read, how many good deeds we have done, or how often we go to church. We seem condemned to try to buttress our egos in any way possible, which is why any of those things, even the religious ones (perhaps especially the religious ones), can become a means of convincing ourselves that we are real, that we are successful at life, that we are not ashes.
This is why the readings on a day like Ash Wednesday, a day with the external sign of the ashes on the forehead, can be so ambivalent to the use of external signs – Jeremiah tells the people, “Rend your hearts, not your garments,” and Jesus warns people about looking for ego-validations when fasting, praying, and giving alms. The readings today don’t say, “Don’t fast, don’t pray, don’t give alms” but “Don’t think you are something special because you are fasting and praying and giving alms – don’t use these things to prove to yourself or other people or God how holy you are.” Cobbling together that kind of identity sounds more substantial than the nakedness of our truest self, because it lets us feel proud about ourselves, but finally what the ashes are calling us back to is the capacity of the spiritually naked self for immediacy with God – humility rather than ego inflation, vulnerability rather than self-protection. That entails the capacity to stand without defenses before God, to hand ourselves over to the death of the small self, the ego self, confident that in the death that feels like breaking down, we break through. That kind of self-emptying faith says that despite the fact that we haven’t earned anything, can’t earn anything, don’t deserve it, we can stand in confidence before the God who is “mercy within mercy within mercy.”

Theology on Tap

My friend Tobias Winright, who teaches theology here at SLU, is friends with a guy who owns a bar called the Royale, a couple of miles from my house. Tobias has done a few Theology on Tap sessions at the Royale and put them in touch with me about doing one, so this afternoon I talked for a couple of hours about various and sundry issues surrounding the problem of evil. Below are the notes I compiled to keep myself on track.

David Hume – “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both willing and able? Whence then is evil?” (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)

Jeremiah – “Why does the way of the godless prosper, why live all the treacherous in contentment?” (12:1)

Br. Patrick – “What do you say about God after Auschwitz, or Rwanda, or Darfur, or Hurricane Katrina? Where is your good God?”

Gottfried Leibniz – theodicy – “the justification of God” – arguments that attempt to show that God is righteous or just despite the presence of evil in the world – God can be omnipotent and perfectly good despite evil. “Everything happens for a reason” is the motto of theodicy in this form.

Much theodicy has been rooted in what is referred to as modern theism – a philosophically rather than biblically based God-image that is generated by contrast with the spectrum of human weaknesses – God as immutable, incorporeal, impassible, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and utterly simple. If this sounds like what you have understood God to be, you aren’t alone. The God of modern theism loses the possibility of any newness, anything that rationality can’t contain or hold on to, and creates such a static deity as to make contact with this God virtually impossible while also denying divine freedom (at once compromising divine immanence and transcendence). This brand of theism has seen the task of theodicy as rearranging this set furniture so as to come to an equation that makes them all work together.

Perhaps the most textually common thread in the Old Testament is the idea of suffering as a consequence for sin, and we know often enough that bad things do indeed come from our capacity to be stupid, sinful, or selfish. On the other hand, is anyone here comfortable with saying that suffering is inevitably a consequence of sin? I was living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, and it wasn’t long before preachers on the radio came out with statements to the effect that the hurricane was God’s punishment for the immorality of the city – rather like a number of the prophets of the Old Testament. However, if sin was really the reason for the hurricane, how come the French Quarter, which this Mardi Gras weekend is showing the depths of depravity which it is capable of reaching, was virtually untouched?

In the last few centuries before Jesus’ life, Judaism developed categories for thinking about suffering for the sake of others – that by suffering, people could contribute to the good of the world. It’s not hard to see how that got picked up by the early Christians, but it brings its own set of dangers with it. When Martin Luther King says, “Unmerited suffering is redemptive,” what are the potencies and limitations of such a model? Is all such suffering redemptive, or can it simply be destructive, crushing, awful, especially in the degree to which it goes unacknowledged and deprives the sufferer of a voice?

