Brother Patrick's Blog

a little poetry

2010-07-29T13:08:00.000-04:00

Just reading an anthology of essays on the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, and stumbled across a tiny essay on theological aesthetics - the relationship of beauty, art, to the doing of theology. Rahner's vision of grace in the world is highly sacramental, that is, he sees the quotidian world as the place of encounter with God, but the little I had read of Rahner in the past was dense and prose-ish enough that I did not expect the morsels of poetry that Rahner wrote and which this author used to flavor her essay. Rahner writes: "Whatever is expressed in art is a product of that transcendentality by which, as spiritual and free beings, we strive for the totality of reality...[I]t is only because we are transcendental beings that art and theology can really exist." The author of the essay, Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen, comments, "Poetry, especially great poetry, is important, because it takes shape where the human being radically faces who he or she is...In Christian existence, as in composing and listening to music or through writing and reading great poetry, the individual is led into the heights and depths, into hope, doubts and moments of despair." In other words, theology is not simply about hammering out metaphysical truths in scientifically unassailable language, but at attempt to speak that which we know but can't ever get quite right. This makes theologians of any of us who are struggling to face the messiness of human existence in light of the transcendence that grasps us far more surely than we can grasp it. It is quite possible that explicitly religious art may fail to reach the level of transcendentality of explicitly non-religious art (what Rahner calls "anonymous piety") if it fails to engage the depths of the human condition - if it is merely religious "Kitsch." Knowing that a reasonable percentage of my students in any given theology class are likely to not be particularly religious, I have always had an affinity for poetry, literature, art which ask all the deep questions without using theological-isms that can carry too much baggage for them to get on board with. My wonderful friend Christa Shusko recently shared the following poem with me (in response to a previous post, in fact), and it has resonated with me repeatedly for its ability to EVOKE the theological without needing to INVOKE the theological.

Louise Gluck
Telescope

There is a moment when you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you've been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where life has no meaning.

You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you're in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

Sometimes those rare moments of being pulled clean out of our everyday life can make the rest of our existence seem somehow flattened, but I hope that the opposite can happen - that those moments of more explicit transcendence can refocus our way of seeing everything, can enable us to see that even the most ordinary folding-the-laundry moments are mystical moments, that there are no "ordinary" moments in our usual sense of the word.

Assisi travelogue - part 2

2010-07-26T17:28:00.000-04:00

Before I continue with my Assisi travelogue, a small adventure from today. We have a few trips coming up in the next week that involve water – swimming pool, beach, so on – so I left the house this afternoon in search of a pair of running shorts, swim trunks, something other than the cargo pants kinds of things I have been wearing everywhere. I found a little sporting goods place not far from the house, and the woman behind the counter happened to have gone to high school in New Jersey, so she spoke great English (it's too late at night here for New Jersey jokes). When I mentioned I was looking for something for swimming, she pulled out a speedo about the size of a Post-It - apparently quite the rage among Italian men, which is certainly making me rethink my upcoming beach expedition. “You like?” “No, I’m not European enough for that…” After I found an actual pair of shorts, she talked with me for another 10 minutes or so, about everything – how bad the economy is, how many chemicals there are in the tomatoes in the States, how many people she knows who are getting cancer from the aforementioned tomatoes, and so on. I halfway expected her to invite me over for dinner to prove that the tomatoes in Italy really are better, as if I didn’t already know that…

OK, back to Assisi...

21 July 2010

I finally felt like I made the retreat into a true pilgrimage today. We started off as a group going to San Damiano, which was nice – smaller, simpler than so much of the overdone stuff. After lunch, though, I took off right away for the Carceri, the caves in the mountains near Assisi where Francis and his friends would go to get away and recharge the batteries. It’s a good 4-5 kilometers away, on fairly steep roads just about the whole way, so I walked for a solid hour in the afternoon heat before I got there. Just when I thought I was in shape…Needless to say, I was more or less wiped out by the time I got there, but it was a totally different feel from so much of the rest of the Francis-and-Clare stuff in town. The Carceri has been built up too, no doubt about it, certainly far beyond the simple caves that would have been there at first – I saw a stone wall way up the mountain, so I climbed up and found on the other side – a two-lane road! So much for getting away from it all…Still, there is an aura of simplicity there in the open spaces that haven’t been domesticated, and even in the relatively rustic buildings that are there: no running water, doorways so small even a person as vertically challenged as I had to squeeze through, and lots and lots of little nooks and crannies to hide in. Add to that the fact that it’s enough of a challenge to get there (at least on foot) that it isn’t nearly as crowded as a lot of the places in town. I found a little hideout up in the hills, no noise but the cicadas, a few razor-thin slivers of sunlight slicing through the foliage. I just disappeared for a long while, and it made me realize how…useful…I have tried to make my religious life (yes, I do mean that in a negative sense). Perhaps that’s an occupational hazard of being an apostolic religious, but I think I raise it to an art form. There’s an old Zen mondo about the young monk who is so zealous about attaining enlightenment that he meditates day and night, night and day. The old monk comes and sits next to him and begins polishing a piece of tile. When the young monk asks what he is doing, the old monk tells him he is polishing the tile to make a mirror. The young monk protests that no amount of polishing can turn a tile into a mirror, at which point the old monk walks away to leave the young hotshot to his new insight. If I keep coming back to the same thing, believe me that it is for my sake, not for yours, dear (few) readers. At any rate, the burning bush at the top of this particular mountain is going to continue to speak to me for some time. Let’s just hope the old knucklehead can get it through the skull to take off my shoes and shut up for a while.

Retreat reflections - part one

2010-07-24T16:59:00.000-04:00

Our group is just back from a weeklong retreat in Assisi, so this time I actually have an excuse for not writing for the past few days. My reflections from that week will trickle out onto this blog over the next few days and weeks. The first day´s reflection follows.
The theme of the retreat was “A Pilgrimage of Hope,” in line with the theme of our general chapter a few years back. In line with that theme, Br. André LaFlamme, the retreat director, started us with the text from John´s gospel in which the disciples of John the Baptist follow after Jesus, who asks them, “What are you looking for?” Like much of John´s gospel, their response to Jesus can seem cryptic, a non-answer to a (so it seems) straightforward question: “Where do you live?” Thinking about it though, I wonder if they ask because they genuinely don’t know what they are looking for. André gave us this question to prompt us to zero in on what we hope to gain from the retreat, and after several months of feeling like a spiritual black hole, I hardly even know where to begin with trying to identify a central goal of my pilgrimage. André told us at Mass that he would call us up one by one to receive the folders that contain our readings and reflections for the week, and that he would ask us the question from the gospel: “What are you looking for?” We were to respond with the subsequent line, “Where do you live?” but before he got to that second part, I was petrified that I was actually going to have to articulate what I was looking for during this retreat: petrified because I was not ready to admit how crushing this past year was for me, and because I hardly knew where to begin to dig out. Later, thinking about it, the first thing that came to mind was from the movie Brother Sun Sister Moon, which we watched a couple of days before the retreat began: after having given away the expensive cloths owned by his cloth merchant father, Francis is asked by Bishop Guido what he wants, and he responds, “I – I want to be happy!” With all the wonderful corniness that only Zeffirelli movies can provide, that simple line cut through a year of restlessness and frustration. The feeling of having made so many wrong choices with my life, having closed so many doors, and now living so compromised a vision of the Gospel despite what feels like a genuine desire to follow Christ without compromise, has welled up into deep loneliness and disappointment again and again this past year. One of the readings that André gave us was about allowing ourselves to feel loved, using the image of critically ill persons spontaneously assuming the fetal position, as if knowing the desire to return now and again to a place of security. In any other situation I probably would have dismissed it as self-indulgent or narcissistic, but recognizing my own profound brittleness, it gave me permission to quit trying desperately to hold it all together by myself. In one way or another I have so locked myself out of allowing myself to feel loved, whether by God or other people, that it feels as if the weight of the world is upon me, and knowing I cannot shoulder it alone, I despair. To twist Spider-Man, “With no power comes great responsibility.” Most times I find it difficult to experience God as personally involved in or concerned about my life, so that if my life is to have any meaning as a tiny speck against the backdrop of endless space and time, I have to focus in on myself and wrest meaning from history, which of course ends up being even more narcissistic and futile than whatever else I might be overcompensating to avoid.

From the notes that André gave us: “The Prodigal Son cries out: ‘I´m restless and I need to journey to far-off lands.’ Time and time again we have re-echoed the that cry of the Prodigal Son, in the silence of our hearts, but also amid the buffeting winds of life, or more often at those times when we felt that we’re not being heard or listened to by our Brothers. Behind our experiences of life, the good ones as well as the not so good, there is that yearning to travel, to walk, to go on a pilgrimage, to see countries in order to discover the Essential, and in so doing, return to the womb of God Father or Mother.”

I felt several times like André was writing directly to me, and this was one of them. What am I looking for? As much as anything it is the autonomy to be able to explore, without feeling bound to someone else’s path, and to not feel like I am being disobedient or wilful for having that desire. More deeply than the desire to do my own thing, however, is the desire for love. I readily admit that I am not at the point at which I could say with Francis that I am seeking not to be loved but to love. My sense of self is so caught in the web of the unsatisfactoriness of so much of life that it weighs me down against the pursuit of that which can satisfy. For this week I am in search of the experience of feeling loved, and to let that experience ease the frantic sense that my life is slipping away from me, that I am not and can never be what I should be, a sort of Sisyphean sensation that the endless “shoulds” of life are weighing down upon me despite knowing better. Having grown up in a happy but more or less un-cosmopolitan corner of the world (small-town Mississippi) and now in my late twenties and early thirties just starting to see into the vast world of literature, scholarship, art, poetry, travel, food, music, languages and so on, the sensation is very nearly a panic attack, like there is so much out there and I have to take it all in and I need it now and I have to take the ocean in at a gulp and when I try it’s like drowning and the community is holding me back and GASP (if you didn’t get the tone of that last sentence, try reading it out loud without pausing for a breath). Okay, relax. After all the stuff I have written about not getting lost in the things we can pin on our chests, guess where I got lost – of course, I suppose that is EXACTLY why I have written so much about it. The night before the retreat began, I had a stack of books lined up to bring along – books I “should” have read ten years ago – until at our evening conference André encouraged us not to bring any books. Again, talking right to me. In my head, I know that no amount of frantic flitting around could even scratch the surface of all the worthwhile realities of this wonderful world, let alone get beyond the most superficial of exposures. But it’s hard to not only know in my head but taste it on my tongue, to know that no quantity of experiences or books read can combine to solve the question that I am.

Romeing around

2010-07-14T07:35:00.000-04:00

Sunday was a free day from our daily conferences, so I went on a little adventure with Pierre Maguelibu (a Brother from Vanuatu, an island in the South Pacific) to spend the day taking in as much of the city as we could. I was a little proud of myself that I went just about the whole day in French - ugly though it may have been. We started with Mass at the Gesu, the Jesuits' big daddy church where St. Ignatius is buried:

Then we were off to Piazza Navona, which had not only this sweet fountain (and several others) but as many artists (caricature, portrait, etc.) as I have ever seen in one place, French Quarter included:

Next, the Pantheon, which was so big I couldn't get a very good shot of the whole thing, so here are a couple of more selective pics. The aperture in the ceiling looked pretty sweet with this sunbeam coming through, and the second photo, shot from the main entrance, does the place no justice, but it gives a hint of the scale:

I think anyone who knows me would not be surprised that my favorite of the day was Trevi Fountain - so much stuff to climb on! (*Not to mention that it was so blasted hot all day that seeing this much cold water in one place was a little slice of heaven.*)

We saw a bunch of other stuff that I could add, like the Victor Emmanuel monument (apparently the largest equestrian statue in the world - the guy's mustache is 5 feet across!), the Roman Forum, the Church of St. Ignatius, and the outside of Santa Maria sopra Minerva (not open to the public for some reason). For my money, though, the real hidden treasure of the day was the Basilica of Cosmas and Damian. It was tucked away in a corner near the Colosseum, and the outside blended in with the ruins enough that it was almost easy to miss, but the inside was a real gem:

Passed by the Colosseum, but time was short and we were truly whipped, so all we got was an exterior shot - for now:

We still had a pretty good hike back to the metro station to get home, so we figured that was enough for one day. Today we were off again, to the Capuchin chapel (the skeletons of over 4,000 friars are on display there - a macabre curiosity!) and the scavi - the excavations under St. Peter's. But that will wait for another posting.

Longo della Tevere (or something like that)

2010-07-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

The fun and games continue unabated in the Eternal City. Our daytime sessions are about the Brothers' Rule of Life, and despite being about more or less serious stuff, we are getting into some good stuff about what the Rule actually looks like in the day-to-day of our communities, especially given the multitude of cultures that are figuring out how to apply it in their situations. My small group is three Americans and one Zambian, and it goes without saying that the issues they are dealing with are literally and figuratively worlds away from ours. The days are nicely paced to intersperse prayer and formal sessions, free time and impromptu trips around town. Have managed to zip through three or four books in the past week, and am currently working on Dostoevsky's The Idiot, a surprisingly easy and quick read given that it's a pretty hefty tome and translated from the Russian in a fairly ponderous idiom. Had been worried about getting enough physical activity with no gym facilities close at hand, but the four flights of stairs, plus all the walking, are keeping me busy, and doing pull-ups on the assembly they use for clotheslines hasn't broken anything yet.

Took a long walk yesterday afternoon looking for stamps (figuring out how to ask for that was an adventure in itself), and while looking up at the balconies and terrazzos, saw a kid, probably 5 years old, standing in his underwear on a tiny skateboard on a terrace two or three stories up. He waved. So, wave back and try not to laugh too hard until I'm out of sight. Found a gelato place - no, there are tons of them, so there is no finding to be done - chose one of the many gelato places on the way home and asked for Nutella gelato as one of the three flavors I could get. If you aren't familiar with Nutella, it's a spreadable chocolate-hazelnut dance party for your mouth, and I was expecting chocolate gelato with a little hazelnut flavoring - you know, Nutella FLAVORED gelato. Not quite - they must have just given me a glob of Nutella right out of the jar, like asking for peanut-butter ice cream and getting a glob of peanut butter on your cone, or asking for rum raisin and getting a shot and a handful of grapes. Believe me, I wasn't complaining, but now I owe the body about 400 pushups to make up for that little splurge.

Last night tagged along with a group of about 10 French-speakers to the Tiber River. The ride there and back on the unbelievably crowded bus was a lesson in letting go, especially of things like personal space and expectation of hygiene, but hey, when in Rome, right? Anyway, once we got there, it was just amazing - there are all kinds of kiosks, outdoor restaurants, even dance clubs right there in the open air along the river, right in the shadow of stone walls and bridges that are hundreds and thousands of years old. Right next to one of the several outdoor hookah bars we saw was a sushi place with a little conveyor belt - the sushi comes along on a little plate on the belt, you take what you want, they charge you for the number of plates you take. For a small-town boy like myself, a novelty. Then we found an Italian band doing a concert at a restaurant (all open-air, mind you); the singer had a pretty solid Elvis impersonation going on, and he did 3 or 4 classic Elvis tunes mixed in with a range of Italian something or another. More soon - too much hilarious and interesting stuff going on here not to write about.

summer and the Eternal City

2010-07-07T15:54:00.001-04:00

For one reason or another, I haven’t felt much like writing this summer, so I suppose a little catching up is in order. The first half of the summer was mostly uneventful – a weekend trip to St. Louis for their graduation and a wedding, another weekend at home for a wedding, then a visit to NYC to see friends, while taking a class at SU: Spiritual and Existential Approaches to Psychotherapy. Interesting material, especially as a once and future campus ministry person for whom talking with people’s experience of meaning was the order of the day. Super-nice people in the class – were totally fine with me not being a psychology person, and I got a little glimpse into their field. Also got to put in a bunch of time helping my friend Hanah get her new house fixed up – pulled up an old floor, rewired a light fixture, put in a shower curtain, helped paint – simple stuff that I nonetheless don’t get to do that often.

The second half of my summer just began – a four-week renewal session at our general house in Rome. I am at this moment typing very slowly because the keyboard is set up for Europeans qnd if I donùt look qt the keyboqrd qll the ti,e this is zhqt ,y typing zill look like::: I had not been in Europe in almost ten years, and Rome in almost twelve. There are about 25 guys here from all over the Institute, including some guys I have met in my travels (from Zimbabwe, Haiti, etc). Getting to work on the French and Spanish at the same time, and making slow progress, but these first few days have mostly been about getting tuned in to accents and pronunciations and unpacking the mental notebooks. Pretty sweaty here in the summer, but it is just an awe-inspiring place: the history, the architecture, *the food*. There is graffiti everywhere, which I guess makes sense – they invented the word, right? Today we had tickets for a papal audience, so we got there a couple of hours early and moseyed around, but when we got in the queue to get inside, the guards decided to close the line right as I was trying to pass security, so I ended up getting separated from the group. Ten minutes later they opened it back up, inexplicably, but by that point the Bro’s were long gone. I got inside the auditorium to see the papal audience, which in effect meant I was somewhere in the same time zone as the Pope. It could have been Carol Channing in white and I wouldn’t have known any different (except for the voice). After all was said and done, twelve languages later, I somehow caught up with a few of the Bro’s who wanted to get pizza and beer – always a plus in my book. BUT, they just wanted the closest place they could find (note – “menu turistica” is Italian for “rip-off”), so we paid too much for too little. OK guys, thanks, but I’ve got it from here. Did a solo act for the rest of the afternoon, saw the papal tombs and the basilica, walked halfway across Rome, sweating my can off the whole way, but made it back with no real problem (although I did get on the metro going in the wrong direction for about 2 stops before I figured out my mistake).

Lastly, a friend pointed this page out to me last week - I had forgotten the editors had compiled it out of the hours of interviews we did in the fall. More as it unfolds, but I want to publish before something goes wrong and I have to figure this keyboard out all over again...

taking the wind out of the sails

2010-06-03T21:53:00.000-04:00

I was in St. Louis a few weeks ago, and I saw the following on a faculty member's door:

Unread books

Suppose you read four books a week every week for 70 years. Allowing for a day here and there where you're unable to read, we can call that 200 books a year, and 14,000 books over the whole three score years and ten. It's a lot of books. But relative to all the books there are, it's a tiny, tiny fraction. According to the guy who manages the Google Books metadata team, at the latest count the books in the world now total 168,178,719. Your 14,000 books are just 0.008324477724 per cent of that. You can think of it as follows. Suppose all the books in the world made up a single calendar year, and you were reading through the pages of that year, cover to cover. Then, 14,000 books - and that's going some - would only get you through the first 44 minutes of the year. There'd still be 364 days, 23 hours and 16 minutes that you hadn't read. And if you get through fewer than 14,000 books in your lifetime, it will look even worse. Comforting in a way.
(see the original post at http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/09/unread-books.html)

Comforting and nerve-wracking all at the same time, but it reminds me of one of my favorite websites, www.despair.com (I know), which answers all those cutesy motivational posters you see in offices with "demotivators": snarky little sayings that can take just enough wind out of my sails to let me laugh at myself a bit. In the spirit of the post above, how about this one:

All for now: have to get back to reading!

Kalina prize

2010-05-25T23:53:00.003-04:00

Just for the hell of it, at the end of the semester I used one of my final papers as a submission in an essay contest on the Holocaust, sponsored by the Judaic Studies Department. A few weeks ago I got an email from the director saying, congratulations, you won for your essay "______," (I don't remember the title) which was not the essay I wrote, then another email saying, oops, we sent the wrong email to the wrong person. OK, no problem. Today the Religion Department secretary congratulated me for this prize, and when I explained what had happened, she told me to get in touch with them. Long story short, the essay I didn't write was the undergraduate winner, and mine was the graduate winner. Not a gigantic deal, but here's the paper anyway.

“Raiding the Unspeakable: Parody in three antipoems of Thomas Merton”

During the late 1950s and until his death in 1968, Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, author, poet, artist and social critic, moved from being a traditional, pious monk extolling the virtues of monastic separation from the world to an outspoken commentator on the horrors of his time: Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Vietnam, Watts, Birmingham. Confronting these grim realities with his ever-present poetic ear, he heard the ways in which language was being emptied of its power to reveal, was being co-opted by euphemism and officialese into the service of atrocity; Merton came to believe that “in our mechanical age, all words have become alike, they’ve all been reduced to the level of the commercial. To say ‘God is love’ is like saying ‘Eat Wheaties.’”[i] Responding not only to the discrete events that made the headlines, but more critically to what he saw as the debasement of language in the twentieth century that helped legitimate all those events, he moved into what he called “antipoetry,” a rejection of more flowery visions of poetry in favor of a more socially engaged poetic voice that gained a brief moment of popularity in the mid 1960s, particularly among Latin American poets, many of whom Merton counted as friends and allies. Characterized by parody, that is, the ironic repetition with critical distance,[ii] of the unspeakable, Merton’s variety of antipoetry, a sort of “assemblage art,” mimics quotations and paraphrases from those who enacted and supported the horrors of the time so as to highlight the absurdity and obscenity of the worldview they inhabited. In three of his antipoems, “Original Child Bomb”; “Chant to be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces”; and “Epitaph for a Public Servant” Merton makes use of irony at every turn, appropriating the language of officialese, turning it back upon itself to break through the numbness it fostered and resensitize the reader.

From earlier forms of poetry that favored images of seclusion from the world, the paradise of the world inside the monastic walls and later in the woods where his hermitage was situated, Merton came to link poetry with the capacity for prophetic critiques of what he called “the mass mind,” and what I call “the prosing of the world”: the world of absolute finality, of officialese, euphemistic speech designed to eliminate the toxic reality of language. While he continued to produce prose essays on any number of social concerns, he singled out his vocation as a poet as a privileged place of recognizing what has happened to language. In his article “War and the Crisis of Language” Merton argues that “poets are perhaps the ones who, at the present moment, are most sensitive to the sickness of language – a sickness that, infecting all literature with nausea, prompts us not so much to declare war on conventional language as simply to pick up and examine closely a few chosen pieces of linguistic garbage.”[iii] In the words of his friend and fellow antipoet Nicanor Parra, “The poet is there/To see to it the tree does not grow crooked”.[iv] In his poem “The Tower of Babel”, the stanza “History is a dialogue between/ forward and backward/going inevitably forward/by the misuse of words”[v] illustrates the cessation of dialogue, back-and-forth, as language serves the unstoppable juggernaut of power, progress, “prose,” shouting down those who, on behalf of those caught in the treads of empire, counter with a poetic destabilization of the finality that a prosaic account of reality would claim.

Antipoetry arises for Merton as a sort of “last resort,” when even language, the fundamental medium of the poet, is no longer available, when even language has lost its power to open communication. “Then it becomes necessary in such a situation to write antipoetry. For what appears to be poetry and what appears to be communication is actually a common plot to repudiate poetry and refuse communication. The pretense has to be attacked with the anti-poem. The anti-poem is positive communication of resistance against the sham rituals of conventional communications.”[vi] Merton’s antipoems typically allude by eluding – the horrors to which they point are made present by what they do not say, what remains a step or two beyond what is immediately given, but which the reader cannot help but connect to the banal tone and the statements quoted in the poems. In “Original Child Bomb” the emotionless, almost casual prose, parodying the bureaucratic language of the development and deployment of the atomic bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki, contrasts with the unspeakable reality that is being reported. In “Chant” and “Epitaph” Merton adopts the “persona” mask technique of Ezra Pound, appropriating the voice of the person whom he wishes to attack so as to show its absurdity and horror: the narrator of “Chant” evokes Rudolf Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz, while “Epitaph” directly claims to speak in the voice of Adolf Eichmann. Direct accusation and condemnation are unnecessary “when a diabolical anti-Psalm like ‘Chant to be used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces’ can be constructed by adapting only slightly the self-justificatory statements made by defendants at the trials of those responsible for murdering millions of Jews.”[vii]

“Original Child Bomb”

While referencing in the title the Japanese name for the first atomic weapon, the subtitle, “POINTS FOR MEDITATION TO BE SCRATCHED ON THE WALLS OF A CAVE”, alludes to a post-apocalyptic future in which survivors, recollecting the origins of the (il)logic of nuclear proliferation that culminated in the obliteration of civilization, will record these events in the only way left to them – with the Stone Age scholarship of marks scratched on cave walls. The ironic humor throughout the poem reflects a tone of disbelief at the insanity that had become so readily accepted: “Mr. Truman was a vice president who became president by accident when his predecessor died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He did not know as much about the war as the president before him did. He knew a lot less about the war than many people did.”[viii] The suggestion to share information about the bomb with the Russians to improve their friendly relationship was shut down because “all finally agreed that the Soviet Union was now friendly enough.”[ix] Merton repeatedly uses religious imagery, including the belief and unbelief of those who speculated about whether the bomb would detonate properly, code names such as “Papacy” and “Trinity,” and the dreams that some officials had of the bomb producing “eternal peace”.[x] Compared with the droning pace of “Chant,” the slow, even understated pace of “Original Child Bomb” produces a contrast between the chilling subject and the matter-of-factness with which the narrator describes it. It leaves behind meter, diction, imagery in favor of “the poem as statement, even as journalism, reporting in a flat undramatic prose facts that are at the same time so banal and so inhuman that they become the images of their own inherent horror.”[xi] The use of contrast language subtly draws attention to the incongruity of that flat mode of reportage, drawing attention to the technologizing logic that dissolves humanity (figuratively and, in the case of Hiroshima, literally): “When they bombed Hiroshima they would put the following out of business: The Ube Nitrogen Fertilizer Company; the Ube Soda Company; the Nippon Motor Oil Company; the Sumitoma Chemical Company; the Sumitoma Aluminum Company; and most of the inhabitants.”[xii] “Putting out of business” takes a grimly euphemistic turn, re-inserting the dissonance it was intended to stifle in its original context, appearing suddenly, unaffectedly enough in an otherwise predictable verse to produce that shock.

The repeated mention of the innocuous code language similarly produces a contrast of signifier and signified, chilling all the more because Merton is parroting, not producing, that incongruous linguistic fracture: The weather scout plane, called “Straight Flush, in reference to the mechanical action of a water closet,”[xiii] sneeringly uses scatology to mask eschatology, while one of the escort planes was named “The Great Artiste,” appropriating an image of God in the act, not of creation, but of annihilation. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane carrying the bomb, had named it after his mother, Enola Gay, tenderly carrying an apocalyptic Little Boy, an Original Child, in her womb. His pen dripping with irony, Merton says, “At the last minute before taking off Col. Tibbets changed the secret radio call sign from ‘Visitor’ to ‘Dimples.’ The Bombing Mission would be a kind of flying smile.”[xiv] A vaguely unwelcome guest now comes with cooing, chubby-cheeked innocence to bring death to the firstborn, and so many more, of Japan. “Good soldiers” are those who can see through the unspeakable human cost, both to the bodies of the killed and the psyches of the killers, to unflinchingly maintain focus on the goal of victory “at any cost”; the Japanese “professional soldiers” who wanted to continue fighting “until everybody was dead”[xv] parallel Col. Tibbetts, a “well balanced man, and not sentimental”,[xvi] Merton quotes President Truman, “We found the bomb…and we used it,”[xvii] the imagery of “finding” the bomb giving the sense that it is a natural resource, that

America

stumbled across it, that they were not looking to create a weapon of such magnitude, but since they found it, they should use it. In the subsequent years, the plethora of similar (and greater) bombs that have been “found” led to “brisk speculation” about the future, but thinking about it is tiresome, uninteresting. Returning to the subtitle, the lack of interest in speculating about the future has played out in the devastation of civilization that has returned people to a Stone Age, as in Albert Einstein’s quote, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”[xviii] The “sane,” like in Merton’s later essay “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann,” are the ones who can unflinchingly carry out institutional insanity. unlike the men in his crew who later suffered nervous breakdowns and are implied to be weak.

“Chant to be used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces”

“Chant” was one of Merton’s best-known poems and, because it marked a new moment in his antipoetic style and inaugurated a series of poems and essays critiquing the function of language in the legitimation of violence, one of his favorites. In a letter to his friend James Laughlin, Merton discusses “Chant,” which he refers to as “the Auschwitz poem”, bemoaning the inability to break through the tone-deafness of the times. Thinking about how to write something about peace, Merton says, “There is no purpose to a silly book of editorial-like platitudes. Some more poems like Auschwitz, maybe. But the thing is to be heard. And everything is perfectly soundproof and thought proof. We are all doped right up to the eyes. And words have become useless, no matter how true they may be.”[xix] Discussing with Nicanor Parra his method of composing “Chant” “almost in its entirety from the very words of the commanders of Auschwitz,” Merton comments, “it would be impossible to invent something more terrifying than the truth itself.”[xx] Finally, in a letter to a religious Sister, Merton refers to “Chant” as “a florilegium of statements from official documents and other declarations, for the most part”, noting, “That makes it even more terrible.”[xxi] Merton saw this poem, then, as a “floral arrangement” of words, an ironic and black-humor twist on the assemblage of quotes from concentration camp officials, held together by the bombast of the imagined commandant himself.

The lack of punctuation and the placement of the spaces between strophes indicate the tempo at which “Chant” is to be read – not measured or halting, but a sort of droning recitation that indicates the voice of “officialese,” the accumulation of formulaic slogans that allow the speaker to bypass critical thinking. Language of purity, cleanliness, efficiency, and improvements made further amplifies the disconnection of the values that the “good functionary” can point to in his own defense from the horrible context in which he was so efficient and managerially competent. “[I]t was not hot water that came through vents though”[xxii] gives a hint of the diabolical nature of the work – something is not as it seems – only to take it back immediately with an organizational flourish: “efficient winds gave full satisfaction.”[xxiii] Merton uses an actual recipe for making soap from the remains of murdered Jews, found in the paperwork of one of the camps, to further illustrate the numbed industriousness of the commandant and the productivity of the camp: “How I commanded and made soap 12 lbs fat 10 quarts water 8oz to a lb of caustic soda but it was hard to find any fat,”[xxiv] again alluding by eluding, the absence of fat pointing not only to the use of human fat from which they would make soap, but to the emaciated bodies of the Jewish prisoners that lacked any fat, throwing into relief the images of love and happiness which the “guests” in the poem experienced. Using a combination of sophisticated terminology and near-baby talk (e.g. “big heater”), the commandant comes off as “simultaneously vacuous and moronic and technically sophisticated…[he] has no images in his prose, no metaphors, no emotion; his is the prose of fact, observation, and euphemism; the prose of clinical and detached discourse.”[xxv] The very prosaic flatness of the language underscores the incapacity of the speaker to critique his own self-contained world, as if there were no other way to imagine a concentration camp except in terms of efficiency and hygiene. Only at the end does Merton allow any slippage in the persona of the narrator, warning the audience that while they condemn his megalomaniacal actions, they are guilty bystanders to the actions of their government (particularly, but not only, in Vietnam), expressing a functionally identical mindset: “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”[xxvi] (*As a side note, comedian Lenny Bruce adapted “Chant” for use in his stand-up comedy routines, goose-stepping across the stage while reciting it in a loud, droning voice.*)

“Epitaph for a Public Servant”

Again using direct quotations and paraphrases, this time from Eichmann’s trial in Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the repetitive and derivative nature of the poem indicates that whereas Merton is intentionally burlesquing Eichmann, Eichmann was himself merely following Nazi doctrine. Whereas Merton still appears in “Chant” and “Original Child Bomb”, the poet disappears totally in “Epitaph,” Speaking of Eichmann, Arendt claimed that “‘the longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that this inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. His speech was full of ‘empty talk’ and ‘stock phrases;’ he was ‘genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché;’ he was, in short, not stupid but vacuous.”[xxvii] Thus numerous lines are repeated throughout the poem, signifying the stock phrases to which Eichmann would turn for ready-made legitimations of his deeds. His refusal to think manifests in the repetition of the line, “Who was to have his own thoughts (in such a matter?),” referring to Arendt’s own parody of Eichmann’s “Pontius Pilate feeling,” his hands washed of all responsibility by awe at the “Popes of the Third Reich,” Hitler, Müller, and Heydrich. “Who was he to judge?” Arendt asks, ironically twisting the self-exonerating question he asked at his trial, “Who was he ‘to have [his] own thoughts in this matter’?”[xxviii] The refrain “Repentance is for little children,” which occurs six times, is a direct quote from Eichmann as he acknowledged his own legal (but not moral) guilt: he was prepared to hang himself as a warning to anti-Semites, but not because he felt remorse for what he believed had been, at the time, the appropriate thing to do. The nine repetitions of the line “Not out of mercy (did I launch this transaction)” refer to Eichmann’s conversation with Heinrich Himmler to trade one million Jews for ten thousand trucks: Eichmann considered the deal, not as a means of sparing Jewish lives, but out of a desire to keep the deportation of Jews from falling into the hands of someone who lacked the technical expertise he had.[xxix] Merton’s more noxious statements become weapons against the worldview that would use language to insulate itself from the reality of its actions: the line “From then on/Official orders/Were my only language” is an obvious paraphrase of Eichmann’s own statement that “Officialese is my only language.” Similarly, “Long live Argentina/Long live Germany/We will meet again” is drawn nearly word-for-word from Eichmann’s final statement before his execution by hanging in Israel in 1962.

In his later essay “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann,” Merton discusses the sinister implications of Eichmann’s sanity, that he had allowed his pursuit of rationalistic values to override whatever basic humanity might resist his orders: “The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.”[xxx] Merton’s focus on the normalcy of Eichmann resonates with Leonard Cohen’s 1964 poem “All There Is To Know About Adolf Eichmann”:

EYES: Medium

HAIR: Medium

WEIGHT: Medium

HEIGHT: Medium

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: None

NUMBER OF FINGERS: Ten

NUMBER OF TOES: Ten

INTELLIGENCE Medium[xxxi]

Although Merton uses Eichmann several times as a foil in his writing, most successfully in his “Devout Meditation”, Merton is less concerned about Eichmann himself than about the bureaucratized “mass-man” whom he comes for Merton to represent, and the calm and measured insanity of those who enacted the nuclear proliferation of the Cold War and the vast devastation of Vietnam in the name of peace and democracy (and not uncommonly, God). As Merton scholar Anthony Padovano puts it, “We have forgotten the name by which God is to be called, the language by which the message we send can be read. The laws of technology have taken the place of the language of the heart.”[xxxii] The skintight fit of the mantle of officialese is sobering because Eichmann represents a new kind of criminal who, as Hannah Arendt puts it, “commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well nigh impossible for him to know that he is doing wrong.”[xxxiii] When language has built such an impenetrable world, what language is left to deconstruct it?

Merton gives insight into his sense of the relationship between his political understanding of poetry and resistance to the hegemonic claims of the inhuman, arguing that “The real dynamic of nonviolence can be considered as a purification of language, a restoration of true communication on a human level, when language has been emptied of meaning by misuse and corruption…Above all, nonviolence is meant to convey and to defend truth which has been obscured and defiled by political double talk.”[xxxiv] His antipoetry, then, becomes a parodic attempt at the reclamation of words from their euphemistic legitimation of untroubled, “sane” devastation, and at the reclamation of the human person from the morass of the mass mind.

[i] Paul Pearson. “Poetry of the Sneeze: Thomas Merton and Nicanor Parra.” Thomas Merton Society.

http://www.thomasmertonsociety.org/sneeze.htm. Accessed 8 April 2010.

[ii] Linda Hutcheon. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. (Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 2000), p. 10.

[iii] Thomas Merton. The Nonviolent Alternative, ed. Gordon Zahn. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1981), p. 234.

[iv] “Poetry of the Sneeze.”

[v] Lynn Szabo. In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton. (New York: New Directions, 2005), p. 145.

[vi] Thomas Merton. A Vow of Conversation. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1988), p. 13.

[vii] George Woodcock. Thomas Merton: Monk and Poet. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1978), p. 144.

[viii] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 111.

[ix] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 112.

[x] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 112.

[xi] Thomas Merton: Monk and Poet, p. 143.

[xii] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 113.

[xiii] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 116.

[xiv] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 117.

[xv] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 112.

[xvi] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 116.

[xvii] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 118.

[xviii] Albert Einstein, http://www.wagingpeace.org/menu/action/urgent-actions/einstein/. Accessed 1 May 2010.

[xix] David Joseph Belcastro. “Chanting on the Rim of Chaos, Sane Language in an Insane World.” Across the Rim of Chaos: Thomas Merton’s Prophetic Vision, Angus Stuart, ed. (Stratton-on-the Fosse, UK: The Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and

Ireland

, 2005), 60-72, at 63.

[xx] “Poetry of the Sneeze.”

[xxi] “Chanting on the Rim of Chaos”, p. 66.

[xxii] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 121.

[xxiii] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 121.

[xxiv] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 121.

[xxv] John Porter. “Thomas Merton as Public Intellectual.”

http://www.spiritbookword.net/spirit/thomas_merton_as_public_intell.shtml. Accessed 8 April 2010.

[xxvi] In the Dark Before Dawn, p. 122.

[xxvii] “Thomas Merton as Public Intellectual.”

[xxviii] Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 114.

[xxix] Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 25.

[xxx] Nonviolent Alternative, p. 161.

[xxxi] “Thomas Merton as Public Intellectual.”

[xxxii] Anthony Padovano. The Human Journey Thomas Merton: Symbol of a Century. (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1984), p. 111.

[xxxiii] Thomas Merton. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1989), p. 290.

[xxxiv] Thomas Merton. The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton. Patrick Hart, ed. (New York: New Directions, 1985), p. 27.

Hauerwas

2010-05-25T23:41:00.000-04:00

A little something from Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian/ethicist at Duke: "The deepest enemy to Christianity is not atheism - it's sentimentality." I think what he means is that whatever "holiness" is supposed to mean, it's either a politically critical holiness or it's nothing. The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, attempting to reject a romanticized or affected poetic form in favor of speaking to the world on the ground, says:
"We repudiate
The poetry of dark glasses
The poetry of the cape and sword
The poetry of the plumed hat
We propose instead
The poetry of the naked eye
The poetry of the hairy chest
The poetry of the bare head.

We don’t believe in nymphs or tritons.
Poetry has to be this:
A girl in a wheatfield -
Or it’s absolutely nothing."

I think I would have to say the same thing about holiness - at a moment in history at which our attention span seems inversely proportional to our capacity for destruction, holiness simply cannot afford to content itself even with "good-deed-doing," let alone more sentimental "me and Jesus" spiritualities or any kind of feel-good that is taking us away from recognition of the genuinely iconoclastic spirit of the gospel. If you will excuse my copycat attempt at a parallel, We repudiate the holiness of the folded hands and the upturned eye. We propose instead the holiness of the shackled ankle and the knotted stomach. Of course, we don't find a lot of that terribly often - not in our parishes, our schools, our universities. What would it look like, Hauerwas asks, to be against something like greed? We can't even think of what greed even looks like apart from completely over-the-top examples.

vampires

2010-05-12T10:58:00.000-04:00

No, I'm not going to talk about the proliferation of vampire-themed movies and television shows that are emerging of late in the media. I got a telephone call yesterday (that's rare enough in itself) from a blood donation center in Louisiana, asking if I could come in and donate. That was the third donation center that had called me in the past two weeks, all of them asking for donations (blood, not money). So, I know that my posts are usually about pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities, but this once, something more practical: if you can, please donate blood. It's the easiest way to save lives that I know of, just about everyone will need blood at some point in his/her life, and if my phone records are any indication, a lot of blood centers' reserves are in bad shape. Plus, some places have started giving out much better swag than the usual t-shirt. Lastly, a number of studies have suggested that donating blood lowers the risk of heart disease by removing iron that would otherwise build up in the body. For adult men, who have no regular means of eliminating iron from the body, donating blood could play a significant part in maintaining your heart. Whatever reason you can come up with to donate blood, please do so.

Farewell discourse - the end of the school year...

2010-05-10T00:54:00.000-04:00

It's the middle of finals week, so I'm up to my eyeballs in paper writing (and enjoying all the snow falling on Mother's Day...), but I did give a little reflection at the masses today, and since it was the last Sunday of the regular school year, I themed it around moving on. More once all the papers are out of the way and I have some time to think about something else...

I suppose it is appropriate that as we are saying farewell to one another, the gospel comes from what is called the “Farewell Discourse” of John’s Gospel. When we return in the fall, it will be a drastically new community – without some old friends, and with a good number of new ones, but one way or another, almost all of us will be away from this place for some time. In today’s gospel Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” Of course I hope you will be active in a community of faith this summer, but wherever you are, I hope that you remember the peace that Jesus is talking about. He says this in the context of facing his death, so he clearly doesn’t just mean that you are happy and content and smooth sailing. “Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” “The world” for John has a very specific meaning – not the physical reality of the planet itself, and not the bodily realm as opposed to the spiritual, but a particular imagination – a vision of how life is supposed to operate. Let’s call it “the worldly” rather than “the world,” so you don’t think I’m saying the world itself is bad.