One of the main schools of thought in classical theodicy followed this idea – associated mainly with Irenaeus of Lyons, it is typically referred to as a “soul-building” theodicy: God allows suffering as a means of enabling people to grow by facing struggles. All of us can certainly acknowledge the potency of such a model, while still seeing something deficient in such a claim. What is the growth or “soul-building” that occurs in the child who slowly starves to death in Zimbabwe, the family whose loved ones die horribly in a fire, the inundation by tsunami of hundreds of thousands of people? While unmerited suffering can be redemptive, it seems that it can also simply be crushing and horrible. Dorothee Soelle warns, too, against the danger in Christianity of taking suffering to be a good thing – in imitation of Jesus, she warns, there is a danger of a Christian masochism that seeks out suffering, or a Christian sadism that can revel in inflicting it on others.

An even more common theodicy has traditionally been associated with Augustine, although he did not really hold this model for much of his career. Referred to as “free-will theodicy,” this argues that God’s gift of free will entails the freedom to commit sin, and God’s intervention would subvert that freedom. Still, it isn’t clear what it means to call God “good” in a world in which God stands on the sidelines in the face of atrocity, nor does it say much about the evil in the world which is not rooted in our free choices – addiction, natural evil, social sin.

Both of these models tend to presume the old bumper-sticker theology, “Everything happens for a reason.” However, Jesus’ central symbol, the reign of God, presumes that suffering is not the will of God. As it says in the Lord’s prayer, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That is, may your will be accomplished here, since it is not being perfectly accomplished now. Jesus does not offer explanations of why it is not being accomplished – he simply overcomes it in his preaching and his healing.

The God of the Biblical tradition is presented as having a rich and complicated inner life, not the static or endlessly simple model of modern theism, which makes God less of a person than us, rather than more. So, one thread in the Bible locates the source of evil in the complicated and at times capricious inner life of God. For example, as much as Christian try to read GN 22, the binding of Isaac, either as a repudiation of human sacrifice or as a Christological prefiguration of God handing his Son over to death, we have to reckon with a story in which God demands the death of Isaac and then jerks Abraham around for three straight days. We have to reckon with a God who punishes the sinfulness of David by killing his newborn son; who hardens Pharaoh’s heart so as to further dismantle the entire Egyptian reality, innocents included; who demands the slaughter of the entire Amalekite people; who acts on behalf of some while far more commonly remaining silent. “God rejects, but not forever.” (O’Connor 51) God is abusive, but not all the time. David Blumenthal’s book Facing the Abusing God argues that God’s relationship with the people is at times like that of an abusing parent to his or her child – an abused spouse may be able to leave the abuser, but Israel is stuck with God like a child is stuck with an abusive parent.

On the other hand, the lament psalms almost never confess guilt – God has been absent or indifferent or neglectful, and this neglect is the reason for the sufferer’s pain – lament psalms often call God back to attentiveness – “How long, O Lord?” is a well-worn question in those psalms – how long until you return to attentiveness to us. Jon Levenson's book Creation and the Persistence of Evil speaks about the ongoing presence of a dangerous, chaotic reality in the world that, if not attended carefully by God, will encroach onto the human situation.

The Book of Job, although perhaps the most heavily contested book in the canon, gives an image of a God who simply overwhelms Job with the grandeur of creation as a means of showing him his inability to understand the reason for suffering. Fr. Robert Barron gives a similar model, like looking at Seurat’s pointillist painting La Grande Jatte from right up close – it only looks like a couple of dots or a blur of color: we are too close to get the big picture. The problem with such a model is that it presumes that this artistic God has put every dot there with some intentionality, and that it all fits together. How far away from the Holocaust do you have to back up to make it fit seamlessly into the picture? Does that not run the risk of looking at life “through the wrong end of the telescope,” making human life and suffering insignificant in the scope of the cosmic endlessness?

Terrence Tilley, who teaches at Fordham, has written about how doing theodicy in this manner, rearranging the pieces while never questioning any of them, is itself the source of a good deal of evil. It quite often blames the victim, presuming that he or she or they must have sinned – think about the Book of Job again for an easy example. Also, as any number of commentators have noted, keeping the problem of evil at the level of an intellectual conundrum is a luxury that scholars have but very few other people do – it can easily become a substitute for trying to overcome evil, especially if the model ends up presuming, as classical theodicies often do, that the way the world is working is fundamentally okay. It is even possible to conclude that working to change such a system is to challenge the will of God who laid the pieces out as they are.