The worldly vision of peace is more or less about “success,” managing your life well enough to climb above the chaos, to make your life a comfortable and stable one. I presume we all came to SU or ESF for a reason – they have a good reputation, you are likely to get hired quickly and get a good salary, whatever. In brief, you thought it would help you to succeed, to make your life work for you. We have implicitly made a deal: we will make ourselves useful to the world by providing ourselves with valuable skills, and the world will make use of us, and in exchange it will make us more or less comfortable and safe and, we hope, happy. All of you, graduating or not, are already successful people by the sheer fact that you got into SU, ESF, wherever, and of course you are all the kinds of folks who will continue to do noteworthy things as captains of industry, businesspeople, politicians, thinkers, educators, health care providers and so on. Now, of course that’s fine, but I do hope you are getting more than job training in exchange for the sizeable amount of debt you are piling up, and that you expect more than that from your education – more than becoming well-paid operators. Certainly you know more stuff now than you did when you first arrived here, but have you become more genuinely human, in all of its glory and anguish and simplicity and complexity? Are you learning not only how to make a living, but how to live?

In a commencement address to the 1961 graduating class of Columbia University, his alma mater, Thomas Merton had the following to say about university education: “If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. If a university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably failing in its obligation to society and to the students themselves.” (TMSM 365) Now again, don’t misunderstand me; please learn all you can and bring your gifts to the table. As one of my brothers once told me, “The world is an endless black hole of misery and suffering,” by which he meant that whatever gifts you have, the world needs them badly. What the world does NOT need, though, is more glory-hounds killing themselves to have their picture on the front page of the New York Times or to have someone else think that they are successful. We’ve got more than enough of that. But that’s all the peace that the worldly can give: this Promethean struggle to be successful in the eyes of a world that can at most see you as a useful instrument. I hope you hear the real violence operative in a world like that.

The peace that the world cannot give is based in seeing beyond instrumental value; those people who cannot be squeezed into an imagination based on usefulness are either invisible or dangerous – the elderly, disabled, undereducated, incarcerated, so on. We have come here every weekend this year hoping to challenge that imagination, to be at least a little dangerous – wasting perfectly good work time producing nothing, accomplishing nothing, and trying to align ourselves with the unsuccessful – with the broken body of Christ, the crucified people of our world. We know that the voice of relevance, success, efficiency, is at full volume wherever we go, and it’s alive and well in us too, but this year we as a community have been here to at least whisper something else, to not give the worldly the stage all to itself. Wherever you are going this summer, remember that whisper, hang onto it when the worldly is trying to shout it down. Stay connected with a community of friends who can keep tuning you in to that whisper and reminding you of the peace that is worthy of your life, the peace that the world(ly) cannot give.

The oasis in my day

2010-04-29T17:48:00.000-04:00

It has been a long time, as usual. The end of the semester means lots of things to be read and written, but hopefully also some things emerging that might not be out of place in this forum. A very dear friend just sent me this poem entitled "Ithaca," and it was for me this afternoon a small oasis of reading and rereading and letting the words play on my tongue, with the attentiveness and care of a wine tasting. (*The fact that Ithaca is only about an hour down the road from Syracuse made it all the more relevant for me as I am looking ahead to the chance to get out on the road a bit soon.*) Simone Weil said, prophetically for our sound-bite era, "Absolutely unmingled attentiveness is prayer." I hope these words might be a small oasis of attentiveness for you as well...

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon---do not fear them;
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long,
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber, and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what these Ithacas mean.

---Constantine Cuvafy

mercy and bodies

2010-04-11T22:52:00.000-04:00

Fr. Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest who is also a Syracuse native and a well-known peace activist, is famous, or infamous, for having said (and I hope you will pardon the colorfulness of this metaphor), “Faith is not where your head is at, and rarely where your heart is at. Faith is where your ass is at!” Today the church celebrates “Divine Mercy” Sunday – typically celebrated in remembrance of the devotion of St. Faustina – you might recognize the pictures of Jesus with the red and white rays of light coming out of his chest. Anyway, the way she talks about mercy is mostly about getting plenary indulgences and eliminating purgatory time, and believe me, I’m all for forgiveness, but mercy in the life of Jesus is way too focused on people’s bodies to reduce it to something that happens only in your head or your heart, let alone after the grave. When we talk about Jesus as the presence of God, we use the term “Incarnation” – coming in flesh. When we talk about Easter, we don’t say his spirit goes to heaven – we talk about the resurrection of the body, the transformation of this fragile stuff. So today I want to talk to you about bodies; for a church that talks about Incarnation and eating the body of Christ and being the body of Christ, we are awfully good at acting like Jesus just came to save souls. How many of us think that spirituality is about feeling it in our hearts rather than living it with our bodies, or imagine that having faith means believing the right things, or think that religion and politics (which is all about people’s bodily reality) don’t mix? Nothing is more embodied than Christianity done right.

And look at the readings – there are bodies everywhere: What does mercy look like for the disciples in the gospel? It looks like a body – the body of Jesus, three times offering them peace, making himself available to Thomas, breaking up the fear that has paralyzed this group of people since his death. What does mercy look like for the people in the first reading? It looks like being healed: these bodies that had been hiding with fear have become so saturated with the mercy of Jesus that even Peter’s shadow has power to heal these broken and diseased bodies. I think I have mentioned before that the Greek word for compassion literally means that the person’s guts are churning inside them, and the Hebrew word for compassion, rehem, comes from the same root as the word for womb, rahamim – mom love, I-carried-you-in-my-body-for-nine-months-and-this-is-the-thanks-I-get kind of love. Any mother knows that mercy is not just in the head or the heart - any mother knows how bodily mercy actually is.

We are all familiar with the “spiritual but not religious” crowd, and I don’t have any particular need to slam that reality in itself, but the biggest danger I see among both “spiritual” and “religious” people is that when people say, “Well, I believe in God/a higher power/whatever,” they mistakenly think that what you BELIEVE is the most important thing. Belief makes no sense at all apart from where you put your BODY. Now, that doesn’t mean that just showing up for church, your body being in the seat, is all it is about; it’s about the commitments you make and what “belief” actually looks like when it is written in human flesh. We miss the point of that because we hear the word “believers” so often in the readings today – believers in the Lord were added to the community, happy are they who have not seen and have believed. The words they are using in Greek are cognates of the root word pistis, which doesn’t mean faith the way we think of it as “what you believe,” so much as faithfulness in the sense of fidelity, “being there” for people, being “count-on-able.” I am so happy that we greet one another at the Catholic Center, but I hope that none of us treat that moment as a formality. I hope there is an actual community, an actual body being created here, the body of Christ, that we are coming to know one another and be available to one another – to take care of this body, not just that “I’m going to church,” like a blip on our radar screens, but to celebrate and strengthen what we are trying to be when we leave this building, for each other and for the people we will meet who need mercy. Augustine is remembered as having held up the consecrated host during the Eucharist and saying, “Christians, see yourselves”; that is, become the body of Christ, individually parts of the reality that is greater than any one of us.

Palm Sunday

2010-03-28T00:32:00.002-04:00

Because the readings are long, this reflection is brief. Plenty more I had in mind, but less, I hope, is more.

I know we had some long readings today, so I will make this quick, but first, an image to contemplate: we have all seen film or Power Point presentation projected onto a screen, right? Speaking of the suffering and death of Jesus, the theologian Mark McIntosh gives the odd image of projecting a film, not onto a screen, but onto a garbage heap; the film is completely distorted, barely possible to make out. He suggests that the suffering and death of Jesus, far from being the will of God, is the distorted outcome of the “film” of God’s self-giving life appearing in the wreckage of human history. That’s why we read the Passion on Palm Sunday, a week ahead of time: to remind ourselves that the roots of Jesus’ suffering and death lie in his life and ministry, his confrontation with the distorted power structures of our world.

There were two processions going into Jerusalem that day: on one hand, Roman forces were massing in Jerusalem, fortifying their troop strength in town in preparation for the Passover, because there was typically trouble as people remembered and demonstrated for a freedom they did not enjoy. On the other hand, Jesus and his little group enter from the other direction, not with an opposing army, but lampooning this show of overwhelming force, playing on the words of the prophet Zechariah: “See, your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, Meek, and riding on an ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass. He shall banish the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem; The warrior's bow shall be banished, and he shall proclaim peace to the nations.” (Zech 9:9-10) A very different kind of king from Caesar, but a king nonetheless.

This year Palm Sunday falls between two infamous days from our own time: this past Wednesday, March 24, marked the 30^th anniversary of the anniversary of the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was killed for his outspoken commitment to economic and social justice for the poor of

El Salvador

. Next week, Easter Sunday, is April 4^th, which of course is the anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the radicality of whose message we as a nation and as Christians have not yet begun to take seriously. Shortly before his death, Romero said, “If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.” If you’ve been to

El Salvador

, you know that is exactly what has happened, and that’s what we are here today to do: to remember, to strengthen one another for our common task. True discipleship, following Jesus, means following him to the place of confrontation with every system of domination, even to death, believing that resurrection, new and transformed life, awaits.

Hagia Sophia

2010-03-24T19:05:00.001-04:00

Today is the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero; "happy" anniversary is not quite the right word, except that he was born into the resurrection and into the communal imagination of the people of El Salvador on this day, as he said: "If they kill me, I will arise in the Salvadoran people." When I was there a couple of years ago, I saw that he remains a powerful figure in the consciousness of the people of El Salvador.

For one of my classes, I wrote a little paper on a new book that just came out, Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton, by my old friend Chris Pramuk, now a professor of systematic theology at Xavier University in Cinncinnati. We were in a class on Merton together years ago, when he was just starting his doctoral work and I was just starting my master's work. He is writing about Merton's prose poem "Hagia Sophia," which draws on the image of Sophia, the Greek word for Wisdom, a figure who shows up in several of the late books of the Old Testament (e.g. Proverbs and Wisdom of Solomon). So, here goes...

I’ll just say it up front: I am in love with this book. Apart from making me realize how much of Thomas Merton’s corpus I have NOT read, I didn’t want to put it down. Pramuk uncovers the influences upon Merton’s “sophiology,” particularly the Russian Orthodox theologians for whom Sophia was a much more accepted category than in the Christian West, which has no real tradition of sophiology of which to speak, and the ramifications of this kind of theological thinking for the concerns of a world facing such moral and theological disintegration as did the world Merton inhabited, the world of the 20^th century, particularly the world of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Vietnam and Watts, the Cold War and the revolutions of the global south. Where Thomas Merton has been dismissed as not a real theologian on the grounds that he is only writing spirituality or poetry, Pramuk argues that, far from being mere wordsmithing, the form of his writing is essentially linked to its content. In a way very similar to Walter Brueggemann, for whom the primary category for understanding the prophet is as poet, Pramuk argues that poetry is a means of avoiding the “prosing” of the world. That is, paradoxical though it sounds, the poet is not swept up in devout idolatry of language the way that “the businessman, the propagandist, the politician” (78) are; the prosing of the world makes for a single, unquestionable Procrustean narrative into which all people are to be stuffed, whereas the poet knows that the elusive, allusive power of language opens up possibilities for “otherwise.” Rather than draw the ineffable down into fixed categories, the poet allows language to be unfixed by being drawn up into higher, more playful and unsettled meanings. “Imagination, in other words, the realm of the symbol, is not separate from reason but enables us ‘to reason differently by enlarging and reordering our powers of perception.” (108)

While it is more or less inevitable, given the workings of language, that those who are condemned to speak about God make God an object, an “out there,” Merton sees this as a tragedy that ends both in the death of God and in the death of the true self, that which we seek but which will never be found “out there” without being simultaneously being tasted as one’s inmost self, what Hopkins would call one’s “inscape.” Thus one angle on Merton’s understanding of mysticism as “the re-centering of subjectivity from the self to God.” (99) He refers to this “God’s-eye view” with the Pauline category of “the mind of Christ,” a lens through which we see that seeing the world, other people, God as “others,” “objects” to be related to, is a falsehood, and a violent and alienating one at that. In truth, we are already one, but we imagine that we are not, so the objectified world and other and God become instrumentalized products of exchange. The problem, it seems (stepping a bit outside of Merton and Pramuk’s arguments for a moment) is that this lens, this atomizing mode of looking at the world is, in Merton’s terms, horrifically Promethean (a literary figure that, while never explicitly stated as such, would stand for Merton as the foil to his figure of Sophia): I must capture what I want from others and from God who are striving to keep it from me. I can have only what I can take, because nothing will be given freely. “War, of course, is the bitter harvest of Prometheanism on a global scale, a centrifugal struggle against life spinning tragically around the poles of ‘heroism and despair.’” (141)

“Peace, then, and healing, begins with poverty of spirit,” (198) with a view of the world that does not pit “us” against “them,” that does not depend on defending myself from the world that is endlessly seeking to take what is mine. While nothing the theological influence that Russian Orthodoxy had on Merton, Pramuk connects Merton’s poetic/imaginative sensibilities with those of Abraham Heschel and Boris Pasternak, both of whom Merton admired and befriended: “‘In the face of our own almost hopeless alienation,’ Pasternak is proof that the poet can help us ‘get back to ourselves before it is too late.’ In him, poetry becomes one with prophecy.” (152) Merton’s repeated theme of the urgency (but nigh-impossibility) of simply being human in an age of mass inhumanity echoes Pasternak’s theme in his writings, “‘the protest of life itself, of humanity itself, of love’ against the ‘reign of numbers,’ against the alienation and anonymity of mass society.” (207)

In a strange way, this capacity for non-duplicity, for simplicity, for humanness, is Sophia, but less as a “thing” and more as a trajectory, a reality already present in each person but so buried under falsehood as to be invisible, that into which we are invited (quietly) to grow. The symbol itself for Merton jumps around, both in the poem and in his other sophianic writings: Sophia as Mary, as Logos, as the ousia of God, as the linkage of Logos and Spirit, who are together the presence of the Father (Mother) God in the world, as the “pivot” of nature playing alongside God from the beginning of creation. “Perhaps most of all, Merton’s Sophia is our ‘true self,’ when we allow Christ to be birthed in us, and so realize the hidden ground of mercy, creativity, and presence in our very selves, the mystical Body of Christ.” (207) This mysterious, “empty” placeholder, marked only by humility and kenosis, is obviously also connected to “le point vierge,” a phrase Merton borrowed from the French Islamicist Louis Massignon to refer to that meeting place of the divine reality with our own, endlessly humble and with nothing to hold on to by way of naming oneself, and hence both absolutely vulnerable and absolutely beyond insult and injury: there is nothing there to insult, since the only “thing” there is the non-object, the Absolute Subject, God, or better, Sophia, who is closer to me than I am to myself, who in the final accounting is my self.

Lest this seem to float off into the ether, Pramuk asks what good it does to bring Sophia-language into the discourse of Western theology and especially the discourse of the post-Christian era. “[W]ith deepest respect for the theodicy question, it is at the point where the analogical imagination ruptures, as in Auschwitz, or present-day Darfur – where all analogy between God and the world is rendered horrific and absurd – that the irony of Christ and Christ crucified intervenes from within, as it were, to mediate and intensify (I do not say ‘answer’) faith’s most difficult question: whether we have eyes to see, the faith to shoulder, the contradictions of hope in a sinful, though still hallowed, world.” (268) This is not simply another theodicy, arguing that the unspeakable realities of our times disappear in the light of the gloriously risen Christ: instead, rather than answering prose with prose, certitude with certitude and power with power, “Merton sets the poverty and humility of Christ, from nativity to the cross, against the Promethean climate of the times.” (262) This takes shape in what some would call “weak” categories: memory, imagination, hope, poetry, but as Merton says in the poem, “She [Sophia] crowns Him not with what is glorious, but with what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty.” (305)

Does this Sophia as dark ousia of God, as the weakness of God, the unpolluted self of humanity, work? Does it end up inscribing weakness into femininity, reinforcing artificial and harmful gender roles? That remains as yet for me an open question, but I suspect there is more to it than that: Sophia opens up imaginings of God that transcend the associations of power and masculinity that usually accompany Western God-images. Merton argues, “The ‘desecration’ of man begins when symbols are emptied of meaning and are allowed to survive precisely insofar as they are patronizingly admitted to be misleading but still ‘necessary for the ignorant.’” (275) There is still something within us, however, that has not been corrupted by the need to defend itself (like the “Uncarved Block” of The Tao of Pooh, perhaps), and the form of subversive imagery (God as Sophia) and subversive rhetoric (poetry, in this case) has the capacity to convey the mystical in a new key: the renewal of imagination, the un-prosing of the world. Such allegedly “weak” categories put theology where it ought to be: in touch with the weak, “intensifying our awareness of the critical present moment for those who have no name, no presence, no value whatsoever on the world stage.” (290) The very hiddenness of this sophianic vision is its power – it is too weak to be brought to the center of a system of control, even a theological system, so it remains on the edge where it belongs, pushed out of the world, uncompromised by abstractions that lose sight of the real people who are chewed up by the machinery of power. This is the Christ (and, one can hope, the Christianity) of today: “Christ is Lord of history in the manner ‘of His entry into Jerusalem: in a concealed, kenotic matter (behind a veil of humility), which is imperceptible to the senses, but more than visible, and absolutely evident to faith’…the Christ of our times is ‘the Christ of the bombed city and of the concentration camp.’” (215)

NYC

2010-03-23T20:04:00.000-04:00

This past weekend my community's New York Province celebrated the 50th anniversary of their foundation, so they had a Mass and a reception in New York City. I was coming back from my spring break in Washington, DC (coming soon), so I was able to be there for the celebration. Got to see a lot of guys I had not seen in a long time. Two in particular:

Br. Paul Montero is not only a current member of our general administration, living in Rome between his travels all over the world. He is also my former high school principal and a long-time friend. Because he is such a globe-trotter, I had not seen him in a few years, but as always, seeing him was a great grace of Brotherhood. Even as a little kid, Paul made a big impression on me - he knew my name, knew my family, and was not just concerned about running the school: he loved us students.

Br. Gaston Lavoie is another old friend, but from my novitiate days, rather than from high school. When I was a novice, Gaston was a new member of the general council, and he came to live with us for a couple of months to work on his English. Every evening after dinner we would take a walk around the block, and he would let me work on the French with him, so we got to be friends, and my French got a lot better (or maybe, less bad) because of his congeniality.

Both of these guys are just Brothers' Brothers - no baloney, just men who love the Institute and have given their lives to making it work better. Ametur Cor Jesu, Brothers, and happy anniversary.

Spring Break in DC

2010-03-17T00:46:00.000-04:00

Spending a few days in Washington, DC for spring break, visiting some former co-workers. Passed through York, PA on the way and saw the York Barbell Company right on the side of the interstate. The sign said they had free tours of the USA Weightlifting Hall of Fame, and their Olympic lifting equipment is the stuff of legends, so of course I had to stop. I know that sounds pretty pathetic, but I love York gear, and seriously, how often am I going to pass through York, PA?

Anyway, got in to DC last evening, and it was my friend’s husband’s birthday. He is serious about his Irishness, so we to a Gaelic Mass in honor of his birthday and St. Patrick’s Day. Had never heard any significant amount of Gaelic spoken before, but it was most impressive. The priest even took out his mandolin and serenaded us in Gaelic after the Mass ended! This morning my friend and I did an hour of yoga, which I was completely not ready for, so I have been dragging myself around all day. She had to go to work, so I went into town and met another old friend, and we spent the day running around town: National Zoo, Holocaust Museum, Washington Monument. The zoo has an “O Line,” (http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/ThinkTank/OLine/default.cfm) a series of towers with ropes attached running from the orangutan home to a research station, allowing the orangutans to be out of their pens without danger of them getting away (there are electrified platforms below the ropes to keep them from climbing down from the towers). How cool an idea is that?

The last time I was in DC (about 8 years ago), the Holocaust Museum (http://www.ushmm.org/) was the one thing that stayed with me above all else, so I knew I wanted to get back, and it did not disappoint. We spent about three hours there, but of course I could have stayed for days. It was encouraging that the place was jammed to the rafters with visitors the whole time we were there – the power of that place is palpable, and it seems like people are really drawn into the presentation.

Finally, dinner with both friends and their spouses at an unbelievable tapas restaurant – how had I gone 32 years without ever having tapas?!

Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, of course, and even though I’m not Irish at all, I feel like an honorary Irishman for the day, and if tomorrow's hour of yoga or whatever other torture my friend can come up is like today's was, I think I’ll be looking for a wee drop...So, to all lads and lassies, genuinely Irish and Irish for the day, a happy day.

A pizza my mind...

2010-03-14T18:20:00.000-04:00

For a while there we were ordering pizza or cooking frozen pizzas almost every weekend, so for the past few weeks, I've been making pizza dough on Friday and having it available for Sunday evening - I roll out the dough, and the Brothers can add whatever they want to it. As I type we are just finishing cleaning up from our latest effort, and for my money, our best so far. Today one of the volunteers who lives down the street came over to talk about graduate theology programs and get some advice about baking bread, so I got her to help, which may be why it turned out so well. I inadvertently cooked one longer than I intended, but it ended up being really good - very crisp! - so I may have to repeat that 'happy accident' again next time! The first picture is Br. Bill's very fine mushroom-and-ricotta pizza, then mine (mushroom and pineapple, my favorite!), then the guys at the table, then Br. Mike's pepperoni and mushroom. Coming to know Him in the breaking of the bread, indeed...

hidden Christ, unhidden small self

2010-03-11T21:49:00.000-05:00

Realization tonight, of the sinister reach of my superficial self. Had a brilliant session today on mysticism, proud of myself for my mastery of the material, good synthesis of ideas and insightful turns of phrase, then came home and snapped at the Brothers during dinner because I was tired and the conversation was boring. Had to apologize for being cranky. Again. All of the morning’s snappy knowledge still hasn’t sunk past my thinking brain. Need for a return to the apocalyptic Christ: not the scholars’ eschatological prophet announcing the end of the world, but the Christ who leaves my plans for my life in splinters, in whose wake my life cannot but be shaken to its foundations. No more taking pride in being clever, like the prisoner taking pride in his large cell. Inauthenticity of justifying my alienated life with work - always more work to do, never enough time, feel continually drawn toward doing more, reading more, writing more, proving more, but then wonder where my religious life, my life, has gone. Need to get from the irreligious religious life of my life at present, not back to “religious life” (whatever that means), but to real life. The attempt to live a more human life is at times inhuman – making bread from scratch (which I love), wanting to avoid processed crap foods, but demands so much more than the two seconds in the bread aisle at the supermarket. Want to connect with what I eat – holiness of food – not just use food as fuel. But hard to spend (justify?) the time when I could be/should be ACCOMPLISHING – plowing through more books, writing some brilliant (!) thing, updating my blog more often. Like the Big Bad Wolf of my unsettled resentful self hiding in Granny’s contented nightgown (the better to edify you with). Merton, as usual, but for me, more than for you: “The Christ we seek is within us, in our inmost self, is our inmost self, and yet infinitely transcends ourselves.” Easy to say, hard to get. Not there yet, haven't even started. But the shy Christ breaks through, despite myself.

a bit more on debt...

2010-03-02T21:14:00.000-05:00

Ever since I went to that lecture last week, I have been thinking about debt and its relationship to theology. I know frightfully little about economics, and only slightly more about theology, but it sure seems like so many theological types have not had to worry about debt that I fear we too easily spiritualize the Biblical language of debt. Of course, I'm in the same boat - just because I've taken a vow of poverty does not at all mean I have any idea of what poverty or debt actually feels like - but I fear that we can theologize debt, real financial debt, into sinfulness, like we now owe God for all the things we have done wrong. I'm not trying to nullify talking about sin, but I do want to avoid reading the gospel like it is just talking about our souls - the salvation of which Jesus speaks is integral, not just getting souls to heaven, but overcoming the crushing forces that warp the human situation. Debt may not be the only one, but it is certainly a real one, and reading Torah, the prophetic tradition, the gospels makes clear that it is near and dear to the heart of the Biblical God. An entire chapter of Leviticus (25) is about the jubilee year, when all debts were to be forgiven and land restored to families, and other institutionalized means of preventing debt from consuming the people. Isaiah, Amos and Micah among other prophets rail against practices that condemn people to fall into debt (see, e.g., Amos 2:2; 3:11; 6:10-11. Speaking about the crushing system of debts in the Palestine of Jesus' time, Walter Wink says, "It is no accident that the first act of the Jewish revolutionaries in 66 C.E. was to burn the Temple treasury, where the record of debts was kept." [Incidentally, if you want to read the article from which I got this quote, go here: http://www.cres.org/star/_wink.htm. He reads the injunctions to turn the other cheek, give one's coat with one's tunic, and go the second mile in the context of Roman occupation - a very different view from our usual spiritualized thinking about those "impossible" injunctions!] A number of theologians talk about Jesus' turning over tables in the temple in the context of the economic control that the necessity of making very expensive sacrifices would impose over the poor. We tend to read parables like the unforgiving servant (MT 18:23-35) or the workers in the vineyard (MT 20:1-16) as if they are really about God forgiving sin or being merciful with us - and yes, that's true, but why would that extend only to the interior life, as opposed to also entailing the surface reading of economic debt, which is so common in the time of Jesus and in our own time? What would have happened those people that Dr. Yunus lent the $27 to if they had borrowed money from loan sharks? How long would that debt have dogged them? Why in poor areas are there so many paycheck advance places that charge unbelievable interest rates? Why when I was in Zimbabwe did I so often see endless fields of flowers for sale abroad all while so many people were hungry? [Foreign debt, in case I was unclear there.] The Church, talking about economic justice, makes clear that we are not isolated monads or self-made men and women - we are inherently communal beings, and our lives impact one another. There is a social nature to our lives - we don't become the body of Christ by sitting together for an hour on Sundays, we become it by behaving communally, and that means that there is a social reality in every aspect of our existence: economic, political, familial. Debt is not just a ready symbol for sin or a story to be allegorized, but a real and enduring source of human suffering that the gospel demands be alleviated.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice...

2010-02-24T00:11:00.000-05:00

I just got back from a public lecture at Syracuse U. by Dr. Muhammad Yunus (http://www.muhammadyunus.org/), a Bangladeshi economist and Nobel Peace Prize winner for his work with microloans – loaning small amounts of money to poor people without collateral. He started with 42 people who were borrowing money from loan sharks, looking to borrow a total of $27 (!); knowing that being in debt to those loan sharks could well control their lives for a very long time, he took $27 from his pocket, and from there, he was off. Today the bank he founded lends $100 million per month, entirely in rural areas and almost entirely to women, and close to 100% of their lenders repay their loans. He gave a great presentation, very animated and funny, and I suspect that more than a few people in the packed auditorium were inspired to start thinking about how they could get in on something like this – I know I was. It also so happens that I’m currently reading an edited collection of the writings of Jesuit Fr. Daniel Berrigan, who is well-known for his activism for peace over the past fifty years. Between the lecture and the book, it is refreshing to be reminded of what all the work I am doing for this degree is actually about – trying to learn better how to be an agent of justice in a world that could really use it.

21 February 2010

2010-02-21T15:50:00.000-05:00

I don’t know about you, but I kinda hate February: the weather is cold, grey, and slushy (especially here in Syracuse), it’s still too early in the semester to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s still a month until spring break. On top of that, then the Church has to throw Lent in, so that just in case you weren’t already depressed enough, now you have six weeks of self-denial to look forward to. We usually think of Lent leading up to Easter, but given today’s readings it also seems to make sense to connect the forty days of Lent with the forty days Jesus spent in the desert immediately after his baptism. Remember what he hears at his baptism? “You are my beloved son; with you I am well pleased.” You ever wonder what Jesus thought about when he heard that? Whatever he thought about his relationship with God, I suspect he wouldn’t talk about it like a theology professor; I can’t really imagine him saying, “I am the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in one divine person.” I mean, I’m sure Jesus got an A in ancient philosophy when he was in college, but that just doesn’t really seem like his style. We think we know what Jesus being called “Son of God” means, because we have a whole history of doctrines to point to, but what would Jesus think about hearing those words applied to himself? If anything, I think that where we have typically read the forty days in the desert as a series of tests to pass, perhaps we could read them more fruitfully as unpacking what it means to be the Son of God. Did you notice that in two of the three tests Jesus faces, the devil begins, “IF you are the Son of God,” as if the suggestion he gives follows naturally from an obvious image of what it means to be the Son of God? If you are the Son of God, you shouldn’t be hungry. If you are the Son of God, don’t worry about throwing yourself off the parapet of the Temple, because nothing bad will happen to you. The ready equation is that God is the king, so Jesus is the prince and should enjoy the freedom from worry and discomfort that one would expect for a prince, but Jesus dismisses that kind of sonship. I’ve said with you before that rather than Jesus being just as human as us, but more divine, I think he is more human – he does not run away from any of the reality of being human, which involves hunger, danger, failure, rejection, humiliation, all the things a lot of us don’t deal with terribly well. He doesn’t make avoidance of hunger his top priority, or gaining power by any means necessary, or attracting crowds by doing magic tricks – sonship has to mean something more than that.

Maybe I’ve been reading too much Thoreau lately, or maybe February is just working its magic on me, but sometimes I feel totally unfree, like my life is being hemmed in by forces way beyond my control, and I think about just disappearing into the desert somewhere. Like the old saying goes, “The problem with running the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” In the Biblical tradition the desert was the place where demons lived but also where God was to be encountered – danger and opportunity, the risk of life without safety nets and the possibility of seeing life from outside of the confines of public opinion. When I was teaching theology in St. Louis, we read Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild in my intro class. I don’t know if any of you read the book or saw the movie, but to read a book about a smart, talented young guy with a big future just cutting off from society to find something big hit home with a lot of my students because they were the same kinds of people, just the students here at SU are: intelligent, talented, going places. We talked about Chris McCandless’s [the protagonist of Into the Wild] passionate need to not get fed through what I called “the meat grinder” - the script that we more or less are expected to fall into: go to a good high school so you can go to a good college so you can get a good job so you can take vacations far from your job and still put away enough money to retire comfortably. Anyone else ever feel like that, like someone else has written the script for your life and you are being moved along, usually imperceptibly? I hope not. The culmination of that project was an assignment to turn off the cell phone, get off campus, just walk somewhere they had never been, be completely unplugged for an hour or so and then write about it. I figured it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, a tiny dose of the weeks and months that Chris McCandless went without seeing another living soul. Some of the students reported what a shock it was to not be able to call anyone, how uncomfortable it was to go so long without text messaging or calling anyone or twittering (tweetering? tweeting?). A number of them said they thought it couldn’t be good for a person to be isolated for so long, but almost none of them said that solitude, silence, unplugging, feeling some fear or uncertainty might actually be worthwhile. We are so constantly bombarded with data that tuning out can feel pretty defenseless, but only in distance from the security of the mass mind can the Christian take the risk of becoming more fully human. Paradoxical, that the mass mind can be so individualistic in selling people on more and more needs and desires, while distance from the herd can open the door to solidarity by seeing the illusions that we mostly take for granted. I’ve said before that if you are waiting for a sign, this is it: we don’t typically expect a voice from the heavens, like at Jesus’ baptism, but here it is: you are beloved son, beloved daughter – how will you confront the false meanings of that reality and come to inhabit the deep truth it offers?

Ash Wednesday

2010-02-16T23:38:00.000-05:00

As usual, it's been a while since I have been around blogger.com's hallways. This time, it's been a bit more deliberate: I've been hibernating for a while, trying to get my head on straight, so thanks to those of you who have asked if everything is ok - I think it is.

I'm giving a little reflection at the Ash Wednesday services at the Catholic Center, so I figured I could post it - there are some recycled lines from older posts, but hopefully they aren't too stale. I used to hate Ash Wednesday when I was younger, but in the past few years I've found some real treasures in it. Hope the same is true for you. My best wishes and my prayers for all of you this season, and in particular for the people of Haiti and those who are working on so many fronts to ameliorate their suffering...

I don’t know if any of you ever do this, but every Ash Wednesday, at some point during the day, I forget that I have ashes on my head and touch my forehead, and I get that gritty feeling of ash on my fingers. I hate that feeling – it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard – but it brings back to mind one of the formulas for the distribution of the ashes: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." We’ve heard it so often that we skip right by it, but that’s a dangerous memory, one we would rather not think about for too long. Ash Wednesday is a reminder that the end of my world is never terribly far away. I’m not talking about the end of life on earth, but the end of all our little worlds, the world of business as usual, the world which is all about managing our own fates. Everything is passing away: not only our lives, not only MY life, but everything – no nation lasts forever, no social system or economy or political party or national leader or public opinion lasts forever: nothing lasts forever.

Ash Wednesday is a weird day, I think: putting ashes on one another’s heads and telling each other that we are going to die sounds a little too morbid, a little too "scary Catholic." In a way, it’s a scandal, and it should be – in Greek the word scandal means “stumbling block,” or for my purposes, "speed bump," something that disrupts the easy flow of getting where we want to get. Ash Wednesday has the potential to be a sort of stumbling block, a speed bump, if you will: it urges us to resist, even if only for a moment, the dominant story of what life is SUPPOSED to look like – well-fed, perpetually young and beautiful and successful and happy and comfortable. It reminds us that the gospel we profess is no safe, harmless gesture we do for a day here and there: we are wearing on our bodies a sign of death and mourning, the impending end of our worlds. If we don’t just let this day pass by, rub the ashes off as soon as we leave, treat it like one of those Catholic duties we are supposed to get through as quickly as possible with a minimum of interference on your real life, this day can be a sacrament of the brokenness and the suffering of our world. That’s what all the ascetic practices of Lent are about at their core – not about being spiritual heroes, but bringing all this spiritual stuff back to bodies, getting us to FEEL something of the tears of the world in our own bodies and not just think about it for a few minutes and then move on. Maybe you have been thinking about what you are going to "give up" for Lent, and if you are doing something like that, good for you, but remember that it's not really about "giving something up," as if what God is really looking for is for you to quit drinking beer or watching Desperate Housewives or whatever else for six weeks. Take today’s fast, for example. Ask yourself, "When was the last time I felt truly hungry? How often do I eat when I’m not really even hungry?" The point is not how much of a rock star you are when it comes to skipping food: it’s about letting prayer get out of your head and into your empty stomach – actually FEELING hunger in your body. That’s what Jesus means with the expression "hunger and thirst for justice": something we can’t turn off any more than we can turn off feeling hungry. I’ll close with a prayer that some friends of mine have in their house: "Lord, to those who hunger, give bread, and to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice." Amen...

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T20:43:00.000-05:00

My dear friends,

My most sincere prayers that this be for you a very blessed and peaceful Christmas. I received a letter from a Brother in our New England province a few days ago, riffing off one of my posts on this blog, so since it is better than anything I could have done, I include it below. (Shawn, I hope you don't mind me borrowing your letter - it was too good to miss!) Let us pray for each other, that this Christmas we remember the poor, that we see in this quotidian miracle of birth the ever-new birth of the reign of God: justice, forgiveness, crossing of boundaries to welcome the outsider.

Who I am is who I am in God, and nothing more.

--And God came to us that way, too.
As an infant.
As one born into a family that had faith and very little else.
As the bearer of reconciliation, renewal in the Covenant,
As Savior and Brother and Lord – as he was in God.
--And Jesus lived among us that way, too.
As a humble, quiet resident of Nazareth for 30 of his 33 years.
As an itinerant preacher who challenged the status quo.
As one who loved those considered unlovable, unacceptable,
unclean and unknown
(the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant,
the substance abuser, the criminal – all children of God)
As one who challenges us to do the same.

--And now we are called to live that way, too.
As people of faith in the face of skepticism.
As people of hope in a world where sometimes hope seems lost.
As people of love in a society that has often confused its
priorities about what love means.

Who I am is who I am in God and nothing more.
May the Spirit of God, the Spirit that gave Jesus life and gives us life,
guide you to become who are you are in God
this Advent and Christmas
and throughout the New Year to come.

reflection for 22 December 2009

2009-12-22T21:32:00.001-05:00

As usual, it has been way too long since I last posted, but I did just finish my papers for the end of the semester, and I’ve been up to my neck in work. The readings today are the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, bringing her baby to the temple to dedicate him to God (1 Sam1:24-28); the Canticle of Hannah, which is a song that follows the dedication of Samuel to God (1 Sam 2:1-8); and then Mary’s Magnificat (LK 1:46-56), which of course is attributed to her after Elizabeth acknowledges her blessedness. Each of them is a great reading, and together they are a great combination. I am currently working on a book review of a new book on contextual theology (An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective by Stephen Bevans, SVD) for a Catholic publication, and a great deal of it has been discussing how theology always comes from a particular context, rather than assuming that the theology of upper-middle-class white male celibates (like myself) is the normative theology and everyone from other situations is somehow derivative from that norm. The only people we hear from in today’s readings are poor Middle Eastern women – not only no degrees in theology, but can’t read or write, have no public voice, but by God, they are doing theology! Their theology is unbelievably important for a person in my situation, because it is too easy to think that the concerns of my world are everyone’s concerns, that everyone encounters these texts the way I do. As I mentioned in my last post, “Apocalyptic never makes sense to people who are tenured.” That is, for people whose life is comfortable, literature written when people are under attack and their world is exploding is a curiosity at best, something to be leisurely pondered. I can easily spiritualize this Christmas season because a person in my context can afford to do so. “Christ being born in your heart” is a nice reminder of the call to inner conversion, and it isn’t WRONG, but re-read the Magnificat and see how much of it isn’t about spiritualized concerns, but about the situation of the poor and the marginal, like Mary herself would have been as a woman, a non-elite Palestinian, a person living under foreign occupation, an unwed mother. The God of Hannah and Mary’s Canticles is not only a God who touches hearts but who demands justice, who crushes unjust forces that would trample the poor. While we talk about the coming of the reign of God at Christmas, both Canticles make clear that this God is already active, already demanding and bringing justice for those who are chewed up by the powerful – this is who God always is. One of my papers this semester was on torture in Latin American dictatorships as a ritual that created a particular kind of collective memory: there is only one story in this country, and it is the story of the regime, and any alternative stories get silenced by torture. What a revolutionary thing to here have a vision of reality that is not only given by poor women, but that offers a completely different vision of reality – a reality in which the poor are saved from the nightmare of oppression, where the narrative of the unchallenged power of the proud is dismantled. That alternative story is just about always subaltern, below the surface of the dominant narrative, like a termite invisibly chewing away at the foundations of the structure from within, but for people who themselves get chewed up by society’s script of how the world works, an alternative story says: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. ANOTHER REALITY IS POSSIBLE. In a world in which 70% of the world’s poor are still women, in which women still do 80% of the work and still own 1% of the property, the fact that today’s readings give voice to poor nonwhite women is still not to be taken for granted, even though we likely don’t a second’s notice to the speakers, let alone the actual content, subversive as it is. (*As a side note, during the dictatorships I mentioned above, the Magnificat was at times ripped out of Bibles by the regimes because it inspired images of another world, of the powers being overthrown. Words continue to offer us the means to depiction of reality, and thus to alternative depiction of reality!*) What a thing it is when, whether in our parishes or on their own, people come together to read the texts of our collective story from our individual backgrounds: some professionally educated in the task, most not, but all taking part in enriching the community by sharing the varied perspectives of their lives in conversation with the Biblical world as it speaks to them: male, female, African, Latin American, Asian, refugees, migrants, even white upper-middle-class celibate doctoral students. As it so happens, last week a volunteer who lives near us and who works at a clinic at a Franciscan parish called me and asked if I spoke French: A woman from French-speaking Africa had just come into the clinic and the usual interpreter was not available. I went over, talked to this woman a bit, and helped her through her meeting with the doctor: very simple, a reminder of how much help my French needs, but it worked. She is a recent immigrant from Niger, her son recently died, so she is staying with the one person she knows, another woman from her hometown who has been here for a while. Those two women have some stories to tell, let me assure you, and I plan to keep in touch with them, especially to help the first woman learn some English so she can make this place home. How would they read today's readings? Certainly not the same way I do, but certainly not wrongly compared to my "scholarly" reading. What world do those two Palestinian village women from a long time ago inspire for those African women living over a barbershop in the old Italian district in Syracuse? And what do all four of them say to me as I celebrate the coming of Jesus, who bears the reign of God in his midst?

expert humans wanted

2009-11-30T23:55:00.002-05:00

We read some Emerson and Thoreau for one of my classes this week, and I just finished the reflection paper, so I have snippets of both those guys whirling in my head, with a liberal sprinkling of clips from Dead Poets' Society for good measure. Thoreau's quote, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them" has got me thinking, and not just because it's the end of the semester and I'm up to my eyeballs in reading and papers: how much do any of us avoid the possibility of unknown suffering by clinging to sufferings to which we are accustomed? Pink Floyd shares Thoreau's sentiment: "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way." Stiff upper lip, lads. How much of my life is extraordinary? That doesn't mean life-as-extreme-sport, (for God's sake, no) but how much do I live to get somewhere else, not pay attention to where I am, muddle through what I am supposed to do? How often am I genuinely alive, really soaking in the full range of human experience, and not running away from some part of it? Whatever we are doing, work, school, whatever is about developing or making use of a certain expertise of ability or information, but how many of us are expert human beings? I have become an expert at keeping the world stable around me, but when that stability is threatened, how easily my little world falls apart. I don't know how to become an expert human being, but, even if just for this night while writing this paper, Emerson and Thoreau have reminded me that the goal of all of it - work, school, community, ministry, whatever - is the deadly difficult task of becoming who we are, becoming real human beings.