After the Holocaust, a number of Jewish theologians have developed the concept of antitheodicy, literally, the refusal to justify God in the face of evil. Retrieving the sense of God’s responsibility for dealing with evil, whether or not God has caused it, these schools of thought refuse to dismiss the genuinely evil character of their sufferings, while refusing to deny the reality of God. There is a classic folk tale that Elie Wiesel tells of a group of rabbis in Auschwitz who put God on trial for failure to live up to God’s part of the covenant, from the exile through the pogroms and the ghettoization of Jews in Europe through the Holocaust. These rabbis hold this trial with a judge, witnesses, lawyers, testimony, the works; they find God guilty, sentence God to death, and then file out and go to evening prayer to offer praise to this guilty, condemned God. What do Christians do with such a paradoxical image? Is it possible to hold together God as guilty and yet praiseworthy?

Theology in the wake of the Holocaust has revisited the question of God’s capacity to suffer. Modern theism, in its desire to keep God sovereign, “impassible,” again created an image of God that is so static as to be nearly impossible to relate to. Does God’s heart not hurt at the Holocaust, at Rwanda or Darfur or 9/11 or the tsunami or the thousand children who will starve to death during the time we are together today? Is God not moved by our hurts? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian who was eventually hanged by the Nazis, concisely said, “Only a suffering God can help.” Elie Wiesel’s classic book Night has people, while watching the slow death by hanging of a child, ask, “Where is God?”, to which Wiesel answers, “This is where – hanging here from this gallows.” (65) On the other hand, theologians have argued, “I don’t want this God to suffer – I want this God to stop the suffering.” I have no idea how to parse that out except to say that it is an argument that was all but unthinkable under the reign of modern theism.

I would argue that much of what we are doing in our study of the problem of evil indicates that we are less concerned about good and evil, and more concerned about order and chaos. We have a hard time when reality doesn’t work the way we expect it to, but we can negotiate a lot of evil in the world as long as it fits into our scheme of how the world works. We know that some thirty thousand children under five will starve to death today around the world, and yet we aren’t running around screaming. If that were to happen in our psychic backyards, we would go bananas, but instead we get more worked up over the light turning red before we get to it, or a printer not working, or other really, really little stuff that is important to us only because it is in the center of our psychic maps. Walter Brueggemann speaks in this vein of “theodic crises”; the amount or nature of evil crosses a mental threshold, and we are forced to develop new models for comprehending the problem of evil. Below that threshold, we can make sense of it all, but above that threshold is more than my model can accommodate. Think of why the things that cultures tend to remember as threshold moments, as “I’ll always remember where I was when” moments are almost always bad things, or at least really chaotic things – Pearl Harbor, JFK’s assassination, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina. They stand out for us as unexplainable events – our map of the world doesn’t work anymore. Wars happen in other countries, natural disasters happen to other people, but we can keep that at a safe psychic distance. Now, the theodic crisis emerges because it is right in my face, in the middle of my map of meaning. We are forced to come up with new models that better map the reality we are facing. The Babylonian Exile stands as the 9/11 of the Old Testament – a hand grenade into the middle of a map of reality that made sense. The utter chaos of the worldview of the survivors prompted the development of a number of new responses to evil, just as happened after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

Like The Joker says in The Dark Knight, “You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan,’ even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. Because it’s all part of the plan.”