For me in my little universe, that means more than having a much-expanded personal library at the end of this degree program. A mental rock star like Thoreau can say that he kept the Iliad on his table at Walden Pond but didn’t read much of it; again, he isn't dismissing intellectual work, but seeing the task of intellection directed to knowing himself. Plenty of people have dismissed his experiment because he was only a mile or so from Concord, but I challenge anyone to spend a week without reading or talking to anyone – that might sound like heaven at the end of the semester, but not reading, not writing, not accomplishing, not producing is a lot more work than it seems. In my head I share Thoreau’s sentiment, “We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers,” but in my real life I also see how needy I can get after a few months of continual interaction, communication, productivity, when I have not disciplined myself to be still and let go of "relevance." My fear in this place is that academe become a barrier between myself and real life, cutting me off from the desperation of real people's real sufferings as well as Thoreau's “quiet desperation” in my own life, not just because I have spent a ridiculous amount of time this semester cooped up reading or writing, but because a university can be a cozy place to hunker down away from the chaos of the world. “Apocalyptic never makes sense to people who are tenured,” one of my OT professors once told our class. Point taken: To the degree that being here opens my world to the rawness of the world of people who live without safety nets, and gives me the tools to bring people to see outside their bubble, I'm in the right place. To the degree that this kind of work insulates me from it, I’m in big trouble.

The Time of the End is the Time of No Room - 15 November 2009

2009-11-15T12:26:00.000-05:00

The readings today include apocalyptic sections of Daniel and Mark, so given the opening of this new film 2012 (which I have not seen, and don't particularly intend to see), I thought my reflection for today might bring those two together. Here goes...

Merry Christmas! I see that we already have a Christmas tree out in the lobby, but how many of you have seen Christmas decorations up at stores or heard Christmas music on the radio? I started hearing it before Halloween. According to this new movie 2012 the Mayans apparently say the end is coming in three years, and I think that by then, stores are going to start Christmas sales on the 4th of July. In the past few weeks, how many of you have said something along the lines of, “Oh my God, the semester is almost over!”? Personally, I don’t want it to be that close, because I have a lot of work to do between now and the end. We see something of that sense of anticipation this week in the readings: sun being darkened, stars falling, heavens and earth being shaken. In other words, the world as we know it is falling apart. We still have a few weeks to go before the end of the liturgical year, but we are already hearing readings that seem to be directly pointing at the end of things. The technical term for thinking about “the last things” is eschatology, so we might say that these readings are eschatological. Preachers throughout history have just loved these texts, usually pointing to current events to convince people that the end is almost here. War here, famine there, the end must be close. There have ALWAYS been wars and famines going on, I’m sad to say, so current events is not the best yardstick. Even the earliest generation of Christians seemed to believe pretty soundly that Jesus would return within their lifetimes, and it’s easy to see why from the content of the gospel: “Amen, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” Both the first reading and the gospel point to a select group who will endure the end: those whose names are written in the book, says the first, and the elect, says the gospel. Of course, people of all times have been at pains to show that they are among the elect, usually showing at the same time who is NOT among the elect. Some group took it upon themselves some years ago to calculate exactly what percentage of people are going to be condemned, and suffice it to say it’s pretty high, 87-point-something percent, if my memory serves. Anybody want to guess whether that group was in the 87 percent or the 13 percent?

What do we do with readings like this when, a couple of millennia after they were written, the end still hasn’t come? Well, there’s eschatology and then there’s eschatology. I did find it interesting that with all this buzz about this movie 2012 coming out this weekend, a professor of archaeology or some such thing pointed out that the Mayans didn’t see this as the end of the world, but the end of the age, the end of a particular arche, a particular power structure. That, I think, is the sense of what we see in this gospel; right around the time Mark’s gospel was written, the Romans sacked Jerusalem and burned down the temple. For the Jews of that time, this was huge, the “end of the world,” rather like that country song after 9/11, “Where were you when the world stopped turning?”, or all those action scenes in the end-of-the-world movies that Hollywood keeps pumping out: the White House blowing up in Independence Day, the frozen Statue of Liberty in The Day After Tomorrow, the fall of the Eiffel Tower in G.I. Joe, and so on. The world looks different after this has happened, because what we thought was stable, sturdy, eternal is shown to be vulnerable. At the same time as these massive catastrophes change the world, that’s also what the life and ministry of Jesus is about, in a completely different way: the outsider, the weak, the unworthy is paradoxically shown to be the place where God is to be found. Thinking back to the “percentages” of who will be saved, who did Jesus spend his time with? The power elite? The well-connected? The really religious folks? Try the unclean, the outsiders, the unworthy, the repentant. So, this age is dying, even if it is a slow and painful death. Unfortunately, instead of this vision of who God is infiltrating our model of power politics, we have allowed it to norm our sense of what God is. The first reading speaks of Michael, and of course we usually get an image of an angel with a sword or a spear, reenacting a power that, while bigger than earthly powers, is the same kind of control: the biggest of the big sticks. In the early Church, Michael was an image for Jesus: Michael means “who is like unto God?” And who is like God, who shows us what God is like? Jesus, who has neither sword nor spear, but only the earth-shaking model of crucified love. God is to be found in the unstable places of history, and while life generally works for all of us who are here, we know well how large a proportion of the world can’t say the same. Despite the death grip of the old age on control and manipulation, the business-as-usual power politics that favors the powerful and the well-placed is giving way to a new era in the ministry of Jesus, who points to the nobodies of his world as signs of the reign of God, a scandal to the reign of power. That’s the already and the not yet; the promise has been made, and we believe that promise is trustworthy, so we can live in a new world and also await its full enactment. The death knell of this arrangement of power and injustice has been sounded in the new reality that is the coming of Jesus, who defies all the power politics of the world, who is born into obscurity and poverty and dies in pain and disgrace.

Since you are all anticipating the end of the semester, and the readings are anticipating the end of the liturgical year, and 2009 is anticipating the year 2012 (why didn’t they wait three years?!), allow me to anticipate a bit and bring the eschatology of this week’s readings into conversation with a reflection on the Nativity, the initiation of the end of the age. Thomas Merton wrote an essay in the early 60’s entitled, “The Time of the End is the Time of No Room,” a reflection on the Nativity, when there was “no room” (in the inn) for the coming of the new vision.

“We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration.

“As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the earth.

As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet. There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.

“In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for man.

“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it - because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it - his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak; and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. For them, there is no escape even in imagination. They cannot identify with the power structure of a crowded humanity which seeks to project itself outward, anywhere, in a centrifugal flight into the void, to get out there where there is no God, no man, no name, no identity, no weight, no self, nothing but the bright, self-directed, perfectly obedient and infinitely expensive machine.

“For eschatology is not finis and punishment, the winding up of accounts and the closing of books: it is the final beginning, the definitive birth into a new creation. It is not the last gasp of exhausted possibilities but the first taste of all that is beyond conceiving as actual.”

Anti-thority

2009-11-13T20:14:00.001-05:00

I met with my academic advisor today to plan next semester’s courses, and at the end of the meeting she, with great sensitivity and candor, brought to my attention a concern that some of the other students in the department had about me. She included that she thought they had not come to talk to me directly because they saw me as a religious authority and may have felt intimidated. I was brought up short by the concern she raised, as I was not even aware of the effect of my actions, but it made me think about what it means to be seen as a religious authority. While I know that the mere fact of being in religious life connotes a certain kind of authority, I don’t consider myself an authority on anything. I am certainly not an intellectual authority, not when it comes to knowledge of the faith, a topic that I have actually studied, let alone any other topic. I don’t consider myself a moral authority; quite the contrary, my sense of religious community is that we are here together because we are greatly aware of our fallibility, and we need to be here together because we are such great sinners. One of the great blessings of community is that, at its best, it holds a mirror to our actions like my advisor did this afternoon. In Christianity in particular, it seems to me that religious authority takes on a peculiar cast, an anti-thority if you will. I have said before how often the very people whom Jesus takes to task are religious authorities, and as a so-called religious authority, I know that I am in the hot seat. If service, humility, self-effacement are the hallmarks of true leadership (which I think Jesus makes more or less clear), then the fact that anyone could be intimidated about bringing his/her concern to a religious authority means that we have not done a good job of making clear that Christian authority is an anti-thority. Jesus repeatedly says that the healthy do not need a doctor, but the sick do, so to follow Jesus means to be aware of one's sickness, and the language of "perfection" that the Church uses for religious life is simply about the goal of learning to listen to the doctor's orders, not being free of the sickness. To be a Christian anti-thority figure means that we should be the most open to criticism, the most able to acknowledge when we have done wrong, because we know how fallible we are, how far from being in a position of superiority. If people expect perfection from us because we have presented that image of ourselves, woe to us. I was certainly embarrassed by what my advisor brought to my attention, but I was just as certainly glad that she did so; Richard Rohr suggests he needs at least one good humiliation per day to keep his head on straight, and I think that’s about right. Of course, to the degree that I take myself seriously, that kind of shaking of the foundations can throw me into a tailspin, which is why regularity of humiliation is important: to never give myself time to take myself too seriously. In one of his books Tony DeMello reflects on the book I'm OK, You're OK and says that he should write a counter-text: I'm an Ass, You're an Ass. That doesn't excuse the fact that I'm an ass, it just reminds me not to be surprised when I prove it. I had just gotten an email from an old colleague this morning, telling me how much they miss me at SLU, and I was feeling pretty good about myself (I still do, I’m not neurotic or anything), but this afternoon’s meeting brought me back to attentiveness to myself – not everyone is reading me as wonderfully as this old colleague, and I better pay attention to why they think so, because they just might be seeing something in me that I don’t see in myself. I sometimes wonder if any of the Twelve read the manuscript of Mark’s Gospel before it got into circulation; I hope so, because as much as that gospel portrays the Twelve as a bunch of knuckleheads, for them to say, “Yeah, that’s about it, we’re knuckleheads,” would be an exercise in real Christian anti-thority. I’m certainly not one of the Twelve, but I’m a knucklehead, and to the degree that I try to paint a prettier picture of myself than my actual knuckleheadedness, I turn true anti-thority into authority as the world thinks of it, and the gospel of humility and mercy becomes a gospel of "unsaved unwelcome" and self-righteousness.

Habits of the Heart

2009-11-02T22:50:00.000-05:00

Today I started reading Robert Bellah’s classic book Habits of the Heart for my sociology class; I was just a kid when it came out, and I “should” have read it somewhere along the line (see previous post), but for one reason or another I never did. Anyway, it deals with how Americans understand themselves and pursue what they understand to be worthwhile in life, and the first person interviewed, Brian, was a successful businessman who made it to the top at the expense of a relationship with his family, working sixty-five-plus hours per week. The collapse of what he thought his world actually was led him to a new attitude about work; as he puts it, “Now I just kind of flip the bird and walk out. My family life is more important than that, and the work will wait, I have learned.” My tendency has been to follow Brian’s pattern (without making big money, of course): “Perhaps it was success. Perhaps it was fear of failure, but I was extremely success-oriented, to the point where everything would be sacrificed for the job, the career, the company.” Boy, does that hit close to home. I always have a bad habit of breaking my neck trying to do work to the umpteenth degree; despite all the wise words I have about how my community is too workaholic, about how we don’t know what our identity is when we aren’t in active ministry, boy, have I felt that one this year. I’ve always been able to justify working like a fool by saying that one reason to be in religious life is to be able to work like crazy without depriving a wife and kids of their husband and father, but the treads have worn pretty thin on that line. One of my formation directors taught us in the novitiate, “The charism of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart is to work your ass off.” Period. In that, I am a true Brother of the Sacred Heart, and I’m tired of it. I want my life back. I don’t blame my work settings: no one has put this kind of expectation on me but me, but I just don't want that for my life anymore. In particular, prayer is an aspect of my life that usually suffers first, and I suspect that is common among members of apostolic orders. I have never considered myself a terribly good pray-er, so it has not taken much psychological energy to push off prayer because I had so much work to do. Grateful though I am for community prayer, it has become a sort of justification: no matter whether I pray at other times or not, I “have to” be in there at those scheduled times, so I can keep on telling myself that’s enough. That's all I've got for today; I won’t quite “flip the bird” to my work or this blog, but I can do so to the attitude that wants to throw a few shreds of real life in at the end of work.

All Saints Day

2009-11-01T12:49:00.000-05:00

I can't believe it's been two weeks since I have posted...ugh...Such is the pace of a doctoral program.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how we form our sense of self, which should be no surprise to people who ever read this thing. In particular I have been aware of how easily the university setting can prompt covetousness, and how hard it is to feel "at ease" even in a setting in which people are very friendly and that is not outwardly competitive. In my program, people are working on dozens of areas of research that are so widespread, it can be quite difficult to figure out what common ground we have. However, when I listen to other students talking about their areas of interest, discussing scholars and movements that I have never even heard of, much less read about, it is easy for me to get defensive in response to feeling like I'm on the dumb end of the department, or on the other hand to work myself into a frenzy of wanting to read all this stuff. Now, there's something good about being motivated to read more, I suppose, but there is a certain abysmal character to such a desire. There is physically no way to read everything I "should" read to be up on the sweep of my chosen fields (let alone all the other fields I "should" be keeping abreast of). It is a bit like the Buddhist figure of the "hungry ghost," which is conceived of as having a huge stomach, but a tiny neck - it cannot be satisfied, no matter how much it eats, because its hunger is insatiable.

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who spends part of the year living in a hermitage, says that when he gets settled into his retreat every year, he comes to the place where he feels like if he never read another book, it would be enough. This is a very well-read guy, so he does not mean that reading is not important or that he has gotten it all figured out. He knows the potential of study to liberate, but he wants to make clear that it can also become an insatiable desire. Even though study is critical to bringing us to new understanding of ourselves and our world, it can also lead to a sense of self based in being able to "compete" with the other: I've read all those people, I am among the literati, I know all the theories out there. The attempt to fill the chasm of who I am with anything, even anything good - books read or published, good works accomplished, income donated, degrees earned - is itself an indication of just how alienated from myself I have in fact become. The measure of that for me is when I find myself in the company of different groups of people: around my students I could feel confident in my knowledge base, while among my classmates I feel somehow more ephemeral, like I am less real around people who know more than I. That may be one way of reading "the Fall" in Genesis 3: the immediacy of my knowledge of my relationship and identity with God gets disrupted with the rise of self-consciousness, of shame and pride, so I feel the need to cover my nakedness with the fig leaves of what I can pat myself on the back for.
That may be one good thing about today: All Saints Day. If today shows us anything, it is the absolute multiplicity of models that have been acknowledged as legitimate ways of living true humanity. The call to holiness is not a blueprint or a script; there is no one way to be a saint. Rather, sainthood is INCARNATED in the very tissue of who I am. As much as I admire her, I am no Mother Teresa, which is ok - I'm not called to be her, but to be me, genuinely me, which is harder than it sounds. This mimesis or creation of desires based on other people tells me what I am supposed to desire, what I am supposed to want to be, and it will jerk me around as long as I play the game of trying to produce a mask that is so real that I will forget that it is simply a mask.

Reflection for 18 October

2009-10-18T12:55:00.000-04:00

My dear friends,
I have been up to my ears in reading of late, but it has been entirely too long since I posted anything. Mercifully it came time to do a reflection at the Catholic Center here at SU again today, so I had to produce something that I could post. Here goes:

The readings bring together two themes that we don’t often think of going together: suffering and authority. To begin, each of the readings today thematizes suffering. The first reading from Isaiah talks about the suffering of one person healing the people. This reading is the end of a larger unit that Christians usually refer to as the Fourth Servant Oracle: the “Servant Oracles” refer to four texts in the middle of Isaiah which refer to an unnamed Servant of God who is rejected, faces persecution, suffers on behalf of others, so on. Whoever the prophet had in mind, it’s fairly clear why Christians have so often seen a trajectory from these texts to Jesus. In particular the Fourth sounds strikingly like the Passion, in lines like this: “But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins, upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed.” (IS 53:4-7) Sound familiar? Hebrews talks about Jesus being able to sympathize with us because he knows suffering, and of course the gospel is loaded with foreshadowing of the Passion.

On the other hand, we have the issue of authority. Jesus is a hair’s breadth from Jerusalem, he’s just predicted his passion for the third time, and James and John come looking for jobs: to sit at his right and his left, that is, to become his secretary of state and secretary of war when he beats the Romans and becomes king. Were they not listening? Mark is just pouring on the irony at this point: when Jesus says they will drink from the cup from which he drinks, they’re all excited – “Oh boy! We’re close enough to the Boss that he lets us drink out of the same cup he uses!” Oh, they’ll get it soon enough, but not like they thought. We know who will be at his right and his left in Jerusalem, and it isn’t his chief ministers. Why do the other disciples get mad at the two of them? Is it because they are frustrated that the boys haven’t been listening to Jesus or that they are thinking in too worldly or selfish a way? Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s because the other disciples are jealous that James and John beat them to the punch – the ten wish they had thought of it first. So, just like the last time we talked, Jesus has to sit them all down and straighten them out: other people use authority to dominate others and to make sure that their life “works” the way they want it to, but you can’t do it that way. Jesus says this is how the Gentiles are, and the gospels from the daily liturgy this past week were all about "woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites," but we know this isn't a Gentile thing, and it isn't a Jewish thing, it's a human thing. All of us are susceptible to the insidious capacity of power to push us to feather our own nests.

Whenever I read texts like this one, or the gospels we have been hearing for the past week, I get really nervous, because he is warning religious authorities about how easy it is to turn authority into domination. People from my generation tend to distrust the very word: we have seen the authority of the church, the government, business, the family, all of it fall short of what it claims to be. We’ve seen how easily authorities can smash people’s lives, whether intentionally or not, and how insidious power can be when people don’t have someone regularly pulling on their leash. As much as I don’t feel like an authority on anything, I’ve been a professional religious and a teacher for a long time, and I know that a certain amount of authority comes with that fact, like it or not. That’s why the Church says of itself, of all of us, that we are semper reformanda, always reforming and always in need of reform. At our best we remember that, but it’s easy to forget just how quickly any of us, even Church officials, can hunker down when we get to a place that’s working for us. One of my teachers used to say that we all get scripted, whether we know explicitly what the script is or not, by the story lines at play in our culture. What might that story be in the world we inhabit? In his phraseology, “technological therapeutic military consumerism.” We breathe it in all the time, and the implicit or explicit story it is telling us is that authority-as-domination can make us safe and it can make us happy – buy enough stuff, kill the right people, build enough toys, get the right degree from the right school, and you can make your life work for you. That story is a big lie. We’re here every Sunday because we think there’s a better story, but we know that we are all mightily co-opted by the big lie, so we have got to keep coming back. We’ve all heard today’s readings a hundred times, but we have a hard time hearing them and an even harder time getting them to stick, when the big lie has so much free air time. Hopefully when we do hear our story we get excited, we’re committed, we’re going to make a fresh start…but that usually works for about three minutes, and then it’s, “Hey, there’s a new IPhone app.” I don’t have an IPhone, but I took a quick look at their web page to see what’s out there – 75,000 applications – there’s one to program your DVR from long distance, another one to help you make espresso drinks at home, and something to “Shave strokes off your golf score.” And we actually expect that to make us happy.

Back to the gospel, which I know is not as flashy and won’t help your golf game. Jesus is clueing us in that authority and suffering are not polar opposites: they are two sides of the same coin. Dorothee Soelle, a German theologian, puts it this way: “Love does not ‘require’ the cross, but de facto it ends upon the cross…it must necessarily seek confrontation, since its most important concern is not the avoidance of suffering but the liberation of people.” That doesn’t sound better than the big lie, but we know what Jesus’ authority looks like when it gets played out: on the far side of the cross, it looks like new life. That’s what Jesus means at the end of the gospel when he says that he has come to give his life as a ransom for many: he isn’t buying us back from the devil, or from an enraged God. We are holding ourselves hostage, and the ransom note is the big lie; it’s what we think we want, what we think will make us happy, but what we get is authority as service, as self-giving love, which is what we as Christians know is what we actually need.

The Bro's are on YouTube

2009-10-05T22:24:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago a film crew came to the house to shoot footage for a series of short films on the Brothers' community, apostolate, and prayer, and Br. Chris Sweeney, one of our vocation guys, just sent me the links. Check them out and tell us what you think! (No, I wasn't crazy about being videoed, but sometimes you gotta take one for the team. Good work, Chris.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovXIm--59DU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxd4Qc2JxCY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDdIAF6HxMw

(*Warning: shameless plug ahead. If you see this and think of a young man who you think would be interested in the religious life, feel free to point him in our direction -- http://www.brothersofthesacredheart.org/. OK, shameless plug ended.*)

I'm turning 32 this week (yeesh), so the parents came in town this last weekend to visit. We did the usual running around - hit the farmer's market, went down to the Finger Lakes, went to church at the Catholic Student Center and walked around the university. Good to visit, and mercifully my reading schedule was lighter this week, so I could afford to visit without being unendurably swamped with work after they left.

Happy Foundation Day

2009-09-30T22:26:00.000-04:00

I wanted to post this about twelve hours ago, but my day was crazy enough that this is my first chance to sit at a computer without having an assignment hanging over my head. Today the Brothers of the Sacred Heart celebrate(d) our Foundation Day, marking 188 years since the first Brothers professed their vows in Lyons, France. We're a small order, but to think of all the good that has been done in the past 188 years, and to think of standing in that tradition, following in the work of some truly great men, is both deeply humbling and encouraging. Those first Brothers came together to respond to the social wreckage of France after the Revolution, in particular taking care of orphaned children who were in jails and on the streets, and the permutations of ministries have exploded from there. Even though most of our work today is in schools, that original charism has even come full circle in several places where AIDS has created massive numbers of orphans in need of care.

I entered my community as a teenager, and I am grateful to have grown up with the modeling of the men with whom I have lived over the past thirteen years. I don't think I will ever recognize what a grace all those men have been in helping me be less of an idiot than I would have been without them. In our community hymn, there is a line which reads, "Qu'il est bon, qu'il est doux, d'habiter un seul lieu," which literally refers to living in one place, but which we have typically rendered as "dwelling in unity"; community has been about more than just living under one roof - at its best, it has been about sharing a vision, wanting to support each other while we hold one another's feet to the fire (gently, of course!). So, to Brothers, colleagues, former students of the Brothers, and friends who have stumbled upon this blog, Ametur Cor Jesu - loved be the Heart of Jesus. Happy Foundation Day, Brothers.

who I am...

2009-09-22T18:07:00.000-04:00

I want to say thanks again to Fr. Austin (ConcordPastor) for so graciously "running the ball," pointing people in the direction of last week's post based on my reflection at Mass. I am amazed at the number of people who have commented either on his page or mine about that line I put in there, "Who you are is who you are in God and nothing more." In one sense I am pleased that it struck a chord with people, but on the other hand it indicates that a lot of people find themselves being twisted out of shape by the impossible task of trying to forge an identity based on something other than that final ground. My local community is reading a book entitled Living a Gentle, Passionate Life by Robert J. Wicks, a psychologist in private practice, and in it he includes a line from a colleague of his: "Every patient stared at long enough, listened to hard enough, yields up a child, arrived at from somewhere else, caught up in a confused life, trying to do the right thing, whatever that might be, and doing the wrong thing instead." Well, I don't know about you, but that about sums it up for me...Walter Brueggemann gave a lecture a few years back to a group of pastors, talking about how we get "scripted" by whatever world we live in, and how the alternative storyline of the Bible offers us a different script. At one point in the lecture he says, "The reason why I've published so much over the years is that I'm trying to overcome my narrative, and my narrative is, 'I'm a sh*t!'" Apologies for the colorful metaphor, but it points to something for me: here is a world-renowned scholar, not only one of the most brilliant men I have ever known, not only one of the best teachers I am ever likely to have, but one of the most gracious men I have ever known, but still he can't get away from this gnawing sense of inadequacy. We know all the right stuff in our heads, but we just can't seem to believe it, or to actually let it stay with us for more than five minutes, so we need to keep coming back to it again and again. Mercy within mercy within mercy...

Arrr...

2009-09-19T18:27:00.000-04:00

Today happens to be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and people who know me know my love for bad pirate jokes. I'll forego putting any of my favorites in here, but here is the link to all things pirate in honor of the day:
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/

Enjoy!

Reflection for 20 September 2009

2009-09-17T22:53:00.000-04:00

The gospel today is the second of three cycles in which Jesus predicts his passion, only to be misunderstood by the disciples, at which point he has to make clear what it means to be an agent of the reign of God. This time, they respond to his prediction by trying to out-ego each other: arguing about who is the greatest. To even begin this argument is already to lose - even if you win the argument, you have lost all the more. This isn't about acting servantish to pad one's Christian curriculum vitae - as a student once told me about a very religiously upright classmate, "He takes a lot of pride in how humble he is." I know I fall into some kind of regression of that - either inflating my ego for being in religious life (as if having a title or a special outfit makes me anything other than the sinner that I am), or taking pride in not being caught up in religious showiness (at the expense of people that I assume are superficial in their Christianity). O wretched that I am - wherever I go, self-absorption seems constantly to be nipping at my heels. The reading from James underscores the insidiousness of coveting what is around us, seeing other people who make us feel inadequate or defensive: "Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? You covet but do not possess. You kill and envy but you cannot obtain; you fight and wage war." Despite some of the crazy directions that early Calvinist thinkers spun Calvin out on, his concept of chosenness is important: instead of worrying about what you can to do "get saved," (faith/works/both) Calvin pushs past that kind of a focus on me and myself to what is really important: the glory of God.

Zambia trip 2009

2009-09-17T21:59:00.001-04:00

Every summer my friend and confrere Br. Chris Sweeney takes a group of grads and faculty members from our schools in the New Orleans Province to St. Francis High School, the Brothers' school in Malole, Zambia, for about 3 weeks of service, immersion, and sharing community. He sent me the following link to a video he produced from that trip, and I'm sure there is a way to embed the video in the body of this post, but I'm too cumputer-illiterate to figure it out, so for now, please check the link. As you do so, pray for the families and teachers and Brothers there in Zambia and so many other places in the world who are doing great things with absolutely nothing, and for the students and faculty here who are driven to solidarity, to get to know them and support them in their work. It was a welcome reminder of the real world for me to watch the video myself - contrary to popular belief among my classmates, there is life outside of a doctoral program!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOm3feGLBaY

Reflection for 13 September 2009

2009-09-13T16:19:00.000-04:00

The priest at Syracuse U's Catholic Center asked me to do a little reflection for the Masses today, so here is the rough version of what I said:

This question, “Who do you say that I am?” has become the center around which much of Christian identity has orbited virtually from the beginning. The proper theological term for this question is “Christology,” and it is, I think I can safely say, the most written-upon topic in Christian thought. And that makes sense to me, because the question really is about what it looks like when humanity and divinity meet – what happens when humanity is radically embraced by divinity; that question is fundamentally the question of salvation – the making whole of our individual and collective human reality. What we Christians claim to encounter in Jesus is salvation, and that is intimately linked with this question of who we say that he is.
So, let’s look at the gospel. Have any of you ever done a math problem in such a way that you get the right answer but you did it wrong? That’s what we see in the gospel today. When Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter pipes right up, “Ooh! Ooh! I know - You are the messiah,” and the text lets us know that Peter got the right answer. But thirty seconds later Jesus is kicking his butt, and it’s clear that what Peter means by messiah and what Jesus means by it are two radically different things. He got the right answer, but he has absolutely no idea what it means. Jesus refers to Peter as “Satan” in this reading, and the previous time the text talks about Satan is in the desert after Jesus’ baptism, when Satan tries to convince Jesus to understand being the Son of God this way: if God’s the king, you’re the prince, so live like it: make yourself comfortable, popular, in control. Peter is, in effect, doing the same thing – he imagines the Messiah being violent because his image of God is violent, making Jesus’ message fit into his image of who God is instead of listening to who Jesus presents God to be.
Now, it’s not really Peter’s fault – just about anyone using the word messiah in that time would make the same mistake – most Jews thought the messiah would be a warrior/king who would kick the Romans out of their country. Makes sense, right – for a people living under a repressive and humiliating regime like the Roman Empire, freedom from foreign occupation is a pretty understandable thing to want. Plus, that’s how God has saved them in the past – think the Exodus, return from Babylon, the Maccabean Revolt, they figure they know how God operates, and it’s violently. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say, “Of course Jesus wasn’t coming to start a revolt against Rome,” but not because we are so much more clued in to Jesus’ message – it’s simply that most Christians hardly are even aware that such revolutionary fervor was in the air. That’s why we see this pattern repeated two more times in all three Synoptic gospels, and why Jesus doesn’t want the disciples to tell anyone that he is the Messiah – he is a very different kind of messiah than the one they are expecting. Three times, Jesus predicts his passion and death, and three times the disciples don’t get what he’s talking about, so three times Jesus has to come back and explain what real discipleship is about. Listen for it next week – Jesus will predict his death, and then the disciples will start arguing about who is the greatest, still trying to inflate their egos, so he takes a little kid and says to them, “You’ve got to be like this,” which doesn’t mean being childlike or pure or whatever – it means to give up concern for social ranking – children were nobodies in that culture, and that’s what a bunch of guys who are squabbling about hierarchy need to hear.

What does this say to us and about us? Who am I? I suspect we all want to maintain a certain psychic integrity, to think well of ourselves and to present an image to other people that we want them to think about us. It’s easy enough to pooh-pooh the obviously superficial stuff as a way of cobbling together an identity – how expensive your clothes are, how perfect your body is, so on. Jesus goes further, though, to root out any places where our egos try to hide: even ostensibly good stuff like getting an education, being religious, can be one more way of convincing ourselves that we have got it together. In fact, it’s insidious, because although I believe religion can be the best thing in the world, it can also be the worst thing when it gives divine legitimacy to inflating our egos. Everything you need is already here – it’s just hard to live out of that because it doesn’t feel like much, because our egos can’t hang onto anything for themselves. Who you truly are is who you are in God, and nothing more. That sounds hokey, but at least in my own neurotic self, I constantly feel like I have to prove something, earn something, accomplish something, so I can think well of myself, so others will think well of me, so God will think well of me. That’s hard at a place like this and at the age most of you are, because there are so many talented people that it’s easy to covet all the talents and successes you see in other people. But no matter how many books I read, how many degrees I earn, how many good deeds I do or churchy things I attend, none of that can create an identity for me. That’s the bad news: I can’t cobble together an identity like that. The good news is, I don’t have to. Who I am is who I am in God, and nothing more – there is nothing to prove, no need to deny what a mess I am, no good self-image to project for other people, no need to make it look like I’ve got it all together so that God will love me or so that I can love myself. That is a sure-fire path to denial and hypocrisy, when we have to look like someone on the outside that we know doesn’t correspond to who we really are, when we run away from parts of our humanity. “Who do you say that I am?” Christianity speaks of Jesus as fully human and fully divine, and we have done backflips for two thousand years trying to figure out what that means, because not only do we not know what it’s like to be divine, we can’t even figure out what it means to be human. Usually we tend to oppose divinity and humanity, so we are all full human beings, just like Jesus, but he has the added bonus of being fully divine, so he isn’t subject to the same human stuff that we are. We are used to thinking of Jesus as more divine than us, but let me suggest that I understand Jesus to be more human than I: I am NOT fully human, insofar as I tend to run away from those parts of my humanness that scare me, like looking stupid, failing, vulnerability, and dying. Jesus “does” humanity better than I do – he IS fully human. He accepts being misunderstood, failing, suffering, being thought poorly of, even dying – because he is rooted in his absolute identity, which is beloved child of God. Anyone want to take a guess what our deepest identity is? You got it – “beloved child of God”! How often do any of us try to come up with more identity than that?

Perhaps that’s one way of thinking about what “fully human and fully divine” means – when the divine fully meets the human, then there is no need to run away from the scary parts of humanity, no need to try to assemble an identity by drawing boundaries over against other people – I’m smarter, I’m richer, I’m holier, I’m better. How many problems in our human reality are rooted in just that kind of alienation – setting one group over against another, not living out of our genuine identity, trying to maintain the appearance of being in control? All of that needs healing, reconciliation, SALVATION, all of which, I said at the beginning, is what makes Christology so important to us. That is our task as men and women of Christ – to become more divine by being more fully human – no need for deception, for denial, for self-aggrandizement. The trick is, it isn’t just something we know in our heads – all of us have heard a thousand times that we are the daughters and sons of God. It’s something you have to know in your guts when your ego creeps up and feels the need to defend itself or put on a show, and it’s something we have to keep being brought back to – in our personal prayer, to re-center ourselves throughout the day, but also right here, in our prayer in the community. This place then becomes a center of resistance to the insidiousness of a culture that thrives on masks, but we can’t put all the blame out there – that clutching neediness is in our own hearts as well.

becoming home

2009-09-03T16:26:00.000-04:00

I just finished my first week of classes this morning (Thursday), and I must say it feels strange to not have any classes until Tuesday. Then I remember how much stuff I have to read and write between now and then, and I get it...Going through one round of all the classes has made me relax a lot about coming into this program, and in fact has made me really excited about the work we are doing. For a while I was concerned that coming from a theology background wouldn't be seen as quite on par as a continental philosophy of religion or anthropology background, but so far it seems to be well received. Also, the work we are doing is so interdisciplinary, it is already opening doors to ideas and authors who just wouldn't be in the normal path of a theology program. The prof who taught last night's class (Classics in the Sociology of Religion) is a practicing psychotherapist in addition to being a religion professor and a trained sociologist, and he was able to very quickly point me in some nifty directions for one of the research areas I am interested in (basically, defense mechanisms that shield people from guilt in situations of violence), so I have a hunch he will be a go-to guy through to the dissertation. At the moment I'm working through a book on memory, place, violence, and religion (for a class, but how perfect a fit is that?!) and it is driving me back to stuff I read a few years back on sacred landscapes: "What they [the desert monks] fled with greatest fear was not the external world, but the world they carried inside themselve: an ego-centeredness needing constant approval, driven by compulsive behavior, frantic in its effort to attend to a self-image that always required mending." (Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, p 166) I include that quote to call myself back to not taking my own intellectual pride seriously - this first week I noticed myself coveting my neighbors' goods, meaning their expertise in all these areas about which I am completely clueless. As much as this department seems to be a very low-competition and low-ego place, I can see how graduate programs like this can become as cutthroat as I have heard some places are: all these egos scrabbling so hard to build a body of work, an area of expertise, but each in its own little bunker, peering out at all the other bunkers and feeling inadequate for not encompassing each of the areas of study that is possible in one's field. A buddy of mine at SLU put the movement through the university system this way, and I think he's right: do a bachelor's degree, feel like you know a lot of stuff; do a master's degree, feel like you don't know anything; do a doctorate, feel like nobody knows anything. All for now - just needed to comment on the homing of this place...

Sunday, 30 August 2009

2009-08-31T00:20:00.002-04:00

A few years ago I took a class at Notre Dame on liturgical prayer, and as it so happened, I was the only student in the class who was not specializing in liturgical studies. At one point we were talking about particular ritual gestures at particular points in the prayers, and I got exasperated at what seemed like nit-picking and blurted out, “None of this stuff matters!” The professor calmly replied, “It does matter – we are embodied beings.” “OK,” I said, “it matters that we do SOMETHING with our bodies, but I can’t imagine that God cares whether we are sitting or standing or kneeling, using the orans position or whatever else, at any given moment.” I just couldn't imagine God being a micromanager, but I could understand the importance of sacramentality, that is, the relationship between our sensory world and our spritual lives.

In today’s gospel, Jesus criticizes the Pharisees who make a big deal about the disciples who don’t wash their hands before they eat: “Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written: This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts. You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.” (MK 7:6-8) On the other hand, Christians have too often rejected ritual practices as magic that we too easily think that movement doesn’t matter, that space or décor or music don’t matter, because God doesn’t care about any of that. Stripping away the ritual drama too easily leads to locating the real “action” of grace in our souls only, which reinforces the old dualistic problems of devaluing the physical world and its attendant dimensions of justice - economic, political, sexual, etc. - in favor of an overspiritualized "inner" gospel.

There’s the real conundrum that the gospel brings up for me today: local particularities and customs are what give folk religion (I don’t mean that in a pejorative way – I am simply referring to religious practice on the ground, as opposed to the official sanctions from the top) its power to shape an identity for people to live inside of, but taking any of it as divinely mandated leads to the kind of pharisaic compulsion that Jesus has no time for. How do we respect those things that shape the boundaries of our identities without obsessing over them or dismissing people for whom those practices are not so important? I mentioned a few months ago about what some people see as “Catholic identity”: frying fish on Fridays in Lent, saying the rosary, so on. None of those peculiarly Catholic things are bad – I think they are very good, and they have shaped a number of distinctively Catholic cultures – but they are hardly the centerpiece of the gospel. Does God really care if we eat meat on Fridays in Lent or not? My vote would be no, but I value the tradition of abstinence on Fridays because it’s important for us to have a chance to remind ourselves of what hunger feels like (see Friday's post), and because for so many Catholics, it's just what we've always done.

In his marvelous essay, “Learning to Live,” Thomas Merton recalls a meeting he had with the Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki, during which they celebrated the Zen tea ceremony: “It was at once as if nothing at all had happened and as if the roof had flown off the building. But in reality nothing had happened. A very very old deaf Zen man with bushy eyebrows had drunk a cup of tea, as though with the complete wakefulness of a child and as though at the same time declaring with utter finality: ‘This is not important!’” We can bring our total attentiveness and seriousness to our practice at the same time as we acknowledge that God isn’t about being nitpicky. We don't do it grudgingly or out of fear, as if God gets angry if we don't split hairs about it all - we do it because it retells our story, it calls us back to the story of who we are. It doesn’t matter to God whether we kneel or sit or stand, whether we show up at church in Bermuda shorts or a suit and tie, or a myriad of other particularities, but they matter to us embodied beings - our postures generally DO say something about our state of mind, our bodies DO influence our religious lives. Too easily, though, the fact that other people don’t do it as well as we think they should leads us to dismiss them, or our attentiveness to those details makes us think we are better Christians than other people because we do them, and that’s where the second half of the gospel comes in: “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.” (MK 7: 21-23) Jesus doesn’t seem to be opposed to washing one’s hands, he just can’t abide people using it to inflate their own sense of holiness – self-righteousness and judgmentalism can come out of a person at the exact same time as they are washing their hands, in fact BECAUSE they are washing their hands. To how much other religious stuff could we apply that standard? We hold in tension the need to sacramentalize (that is, make tangible and bodily) our inner lives while acknowledging the plurality of legitimate ways of doing so.

Happy Hurricane Katrina Day...

2009-08-29T12:02:00.001-04:00

Today is the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making lives interesting in Louisiana, and as it so happens, I’ve been reading for a class on how religions institutionalize memory. What particularly interests me is how we make wounds into sacred wounds to memorialize trauma. There is actually a show on MTV called Scarred (or something like that), which is mostly about extreme athletes telling stories of hurting themselves really badly and showing off the resulting scars while videos of their accidents replay over and over. (Seriously, I only watched it for about 3 minutes…really.) I remember seeing the news from Halloween in New Orleans in 2005, and a lot of people made costumes that poked fun at our collective plight – wearing the spray-painted markings that the National Guard put on houses they searched, for example. Some people have deliberately kept those markings on their houses, or kept the waterlines on their outer walls, as a way of remembering what happened here. People who go through initiation rites often receive some kind of permanent marking (scar, tattoo, wound, lost tooth, branding, whatever) as a way of marking them as initiated men or women and reminding them of their own mortality. Mythic traditions often do the same, from the dislocated hip of Jacob in Genesis or the boy prince’s golden finger in the Eisenhans story to Harry Potter’s lightning scar or Luke Skywalker’s lost hand. What I think all of these sacred wounds are pointing to in some way is compassion. Richard Rohr, OFM says that he can only think of two things that have much chance of teaching us wisdom: suffering and contemplative prayer (I suspect they have to go together). This is because, on one hand, they remind us that we can’t take our own projects with final seriousness and that we are much more mortal than we would like to believe, and on the other hand, because we’re not the only ones with sacred wounds. Seeing our own wounds had better open us up to acknowledging the wounds of others, or we will simply turn inwards on our own bitterness or self-absorption and play victims.
As a side note, Hosea 11:8 has God say, “How could I treat you as Admah, or make you like Zeboiim?” Admah and Zeboiim are code words for Sodom and Gomorrah – how can I do this kind of violence to my child? Then, the text says, “My heart is overwhelmed,” and the word used here is the same word used in the Sodom and Gomorrah story for “earthquake” – God is taking the earthquake of anger at injustice and unfaithfulness into God’s own heart and being torn apart by it. Kazoh Kitamori, a Japanese theologian, envisioned God, in the words of German theologian Dorothee Soelle, “as one who suffers because of sin and yet cannot maintain his wrath, who reconciles wrath and love in pain because he loves the object of his wrath, which always entails suffering.” Not our usual God-image, perhaps, but what is the Sacred Heart, my community’s central symbol, but the institutionalization of the suffering of God in and on behalf of the world? So, to wrap up on this day of memorializing the scars that are hanging on in Mississippi and Louisiana four years later, are those memories opening us up to acknowledge the unbelievable plethora of sacred wounds in the world that remain unhealed? I regularly use Merton’s quote from The Sign of Jonas to talk about God, but maybe we can point it at ourselves too…mercy within mercy within mercy.