Kathleen O’Connor, in her book Lamentations and the Tears of the World, tries to reclaim lament as a legitimate response to the problem of evil – not a logical solution to an intellectual problem, but a gutsy, visceral response for people who are caught in the midst of suffering. Rather than assume that this is my fault, or that I am on my own, she encourages being able to sit in the middle of suffering and scream for a response. While psychologically there may be something very healthy about that, some people would argue that the theological proposition running lament, that God is at the core of my suffering, is problematic. I prefer to think of lament as a means of keeping the mysterious nature of suffering in mind. I mean by mystery not that we just don’t have a big enough perspective to take it all in, like Robert Barron argued, but that we deliberately keep the edges raw on the very idea of having a model. We know that any model is a sort of Procrustean bed, squeezing or truncating reality to fit the model. From this angle, lament, with its insistent cry of “Why?” admits its ignorance, while also holding out the demand that, finally, beyond any model of why it is, evil is to be overcome, suffering is to be alleviated.

Reflection for 11 February 2009

The Hebrew word adam means human being, and the word adamah means earth or soil – the adam comes from the adamah, the people come from the dirt, get it? That works the same in our language – the word human comes from the same root as humus, or dirt, which of course comes from the same root as humility or humble. Where the first reading tells us, “Remember where you come from, that you are in fact made of the stuff of the earth,” the gospel reinforces that and undercuts our seemingly inevitable tendency to make ourselves out to be more than we are. We don’t like being reminded of our humble origins, that we are made of dust, that we are all going back to dust, so we try to create an identity for ourselves, typically by comparing ourselves to other people, distancing ourselves from what is not as holy, not as pure as we are. Jesus warns that situating uncleanness or impurity outside of ourselves is a dead end, is a cover story for trying to create our own righteousness. You may avoid eating unclean foods, but still be loaded down with hard-heartedness, violence, self-importance, and above all, major blind spots about your own need for the divine mercy. The stuff that comes out of us, rather than the stuff that goes into us, should give us pause. I may want to present myself as a relatively well-educated, more or less competent professional, but the Joker puts it this way in The Dark Knight: “Madness is like gravity – all it takes is a little push.” I know how easily my own capacity for violence or self-aggrandizement can come to the fore, most likely when that image of myself as competent, respectable, in control is under attack. None of us want to be reminded that under all the personas we create (persona means “mask,” by the way), we’re made of dirt and we’re naked. On my own steam, I’m nothing – I cannot create a mask big enough to undo my screwiness, my self-centeredness, and my own finitude. That’s the bad news – we twist ourselves into knots trying to forget our own messiness, trying to forge personas that we can take pride in. The good news is that we don’t have to do any of that stuff. Who we really are is already established before we can do anything about it. Yes, I come from dust and I’m returning to dust, but I’m made a little less than the angels, and my name is written in heaven. There is nothing for me to boast about, because I had nothing to do with it, but that is fundamentally the only identity that can give me any satisfaction – who I am is who I am in God, and nothing more. Even if I could create myself like that, it’s all disappearing – how much stuff I know, how tight my waistline is, how nice my hair looks (ha), how much respect I can get out of other people.

The Sparrow

Last weekend NPR's program "Speaking of Faith" interviewed Mary Doria Russell, focusing on her two novels The Sparrow and Children of God. I had heard of those two before, but never read them, so on a whim I picked up The Sparrow from the library last Sunday night and finished it yesterday morning. Without giving too much away, it deals with the reception of radio signals from another planet and the Jesuit mission sent to that planet to find the source of those signals. The potential for things to go wrong, the uncertainties involved with interacting with another culture, let alone another planet and multiple other species, are all rendered in a story that is at once beautiful and terrible. It holds serious resonances for me at the moment, given that I am teaching a class on evil. An article by Terrence Tilley (theology prof at Fordham) that we are reading right now asks of the protagonist of the Book of Job, but could just as easily ask of the protagonist of The Sparrow: "Does he undergo that most terrible experience for a victim: 'to believe himself exposed to the personal hostility of the divinity'?" We have spent a fair amount of time in class examining Biblical texts in which God is presented as a fairly ambivalent character - the Akedah (the binding of Isaac), for example, and now Job. Is it possible for Christians to hold a God-image such that they feel crushed by the whim of an ambivalent (if not malevolent) deity? I see so much denial and self-loathing arising from the conception that whatever happens to me happens for a reason, or is my fault, or that God is somehow justified in letting it be, but is the alternative (a morally questionable deity) any better?

Reflection for 4 February 2009

Anyone else notice that in the gospel for today, the people in Nazareth “took offense” at Jesus when he goes home? It isn’t “how dare he claim to be mighty or wise,” because they don’t deny that the deeds are mighty or that the words are wise, but that they can’t accept something new where all they expect is the ordinary – he’s just a carpenter, he’s just Mary’s kid or Judas’ brother. They have a hard time tolerating the fact that the ordinary can be the place of encounter with the extraordinary. We do the same thing with people that we want to not be challenged by, so we domesticate them (think Martin Luther King, once “the most dangerous man in America,” and now, for one day a year, the darling of business luncheons and 24-hour news coverage across the nation.) We also do the same thing with space and time – it’s hard to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, so we keep looking around for special times and places – the retreat coming up later in the semester, the trip to the Vatican or on a spring break mission, hearing a speech from a famous theologian.

It's ordinary time in the liturgical calendar, of course, and the danger of ordinary time is that it can be reduced to being, well…ordinary. We look ahead to the next big season, say, Lent, or to some big feast day, like last week’s feast of Thomas Aquinas. Today is the feast of people I never heard of, like Saint John de Britto and Saint Rembert of Torhout. I only saw those names because I literally Googled February 4th in hopes of finding some big event that happened on this day in history, some major feast day, something to give me a big topic to bounce my ideas off. Well, there aren’t any. But there are. Any of you ever Google or Wikipedia a date and just see all the stuff that happened on that day? It’s the birthday of Johann Ludwig Bach, second cousin of Johann Sebastian Bach (how’s that for living in someone else’s shadow), and of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rosa Parks, but mostly of people I never heard of. It’s the 5th anniversary of the founding of Facebook, the 150th anniversary of the discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus, and so on. But far and away the stuff that happened, the deaths and births that Wikipedia lists for February 4, are things I never heard of. Even then, of course, 99½ percent of the stuff that happens in our world won’t show up on Wikipedia or Google or anywhere else, but those places, events, people are precisely our points of encounter with the divine - the grandfather who will never be famous, the wedding anniversary, the family's favorite picnic spot.

Do we just look to go from one big event or feast to the next, one major saint to the next? Is “ordinary time” just a holding pattern between Christmas and Lent? That seems to me like a recipe for not being here now, not paying attention to the normal, quotidian, uninteresting bits of our lives which is where most of us in fact live most of our lives. Simone Weil puts it this way: “Absolutely unmixed attentiveness is prayer.” However, most of us live in various grades of unattentiveness, whether because of the noise of all the pacifiers we have in our lives, the expectation that only big things have anything good to offer us, or whatever. The Incarnation, the sacramental nature of our lives, means that it is exactly in the ordinary that we encounter the extraordinary – history can’t be split into a history of the sacred and the profane. There is no place, no time, where we can’t encounter the divine reality. In the Zen tradition, it goes this way: "After enlightenment, the dishes." True enlightenment puts us in contact with the real world, rather than letting us escape the real world.

We make a big deal about sacred places to remind us that every place is sacred. We highlight sacred times to recall that all time is sacred time. We hold up sacred people as symbols for us that all people are sacred, no life is trivial, no person can be swept under the carpet. Unfortunately we tend to miss most of those chances to see it, often enough because we pay so much attention to the “special” that we miss what it is pointing out to us, like the old Zen adage: “When the wise man points at the moon, all the idiot sees is the finger.”

Reflection for 28 January 2009 - the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas

Shortly after Thomas Aquinas entered the Dominican order, his family, dismayed that instead of becoming a Benedictine, which would have held a good chance of becoming an abbot or bishop, he had chosen to become a Dominican. The Dominicans were still a new order at that point, and still flush with the poverty of their mendicant origins, so the family could not see for their son the prospects for status or influence they desired for a person of his noble birth. The story goes that they were so dismayed that they locked him up in the tower of the family castle for almost two years, to the point that they even sent prostitutes up to him to try to dissuade him from pursuing the life of a ragged friar (the story says he chased her out of the room with a hot poker from the fire).