2009-08-21T21:50:00.002-04:00

Considering how few people ever see this blog, I don't expect any Muslim readers to see this, but just in case, Ramadan Kareem. The fasting during the lunar month of Ramadan is intended to increase solidarity with people who don't have a choice about going hungry. We Catholics have pared down the fasting bit pretty far in our liturgical calendar, and while I rarely argue for legislation from on high as the means of invigorating the interior life, I would say that we could learn something from our Muslim sisters and brothers about taking on such a discipline and having more than just our whims to hold our feet to the fire. It's not about "giving something up," but about embodied prayer and solidarity - FEELING hunger in our bodies, and using that sensation as a launching pad to consider what hunger means given the massive scale on which it exists in our world. I know a number of students who voluntarily fast regularly, and who hold each other accountable - not making a fuss, not because they have to, not because they think it makes them holier than anyone else, but because they want to take on a discipline that keeps them attentive to issues of hunger in the world. When was the last time any of us felt truly hungry? How often do we eat when we aren't even hungry? Bethlehem Farm (where I visited last week) has a banner in their dining room that reads, "Lord, to those who hunger, give bread, and to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice." Amen...

one more thing...

2009-08-14T22:50:00.002-04:00

I've been fiddling with the settings on this thing, adding blogs I like, and I wanted to mention one that I like a lot: it's called "Religious Life Rocks: The Adventures of One Fun Nun," (http://onefunnunslife.blogspot.com/) and it's kept by a young School Sister of Saint Francis named Sister Katy. Never met her in person, but from what I have seen, she lives up to her title of "fun nun" (given by one of her students) - she has a quirky sense of humor - she's apparently part of an improv comedy group in her city - and a charming writing style. (On the other hand, my own mother tells me that half the time she can't figure out what I'm saying in my blog posts. Thanks, Coach.)

mysterium tremendum et fascinans

2009-08-14T22:03:00.005-04:00

Just got back from Bethlehem Farm a few hours ago – a great trip, despite having a few more aches and pains than I would prefer to admit. Still, any trip that involves hitting stuff with a sledgehammer is a good trip in my book -- the second picture, by the way, is of me with my friend and former co-worker Laura O’Donnell (and the sledgehammer). I promise we didn’t dress alike on purpose… The first picture summarizes my Wednesday – working in the garden, shoveling a lot of…fertilizer.

I had wanted to write about this before, and kept putting it off…a few weeks ago, in New Orleans, we had an interesting table conversation: one of our guys who does mission appeals for our Bro’s in Africa went to a parish in New Orleans, visited six Latin Masses at this place, and they were all full, mainly of younger folks. I’m happy people are going to church, of course, but I’m curious about this, because I have gone to Latin Masses before and found them impressive but personally unfulfilling. (*The Latin Mass feels to me rather akin to going to a Greek Orthodox liturgy, which I enjoy doing every now and then even though my Greek is almost as terrible as my Latin. The ceremony is impressive, the “smells and bells” are potent reminders of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (thank you, Rudolf Otto), but I don’t feel like I am building any community, and liturgy, which literally means “the work of the people,” feels at that moment more like a spectator sport, since I don’t speak the language.*) So, a few ideas we had: have our masses become so “domesticated” that they have lost a sense of mystery that people feel is important to maintain focus on the transcendence of God? Does the majesty and otherness of the Latin Mass make that present in a way that other liturgies don’t? On the other hand, since most folks don’t know Latin, is the “horizontal” aspect of the liturgy (i.e., the building of the body of Christ in the community, the celebration of our daily triumphs and defeats and fears, lost in the otherworldliness of the Latin? Even though the Latin Mass is not my particular preference, I understand the importance of deep, powerful symbols in relationship to God (how many sweatlodges have I done because the symbolism goes all the way down?) and have no need to try to undercut that. Still, if the retrieval of the Latin is a sign that the vernacular Mass is not meeting people’s needs (not trying to oversimplify – I know a lot of parishes and a lot of ministers who are doing tremendous things), then we should be asking questions about that as well. Too, for Christianity the real mystery is that the mysterium tremendum et fascinans is encountered in the ordinary, in our midst – bread, wine, water, one another in all of our messiness. I say that not to try to domesticate God or to invalidate grander models of liturgy, but to ask how to hold the transcendent and immanent, the vertical and horizontal, in tension and not spin back into the liturgical stuff that Jesus fussed about with his contemporaries. The frustrating thing I see in so many Sunday liturgies gone wrong is that all the raw materials are there – good readings, deep symbols, grand ritual – but we end up moving it into our heads or into our feelings instead of into our guts, where it can become the story by which we “live and move and have our being.” As I have argued elsewhere, maybe one problem is not that we are asking too much of people, but that we are asking too little. English or Latin, the liturgical goal of the active participation of the faithful is an elusive one, with passive listening and watching being much more the order of the day. I don’t envy pastors their task: respecting people’s intelligence without turning it into a theology class, getting people involved without resorting to entertaining them (some parishes with a lot of teenagers seem to think that an electric guitar and a drum kit added to humdrum liturgy could make it not humdrum), and reweaving a story that engenders another way of living in the world. As always, ideas or rebuttals are most welcome.

farming and Flatland

2009-08-12T00:20:00.002-04:00

First, a quick word of thanks to Fr. Austin (http://www.concordpastor.blogspot.com) for kindly making mention of my blog on his – I admire his consistency in posting so regularly and always having something good to say. Even when I go long stretches without posting I don’t often come back feeling like I have much to say that is worthwhile.

To that end, a few interesting things (interesting to me): I am presently staying at Bethlehem Farm (http://www.bethlehemfarm.net) in southeast West Virginia, a Catholic farm run by an intentional community of young Catholics. One of the founders of the place, Colleen Fitts, happens to be the sister of a former co-worker of mine from St. Louis University, so they both invited me to come visit. An exciting place: 15 or so groups per year come for weeklong missions, rather like Klagetoh, the Brothers’ place in the Navajo Nation, but they also grow a lot of their own food here, cook almost exclusively vegetarian food, and have a good mix of community living setups – long-term folks, summer volunteers, single and married folks, shared prayer, the works. As much as I am enjoying these few days here for their own sake, I will be keeping an eye out for ideas that could work in Klagetoh, especially involving bringing more people there for longer-term volunteer opportunities (summer, semester, year, whatever) - for college students or recent grads.

I just read a little book by Edward Abbott, entitled Flatland; written over a hundred years ago, it tells a story from the perspective of a being living in a two-dimensional universe. A being from 3-D space tries to explain what his universe is like, to no avail – the 2-D being simply can’t fathom anything so beyond his experience. It has reminiscences of Plato’s “Cave Allegory,” from The Republic, as well as The Matrix, but it poses the question to us of our capacity to imagine realms of reality and experience beyond our own. I could see it working as a reading for an intro theology class or something like that.

Just started in on The Sacred Canopy by Peter Berger, a sociologist. He is doing a sociological analysis of religion, not to reduce religion to sociology, but to remind us that religion has a seriously sociological element to it. In particular so far he has spent a lot of time talking about religion as a legitimizing factor for a particular arrangement of power structures. For example, he has a chapter entitled “Theodicy” (which of course piqued my interest since I taught a course on theodicy, or the question of why bad things happen to good people), in which he argues, “One of the very important social functions of theodicies is, indeed, their explanation of the socially prevailing inequalities of power and privilege. In this function, of course, theodicies directly legitimate the particular institutional order in question.” (59) So, if we say, “Everything happens for a reason,” we give support to the current state of affairs, since by our logic, whatever is happening, no matter how terrible it is, must have a good reason for being so. That means that we don’t have much theological pressure to change the state of affairs (whatever it might be). Of course, most of us at one time or another have likely said, “Everything happens for a reason”; we do at times feel like things have lined up too perfectly to be mere coincidence (and that may well be the case), but if everything is happening according to plan, then God presumably wants our world to be the way it is, undercutting the impetus for social change and neglecting the gospel stance that things are NOT the way God wants them to be. “May thy kingdom come, may thy will be done” (making explicit the usually implicit subjunctive) means that “thy will” isn’t being done, at least not in full. People that challenge that social arrangement, however, usually end up in trouble (can you think of any significant religious leaders who never got themselves in trouble with their religious group and/or their society for critiquing the status quo?), because to shake up the ordered worldview of the religion seems to risk plunging them back into chaos: “When the socially defined reality has come to be identified with the ultimate reality of the universe, then its denial takes on the quality of evil as well as madness.” (Berger 39) In Flatland, after our two-dimensional narrator is given an experience of the 3-D universe, he tries to explain it to the other beings in his universe, he is summarily silenced and imprisoned for threatening the secure worldview that they all inhabit. Thomas Merton and Walter Brueggemann both see poetry as closely akin to prophecy, not in making rhyme schemes, but in articulating an alternative to our “settled” vision of the world – what we presume to be obvious, self-evident, in the very “nature” of the world. Such thinkers and seers use analogy, metaphor, poetic language, something other than flat, “final” prose to call into question both our certitudes and the arrangements we have settled on as a society to avoid seeing those who get chewed up by those arrangements.

bringing speech to pain

2009-08-10T10:00:00.001-04:00

Yesterday (Sunday) I accompanied one of the Brothers to a march organized by a local group called Mothers against Gun Violence – we walked through an area of downtown Syracuse to an outdoor gathering where there were about 2 hours of performances – prayers, raps, poems, a mime, and so on. I was glad I went, but the left side of my brain kept saying, “Do they expect this to actually stop people in the heat of the moment from taking violent actions?” Centering prayer, teaching about nonviolence, all that seems more “results-oriented,” and maybe it is, but then today I was listening to a clip of Walter Brueggemann giving a sermon at Duke University, making his way through a lament psalm, and I realized that, in their own way, that’s what those folks yesterday were doing. “Effectiveness” is only one pole of the work they are involved in – most of the people there had lost someone to violence (as evidenced by the number of people wearing t-shirts with iron-ons or airbrushings of deceased friends or family members), and lament is the appropriate response to such a rending of life’s fabric. Part of their intention was undoubtedly to tell young people to stay away from violence, but I imagine that much of it was rather about the need to “bring speech to pain.”
As I was listening to Brueggemann’s sermon, I was caught up with realization that I almost never hear a sermon on a psalm. My experience in Catholicism is that sermons are more often on some piece of Catholic doctrine, or on a moral kernel to be gleaned from the gospel, or perhaps Paul (although it seems that Paul is too close to the Protestant schema for most Catholics to know what to do with him). The psalms, though, particularly the lament psalms, present the grittiness of life lived with God and the boldness of making big complaints and big imperatives of God – something many of us are not comfortable with. Brueggemann concluded another clip I watched this morning with the line, “If people are caught in dogmatism or in moralism, they tend not to see how incredibly artistic it all is.” One of his big motifs is the need for the artistic, the poetic, to bring speech to the stuff we usually deny – the heartache and uncertainty and rage we feel and then feel bad about feeling, because good people aren’t “supposed” to think that way. So, we prefer a safe denial to a risky honesty and thereby truncate God to only having access to the acceptable parts of our lives, and the shadow part of our lives and our personalities runs unchecked and unhealed.

Happy anniversary...

2009-08-08T23:01:00.001-04:00

I think I have mentioned before the alleged Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Translation: change is difficult. Still, four days after arriving in Syracuse, so far it has been pretty smooth. It will be a little while before I know my way around town, and until I actually meet people (activities at school don’t start for two more weeks), but I have so far managed to find a few essential places (grocery store, gym, school, etc.) and to keep myself busy. In the past few years I’ve gone to a gym in New Orleans a few times with some of the Bro’s, and it’s the kind of place where they give you towels out of the freezer and there are flowerpots in the locker room. Nice place, but half the times I went I was afraid of getting sweat on the equipment, and the other half the air was up so high I never broke a sweat. Believe me, there are no frozen towels at this place: it’s dark, full to overcrowded with beat-up old weights, the walls are covered with ancient posters of past greats like Larry Scott, Sergio Oliva and Ah-nold, the place smells like rust and half the mirrors are broken. It’s definitely a dungeon, and I love it already. I know that once I register for classes I can use the rec. facility at SU, but part of me wants to stay at this place just for the dungeon factor.

Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of making perpetual vows, and today is the tenth anniversary of first vows. I certainly would not have anticipated on either of those days that my religious life would lead me to Syracuse, New York. I do think I had hoped I would have grown up more, but the more I try to think about my spiritual development over the past decade, the more I find that there isn’t much to speak of. Just like ten years ago, it is still so much easier for me to ask questions about faith than to have it, to read books about prayer than to pray, to think about justice than to work for it. As the saying goes, “O wretched man that I am!” It is just such realizations that spark my faith, however – realization of my need for “mercy within mercy within mercy.”

Institute for Creation Research

2009-08-02T01:57:00.002-04:00

Almost at the end of living out of a suitcase! I left New Orleans two days ago, spent last night in northern Alabama at the wedding of a friend from high school, and got up this morning and drove to St. Louis, where I am staying the next two days on my way to Syracuse. Along the way, I happened to catch part of a radio commercial for a group that promotes “creation science.” What was particularly interesting was the clarity with which they laid out the logic of their position; in battling mainstream biology, they take issue with claims that dinosaurs existed for millions of years before human beings, and here’s why: if dinosaurs lived and died for millions of years before humans existed, then that counters Paul’s argument that death entered the world because of the sin of the first humans, so sin is NOT the wages of death, and then, what is the value of the cross of Christ as the sole means of the salvation of humanity? It is stunning to me how clearly they see where the crux of their problem lies: the point was not about challenging pagan science or anything like that, as they put it, but about the centrality of Christ, which, ideologically twisted though their position is, it has a certain internal logic to it which I find interesting. However, the unexamined parts of their argument are even more interesting to me. Early on in Christian history, mainstream Christianity fairly tightly defined the orthodox teachings on Christology, i.e. who Jesus is in his relationship with God and other human beings, but no official teaching was ever given on soteriology, i.e. the means by which Christ saves. There are any number of models and analogies in scripture and the teachings of various theologians, but never has any one been declared to be the definitive model. However, this particular group has taken an analogy (or more likely, taken a few analogies and conflated them) as literal speech. Paul and other early theologians wanted to say that somehow in the midst of the horror of the cross, salvation was understood to be present, but they used so many images and models that it is quite obvious that they did not take any one model with final seriousness. The other problem is that as much as the term “salvation” gets batted around, people often enough don’t have a clear sense of what it actually means. We tend to think of it in extraterrestrial terms, e.g. the forgiveness of sins as means of attaining heaven or some such thing, rather than being involved in people’s real lives, encompassing physical well-being, social reconciliation, and so on. This infomercial ended by urging listeners to go back to the Bible and “get right” with Genesis, that is, don’t allow yourself to be led astray by the disenchanting teachings of evolutionary biology. I have no problem with claiming that I experience salvation in the cross of Christ, but that in no way forces me to believe that death did not exist until humans existed, or that the death of Jesus is only or even primarily about a transaction with God to propitiate God’s anger into forgiving sins. So the effort of defending “creation science” boils down to protecting an analogy, to taking literally that which was meant to be a pointer, and one of many at that – as Nietzsche says, “Truth is an army of metaphors.” Images of Jesus as scapegoat and sacrifice and exemplar and ransom and many others all shake together, not so they can all be taken literally (impossible, as they mutually undercut each other), but so they can together point beyond themselves. Such a reality is too big to be adequately captured by any one image, or even by many working together, and to attempt to do so, despite their best efforts, does not uphold the integrity of the cross, but reduces it to one image. At the same time, on the creation vs. evolution front, I would offer Paul Tillich's "principle of correlation": good science may not necessarily lead to good theology, but bad science inevitably leads to bad theology. If truth is genuinely one, that is, if all truth comes from God, we don't have to be afraid of science - new learnings may well give us new, better questions to ask of the tradition that we could not have asked otherwise.

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

2009-07-04T23:42:00.007-04:00

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

2009-06-28T00:46:00.006-04:00

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

2009-06-20T00:13:00.002-04:00

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...

2009-06-18T21:47:00.002-04:00

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

2009-05-25T01:58:00.003-04:00

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

2009-05-16T23:16:00.003-04:00

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)

2009-05-02T23:11:00.001-04:00

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

2009-04-01T01:37:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-30T23:07:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-17T01:04:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-12T23:29:00.002-04:00

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?

2009-03-02T23:14:00.004-05:00

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

2009-03-02T23:10:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-24T22:28:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-23T01:27:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-11T22:43:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-08T14:13:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-04T22:47:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-28T00:51:00.003-05:00

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

2009-01-26T00:24:00.003-05:00

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...

it can't be this long since I have posted something...

2009-01-20T21:46:00.001-05:00

A few regulars came by the office this afternoon, and we somehow got talking about the implications of placing religion so in criticism of culture that it loses its perspective. I guess I never really thought about it quite this way, but from certain angles a prophetic model (Christ against culture) stands in opposition to a sacramental model (Christ in culture). Liturgically this model can easily end up viewing sacraments as means of “recharging” the batteries that get worn down by contact with the outside world so that we can go back out there and keep banging away at it. There is certainly something to that insofar as the gospel has both the ability and the need to stand in critique of a culture which all too often seems to have truly gone insane. On the other hand, this can end up being anti-incarnational and sectarian. A more broadly sacramental view would hold that the sacraments are not about recharging our batteries but about celebrating and bringing to conscious awareness the presence of Christ in the world. The danger is that it can lose its critical edge if it hunkers down into an “I’m ok, you’re ok” kind of relationship with the world. On the other hand, it reminds that Christ is found precisely in the messiness of the world, that grace is not a scarce commodity. It also avoids the dangerous tendency of the prophetic or “Christ against culture” model to see itself as a bastion of righteousness, holding at bay “the world” which exists out there. In a more sacramental model, just as Christ is in the world out there, so is “the world” in here, in my own self-centered and violent heart. Ironically, the inflated and twisted ego can easily enough inhabit the prophetic mind that believes that, having shunned “the world” outside the community, it has shed its own ego once and for all. That does not mean the abdication of the call to stand against a dehumanizing and self-aggrandizing culture, but to realize that saying no to the culture is not quite the same as exorcising its spirit from my heart.

2008-10-01T12:41:00.006-04:00

I've been the advisor for Habitat for Humanity at SLU for a year or so, and it's one of the best parts of my job (although I admit, there are a lot of best parts to my job). This year, we had an incredible number of freshmen sign up to join Habitat (120 or something ridiculous), and we have been really lucky that the St. Louis Habitat affiliate has had lots of spaces on builds for us to get involved, so we have been bringing a ton of students out every weekend. I haven't been able to go every time, but below are a few shots from two weekends I have spent with them so far.

Reflection for 18 September 2008

2008-09-19T00:10:00.002-04:00

In the first reading today, Paul is dealing with people who, like us, don’t understand what “resurrection” means. We say “we believe in the resurrection of the body” every Sunday at church, but do we know what that means? Like the Christians in Corinth, our mental furniture comes from a Greek worldview that separates body and soul, leaving the body at death to decay while the soul is “saved,” that is, goes to heaven. Many of us may well be thinking, “Yeah, what’s the problem with that?”, but Paul has to combat that model in favor of what resurrection is really pointing to. That kind of body-soul dualism has lurked at the edges, and sometimes at the center, of Christianity from the beginning, originally in Gnosticism, then in Manichaeism, later Albigensianism, and on into neo-Thomism in our times, but always fearful that our physicality, with all of its urges and weaknesses and messiness is taking us away from what really matters, that is, the spiritual stuff. The whole point of the Incarnation, though, is that God is to be encountered precisely in this messy world, not out there in a cosmos that tries to leave this world behind.