I feel very fortunate that my parents never went to those kinds of lengths to keep me from joining my community, that in fact they were and still are very supportive of my vocation. On the other hand, the gospels so far this week have looked at the resistance Jesus faced from the beginning of his ministry – being accused of having an unclean spirit, being thought crazy even by his own family, and today being so badly misunderstood by his own disciples. The image he uses in the parable today, of the sower and the seed, is fitting, not only because they don’t get what he is trying to say, but because the farming image used seems to us to be so wasteful. As opposed to our modern method of farming, where we plow up the soil and plant seeds in it, the method being laid out here was to throw seed out indiscriminately and then plow to turn the seeds down into the soil. What that meant was that you couldn’t see what kind of soil you got until after you had already put the seeds out there – like Forrest Gump, “You never know what you’re gonna get.” Any teacher knows that even with the most objective of subject matter, but certainly with the work of the gospel, this is a lot like how teaching works – in a sense, it’s wasteful, because you keep working with whoever shows up, but you can’t tell what the end results are going to be. Sometimes maybe you can tell right up front if a person, like the footpath, is so thick that the seed never has a chance to get through, but just as likely, you just can’t predict it. Like with the rocky soil that has no depth to it, sometimes people can get all fired up at first, either because it sounds good on paper or because people want to win Brownie points with the teacher. Other times people have all the right stuff, but the world they live in is a mindkiller – I think of the talented, enthusiastic students I had in Zimbabwe or the Navajo Nation who could really have gone places, but because of the disaster they lived in or the environmental forces working against them, their potential got squelched. Finally, I have known a few students that I NEVER thought listened to a word I said, who have turned out years later to have put the pieces together, just like seeds going in the ground take a while before they show any signs of life and don’t just look wasted.

In his book New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton writes, “Every moment and every event of every person’s life on earth plants something in his or her soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of people. Most of those unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because we are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love.” (14) The need for a renewal of attentiveness as central to the discipline of discernment, of not going through life functionally asleep -- as Simone Weil puts it, "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."

Defiance

On Friday evening I went with a group of students to see the film Defiance, about 4 Polish brothers' resistance to the Nazi regime. Although it is hardly an "enjoyable" film, they wanted to process it afterwards, so we went back to my house and stewed about it for a while. I kept going back to a question that I have been working over in my head for a long while, in particular, was nonviolence possible against the Nazis? Of course the Danes and the Norwegians managed to pull off campaigns of nonviolent resistance, but those were rather atypical situations because of the Nazi position in the war at the time and the relative importance of those two countries in the Nazi vision (with requests for corrections and apologies for whatever inaccuracies come from my all-too-partial knowledge of the topic). Looking at the forest camps or the liquidated ghettoes, could a large-scale nonviolent resistance have been genuinely possible?

For the past few years I have done an activity with the Micah program freshmen around MLK Day, which includes talking about the way his nonviolent campaigns worked. We pass around the picture I have included below, talk about what was going on there, ask how the nonviolent strategy worked and what it might have been like to be in that situation, and I typically close by asking, "What would have happened if these three people and others with them had come to that street corner in Birmingham with rifles and shotguns to respond to the fire hoses, batons, tear gas and police dogs that were waiting for them?" Our history would certainly have been quite different if the spiral of violence had carried on. Yet, as brutal as Bull Connor's reaction was, he didn't simply mow people down with machine guns. On the other hand, Robert Jay Lifton talks extensively about the amount of psychic barriers necessary to keep German soldiers from having psychotic episodes: the development of the gas chambers as means of mass killing, extensive euphemistic reshaping of the German language, the enormous psychic weight of the bureaucracy, and so on. That all signifies the human conscience beneath the brutality that needs those psychic barriers to be able to carry on. Still, I can't imagine the kind of mentality it would demand to be in the belly of the beast, in Germany or Poland and trying to create and maintain some kind of nonviolent pressure, nor how slim the odds of surviving such an effort would be... I think I understand Reinhold Niebuhr's "realist" stance that would have us read the Sermon on the Mount as a judgment upon us who are unable to live up to it, but the fact that the folks in the picture ARE living up to it won't leave me alone...