The Jewish anthropology that Paul, as a Jew, is using sees the person as an integral unit, not splittable into body and soul, so that it is the totality of the person who is to be raised on the last day. He realizes the dangers of taking any image too literally, so he goes on later in this chapter to anticipate people’s questions: “But someone may say, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come back?"” He asserts that this resurrected body will not simply be a resuscitated corpse, any more than Jesus’ resurrection was simply resuscitation. Rather, it is a transformation, but it is a transformation of the entire person, even as he struggles to find analogies that make any sense.

Why is any of this important for us? Resurrection as a symbol points us beyond any overspiritualizing notion of salvation being something that only happens to our souls. We know how easily such a model can lead us to denigrate the tangible world around us – if only people’s souls are to be saved, perhaps their bodies and their world don’t matter so much. This kind of model, which has had a fair amount of traction through the centuries, is behind much of Marx’s infamous critique that religion kept people from striving for the kind of social change that needed to happen. We know from reading the news that our world in all its physicality is crying out, “groaning” as Paul puts it, for redemption, and that’s what resurrection points to for us: the renewal, the transformation, of all of creation. We can’t ignore people’s bodily needs, the unjust political and economic forces that impact their lives, the use of torture or sexual assault, the damage we are inflicting upon the natural world – all of that is part and parcel of the salvation that Paul makes clear has come. Our faith demands that we anticipate and participate in a transformation of all of reality, which makes salvation a truly social and cosmic reality, not an individualistic or self-concerned one.

The scariest place in the world...

2008-09-08T00:42:00.002-04:00

Today's gospel (7 September) is the old classic from MT 18 about dealing with someone who hurts you - start by going to that person, then take a few other people if that doesn't work, then go before the church if THAT doesn't work, then treat them like a tax collector if even that doesn't work. How on target is this gospel? How often do we actually talk to the person who hurts us? Not often, actually - at least I don't. Confronting someone you respect, whose opinion matters to you, or even just someone you have to see all the time is about the scariest thing in the world for most of us. Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology in Toronto, talks in his book and lecture series Maps of Meaning about the immportance of learning to face that which most frightens us, because inevitably there is to be found that which we most need. He talks about working with people with garden-variety phobias like claustrophobia or something similar, say, fear of elevators. The therapy he outlines is to have the person get as near to the elevator as possible without fear, then stand there until they get bored, then move a little forward as they realize that nothing has destroyed them, and so on, gradually nudging them toward and into the elevator until finally they have gone up or down in the thing. Often, he says, the person will go home after conquering that fear and get in an argument with his/her spouse about something that has been brewing for a long time. The situation is not, as Freud thought, that the elevator symbolically represents the marriage, but that the person has learned that he/she can confront the scariest place in their psychic world and not be destroyed by it. The elevator continues to be scary, getting into the fight continues to be scary, because it upsets the stability that we so often prefer to change, even if the stable situation is terrible. Again, that which we most need is found in the place we least want to go - the scariest place in the world. And if that isn't the Cross, I don't know what is...

Maps of Meaning

2008-09-04T00:28:00.000-04:00

Somehow or another in my THEO 100 class last Friday, we got talking about the problem of evil – something about the limitations and potential of theological language about God. Anyway, at one point one of the guys in the class told a story about a soccer coach from his high school who died at age 38 – great guy, a couple of kids, loved his students, the works. This student explained that part of him clung to the old saw about “God wanted him in heaven” because he couldn’t handle the idea that such a great guy died for nothing. We went on with the discussion, but after class, this guy stayed around and asked me about how guilt factors in to bad things happening in the world. I asked him what he meant, and he launched into how some part of him in his guts feels guilty for this coach’s death, even though his brain tells him that there is no connection at all. This little voice tells him that he wasn’t playing very well in the last few games before this coach died, and maybe his part in losing those last games added to the coach’s stress that led him to have a cardiac arrest, and so on. I told him that he had absolutely nothing to do with his coach’s death, and of course he said he knew, but I could tell that some part of him wasn’t hearing it. By this point this guy was starting to break down, and was doing his best to keep a stiff upper lip, so it was clear that this is still a live issue for him. He actually remarked that it was a Good Will Hunting moment – knowing “It’s not your fault,” but not really believing it. I guess I write this out of amazement that our gut desire for order would prefer such an awful and painful explanation for evil over the possibility that there is no “reason” (i.e. predetermined meaning) behind why bad things happen; even if it would indict this kid’s psyche with guilt, in a way such a scheme was better to his psyche than everything just being meaningless.

Carl Starkloff, SJ -- R.I.P.

2008-08-14T15:10:00.002-04:00

I have mentioned a few times in this blog the directed readings I took last year on "Anthropological Issues in Theology." The instructor, Carl Starkloff, would meet with me every few weeks to talk through a book and develop ideas for the paper I was working on. At the end of last semester, Carl developed a recurrence of cancer in the stomach, which he had dealt with once before years ago. He did chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant, and so on all summer, and I emailed regularly to see how he was doing. As soon as I got back into St. Louis last week, I went to see him in the nursing wing at Jesuit Hall, the main Jesuit residence at SLU. It was a bit of a shock to see him at first - Carl was a tall, robust man of 75 with a full head of dark hair, but because of the surgery and the therapy, he had lost his hair, and he looked shrunken and frail. He was on oxygen because he was having trouble breathing, and his legs were too weak for him to walk far. He was a bit depressed when I talked to him because he couldn't work, couldn't even write the book he wanted to work on because the medicine he was on made him drowsy and nauseous. The doctor told him that he should be fine, but it would take a while. He told me it would have been easier if the doctor had told him to prepare himself to die, because the uncertainty of his health, the feeling of helplessness (uselessness?), and the frailty and weakness he was dealing with were taking a toll on his spirits. I asked him if we could get together during the semester to read a few books, partially because I really did want his help, but partially because I thought it might make him feel more productive. Yesterday one of my co-workers told me that Carl was back in the hospital with fluid in the lungs, and I was actually planning on calling today to see if I could visit him, but when I got to the office this morning, a Jesuit who works in campus ministry told me that Carl died during the night.

Carl was a giant of a theologian, and worked for years in Toronto and here in St. Louis. He also spent a long time working with several Native American communities in the Pacific Northwest, which provided the initial impetus for my desire to work with him because of his expertise in both theology and anthropology. At the time of his death, he was working on an ambitious project with a tribe near St. Louis on the history of the Jesuits' interactions with that tribe. Above and beyond his profound intellect and teaching ability, Carl was a wise and good man with a great love for SLU and the students. He had been involved with campus ministry, saying weekday masses in residence halls and directing students on Ignatian retreats. I was fortunate to call Carl my teacher, my mentor, and (if I may be so bold) my friend, and his death is a great loss to the Society of Jesus, to SLU and to me personally.

El Salvador - Day 3

2008-07-10T23:36:00.002-04:00

Sunday, 22 June 2008

An amazing day again, combining the tragic side of El Salvador's history with the festive. We started the day at the cathedral in San Salvador, in the crypt below the main sanctuary for a "people's mass." We got there early enough to see Romero's tomb, over which is a huge bronze representation of him lying in state. There are multiple bishops and archbishops buried there in the cathedral basement, but Romero occupies center stage; athough it seems that the current bishop there is resisting the canonization process for Romero, he is definitely already a saint by popular acclaim in the minds of a sizeable part of El Salvador's population. The standard concept of martyrdom for a long time has been that a person dies for his or her faith, but what happens when someone is killed by another person who in theory comes from the same faith tradition? Some people argue that Romero was killed because of his political involvements rather than because of the faith, but I genuinely don't understand how his political concerns can be separated from the implications of the gospel for politics and economics. Vatican II itself says that the Church's sole concern is that the reign of God come, and if the reign of God includes, at a minimum, the will of God being accomplished for the well-being and peace of humanity, then the faith, the Church, is inevitably tied up with the social order.
But I digress...After the mass, which lasted a couple of hours and was presided over by a priest who had worked with Romero, we headed out to a town (can't remember the name right now, it's in my notes somewhere) that was having a cultural festival this weekend. We feasted on shrimp and chocolate-covered strawberries and so on, and the students took the opportunity to look at the usual spate of knickknacks that were being sold. A couple of the more fearless students rented horse rides while the rest of them shopped.
Joe Cistone, the CEO of International Partners in Mission, joined us this morning, and he will be with us for the rest of our time in El Salvador. What an interesting guy -- lived in Rome for 7 years or so, ran a refugee center, now spends half his year traveling all over the world -- Africa, Asia, South America -- with groups like ours. Not a bad job if you can get it (although he says he has caught just about every tropical disease out there in his travels!).

(*NOTE*) I'm still in Klagetoh as I write this, and I spent the day on the Hopi reservation, which is actually landlocked by the Navajo Nation. I spend most of my time on two of the three primary mesas, fittingly enough named First Mesa and Second Mesa. The silence, the view, everything was just amazing. The Hopis don't let people take photographs or video within their reservation, so even when I get back to non-dialup Internet access I won't be able to post any pictures, but take my word, it took my breath away.

El Salvador Day 2 - Saturday, 21 June 2008

2008-07-08T15:38:00.002-04:00

NOTE: As I type this, I am in Klagetoh, AZ, deep in the heart of the Navajo Nation. I'm here for about 10 days, visiting the Brothers out here and retreating in this sacred land. I can't post pictures at the moment because the dial-up Internet access would take until Thanksgiving to upload them, but later...

I can’t believe it’s only 9:20 as I write this – I feel like we did about 3 days worth of stuff today, even though it was actually a very relaxed pace. 7:30 was breakfast, and my kind of breakfast – refried beans, plantains, eggs, juice, while people talked about the day ahead and about the rooster that woke everyone up at 4 am. From there we drove out to Aguilares, then to El Paisnal to visit the church where Rutilio Grande, SJ worked and is now buried. As luck would have it, a new priest was being assigned to the church that day, so what looked like half the town was there cleaning, decorating, and so on to prepare for his arrival. We managed to swing some time to talk with two young men who work as catechists and leaders in the base communities there in El Paisnal. It turned out to be better than one of us adults giving the students a talk on liberation theology, because these men talked about what life actually looks like to the people, and the role of the church in their lives. As excited as they were about their new priest coming, the church there obviously has a strong and very active laity – this is not just a place that people go on Sunday morning. Afterwards, the students peppered me with more “scholarly” questions about liberation theology, its pros and cons, but that was only possible because of what they had seen and heard from those two young men.

From there we went for lunch at a place way up in the mountains called Suchitoto, to a restaurant overlooking a huge artificial lake. Again, we took our time and had a wonderful, relaxed meal – the folks from IPM seemed to have no need to herd us along too quickly, and I like their flexibility in giving us input about the whens and wheres of our day. The students asked if we could walk down to the lake, and no problem, then a few of them asked if we could take a boat ride around the lake, and again, no problem. After that, our guide, Julieta, insisted it was time for coffee; never mind that it was 90 degrees out – the local custom is to drink hot beverages in hot weather because it makes you sweat more, so you stay cooler. Whatever you say… Anyway, we went back to Suchitoto and were able to walk around the plaza for a good long time, checking out the vendors’ booths, sampling the foods and beverages, and so on. Of course, some of the more caffeine-addicted students got their coffee, but then went looking for Salvadoran coffee beans because they like the local coffee so much that they want to take it back with them. For dinner that evening we went to another pupuseria, and a few of the students actually asked the women making the pupusas if they could try making a few, and they managed to do a pretty good job, at least to my untrained eye. People were pretty wiped out by the time we got back to the house at 8:30, but I wanted to get them to reflect on the day, so I just asked them about what they had seen that was sticking with them, and they ran with it for 45 minutes. They are coming to appreciate that even though we aren’t “working” like we would have if we had gone to Haiti, immersion is an important task for us, to be present, to listen, to hear about what is going on here without the need to rush in and assume that we can fix everything (or anything) with a week’s worth of unskilled labor. On a side note, the one student who had been in the theology 100 class I taught in the spring kept bringing up things we talked about in class; it gives me a new gratitude for the kind of formation that is possible in that kind of class.

Notes from El Salvador - part 1

2008-07-02T16:45:00.004-04:00

Hi everyone,

A group of 6 SLU students and I just got back from a trip to El Salvador, sponsored by campus ministry and hosted by International Partners in Mission, a group that partners with local businesses around the world.

Friday, June 20

In a way quite different from when I arrived in Haiti last summer, I am again confronted by a myriad of responses to this first day in El Salvador. Different, because I don’t have to worry about the “sink or swim” stakes with the language, but now, instead of the constant effort of working in a second language, being the adult in charge of a group of students brings a certain constant low-level awareness of all of the things that could go wrong.
Everyone met in Miami without incident, although the last member of our group showed up at the gate during boarding for the flight to San Salvador, so I had sufficient time to wonder what I would have done if one (or more) of the students’ flights had been delayed. Nevertheless, everything went off without a hitch until we landed in San Salvador. I expected that our guides would have a sign saying “IPM” on it or something, but no luck, and of course I, being the poor planner that I am, realized that I had the number for IPM in the United States, but not for our contact person in San Salvador. Of course, my cell phone didn’t work in El Salvador, so I couldn’t even use it to call the number I did have. Long story short, I was able to find a phone booth that let me connect to the United States, and the IPM representative got me through to one of their people in El Salvador, but by the time she could put a call in to find out where the people who were supposed to meet us were, they met up with the students. It turned out that they had been there the whole time, and they even had a sign with them, but they just didn’t have it out. (*In hindsight, that was the biggest problem we had to deal with all week. After that, IPM was completely on the ball.*) Halfway to the guest house, we stopped for a late lunch at a little roadside restaurant that served pupusas, the local Salvadoran staple, which are like small tortillas stuffed with anything from meat to cheese to beans to vegetables to all of the above. Every table in this place (and in every pupusa restaurant in El Salvador, it seems) had a gigantic glass jar full of spicy pickled cabbage that goes with the pupusas.

From there to the guest house and a brief orientation to the place and the trip before heading back out, this time to a nearby park to see a memorial to those who were killed or disappeared during the civil war. In some ways it reminded me of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington: a long black stone wall with thousands of names inscribed in it. On one hand, I appreciated it because it acknowledges what happened, but the danger is that there are so many names, it can cause a kind of sensory overload, with all those names blurring into a massive background of death and missing the point that each of those names was a real person, not just part of a statistic.

From there we drove up into the mountains and got a panoramic view of the city before hitting another local restaurant and heading back to the guest house to collapse.

I was very surprised at how “Americanized” much of the city is – Burger King, Subway, road crews using the same equipment they would in the United States. I guess I expected it to be more like Port-au-Prince, where I saw NO American franchises and only the shoddiest of upkeep. Our guides tell us that the gap between the wealthy and the poor will be wildly evident when we go out of the city, but at least from what we have seen, globalization is in full swing here.

June 6 -- last day in St. Louis

2008-06-06T17:03:00.003-04:00

I just got back in from an exciting day working with Habitat for Humanity here in St. Louis. I’m technically done with work, but I don’t leave for New Orleans until tomorrow, so I decided to put in a couple of days with them since we didn’t get to build all semester (except spring break in New Orleans, of course). Yesterday the temperature was in the 90’s, and we spent all day hauling lumber, swinging the hammer, and finding other ways to make ourselves sweat even more. I honestly couldn’t drink water fast enough to keep up with what I was losing in sweat. We finished about 3:00, and I came home and crashed for an hour or so before going to SLU for the evening. A little group of my students convinced me to cook dinner for them – black-bean spinach burritos, which is about the only thing I know how to cook, and then we got gelato at a new place that opened up in my neighborhood. Nice.

Anyway, this morning I went back to Habitat (partially dreading it, I admit, because yesterday wiped me out so much) but it ended up being much cooler (more on that in a moment). I ended up spending most of the day lugging windows out of an 18-wheeler, some to the houses, others to a flatbed so we could move them to the Habitat warehouse. We did that through mid-afternoon until the heavens opened up on us, and we would have kept working except that the city alerts came out that there was a tornado alert (warning? watch? whichever one means they have actually spotted a tornado). Then we had to pick up the pace to load the last few palettes of windows onto the flatbed so we could get out of there. The guy driving the Bobcat forklift was in a hurry and ended up driving onto my foot – it was my fault too, because I wasn’t paying attention either, but he certainly got my attention when he rolled onto my foot! Anyway, no big deal; it doesn’t hurt much, but I may have broken a toe. Tomorrow morning I’m headed to New Orleans, with a couple of days to spare before our provincial chapter starts. Quiet stretches like these past few weeks remind me how much I miss home, so I really can’t wait to get back. When I was there at spring break, I felt like I want to take a vacation in my own hometown and just go to restaurants and places that I never go to.

Finally, we just got the good news that we have a young man named Kevin Piper joining our province in the fall as a candidate. He has been in seminary for a couple of years but has discerned that his call is to Brotherhood, so he will be moving to our formation house in Syracuse, NY to finish school and do his candidacy. Hooray to Chris Sweeney, our vocation man and my friend, for all the work he has done to help Kevin with his discernment.

2008-05-30T15:36:00.002-04:00

Today is the Feast of the Sacred Heart, and I suppose I am feeling a little homesick at the moment, wishing I could be celebrating our feast with other men in my own order. The Marianists in my local community offered our liturgy this morning for Brothers of the Sacred Heart around the world, which was a really nice touch, but I wish I could sing the old songs and celebrate our community with my confreres in person.

The school year ended a couple of weeks ago, nicely capped off with a weekend trip to South Bend with the parents for my graduation ceremony (yes, I got the piece of paper in the mail back in September, but summer graduates don’t have a ceremony until May. Go figure.). Nice, easy weekend up there, apart from a few glitches related to driving between Chicago and South Bend (I took a bus every summer, so I never learned the roads!), and back to St. Louis just in time for…not much. Mind you, I’ve been very productive in the past couple of weeks since school let out, but there’s only so much campus ministry stuff that we can actually do at this point. My dorm is completely empty apart from the building coordinator (whom I never see), so I have spent some wonderful days in near-total silence – almost a paid retreat!

Now that I’m not in my office with students until midnight every evening, I’m able to get back to some of the stuff I have missed during such a busy year – catching a film with some of the Bro’s (Indiana Jones was fun but kinda hokey at the end, No Country for Old Men was brilliant but downright disturbing), a little rock climbing, plowing through a fraction of the backlog of books I have on my desk.

On that note, I am sure this one will come up again, but I have been working through a book called On Killing, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a psychologist and former Army Ranger. He discusses the incredibly low percentage of soldiers in World War II who actually fired their weapons (15-20%) compared with the percentage in later wars – roughly 50% in Korea, around 90% in Vietnam – to point to what he claims is an innate resistance people have to killing, even if their own lives are in danger, and how much of what is going on psychologically in modern military indoctrination is overcoming that innate resistance. What fascinates me about this guy is that he isn’t coming out of the agenda one might expect, given those claims. He is by no means a pacifist or a military-basher: he’s a career military man, believes in a strong military and the necessity and rightness of warfare in some circumstances. He believes that violence is sometimes a necessary thing and that soldiers can use it for good reasons, but he still claims that it causes well-adjusted people all kinds of psychic trauma to engage in it and that our culture is eroding that resistance to killing by flooding our media with violence. It would be fascinating to get him and Robert Jay Lifton to sit down and talk about psychology and violence – Grossman as a military man, Lifton as a pacifist, but both trained in psychology and examining the effects of violence upon the human psyche.

At the same time, I just started another one called (God) After Auschwitz by Zachary Braiterman. I am hoping to teach a class next spring on the problem of evil, and I would like to do something on post-Holocaust Jewish theology, so I’m reading through a few things looking for possible textbooks. I’m just at the beginning, but I go in with a sense that even though this book is written by a Jewish thinker, basically for a Jewish audience, using Jewish thinkers like Rubenstein, Heschel, and Fackenheim, theology after Auschwitz is a solidly Christian problem as well. What can we say about God after Auschwitz? What can we expect from God viz. horrific evil? Whether it happened to Christians is really immaterial – it happened, and the God whom Christians claim did not put on the emergency brakes and stop it. Hardly “enjoyable” reading, but intensely important.

On that note: Mercy within mercy within mercy…