OUR DIVIDED SOCIETY

    I know I’m not alone in surveying, with dismay, our ever-more-divided American society.  While constitutional experts frequently point to the vivid debates that the Founding Fathers wanted in the new country they were starting, I suspect it was one thing to have landowners disputing over an after-dinner sherry, but it quite another thing to have massive amounts of money poured into media and political channels to start, and sustain, a fight.

    Indeed, I think it is “the fight” that carries the day when it comes to modern discourse.  Perhaps we’ve become so sports-obsessed, our only categories are “winning” and “losing,” and we end up applying this to everything, politics included.  Do we not see the fight metaphor extended to business, to education and, regrettably, even to religion, even to our Catholic faith?  How strange that, having made progress in overcoming 400 years of rancor between Protestants and Catholics, Catholics themselves seem willing to watch the right and the left go after each other.

    In the end, though, do not most of us  get up for breakfast, go to work, do things with and for our families, share meals, carry each others’ burdens, chat and joke, and otherwise find so much in ordinary life?  It always struck me as illuminating that a Christian and a Jew, or a Muslim and a Catholic, could end up marrying each other—and have a pretty rich marriage and life.  So, while there clearly is truth and there clearly are issues, life itself can trump the potential conflict. 

    So let’s have a toast . . . to life!  And to the way the needs and joys of life can pull us beyond our conflicts and lead us to be sisters and brothers.  And another toast . . . not to winning, or to losing, but to simply drinking together in love.

                                          February, 2010

Health Care

   The health care discussion (or argument) which has occupied much public attention in the past year gets very close to a basic fault line in today’s American public life.  It pushes together the two major tectonic plates which keep ramming against each other and causing unpredictable extrusions of varying sentiments.  One plate is the “American philosophy” of people taking care of themselves (and not being taken care of by the government); the other is the old fashioned “American goodness” of people taking care of each other.

   Concretely, if someone came up to me with a cut and I had antibacterial cream and a band aid, what kind of human being would I be not to swab the wound and protect it?  But if millions of people (many of them with jobs or job-seeking) without insurance need medical services, and if they go to a medical facility, then would it somehow be right and good for them to be denied?  Put this way, the cause for providing something like universal care (however that is done) cannot be refuted unless one has a very cold and hard heart.  People care for other hurting people.

   The issue certainly revolves around money.  “Who will pay for these (often outrageous) costs?”  This hides the deeper sentiment: “Why should I pay for someone else’s illness?”  But it also hides the reality that, one way or another, we are paying for each others’ illnesses.  How does forcing people into bankruptcy to pay hospital expenses that already eat up huge gobs of public money—how does doing this to others change anything for the better?  One pays through a program, or one pays through extortion (of the taxpayer and the uninsured). Either way, one pays.

   I suppose someone could not sustain an abstract philosophical argument that health care is a right.  But, concretely, it certainly looks like a very defensible demand that people make on each other by their sheer human existence and interaction.  Were we still primates in trees, without remedial resources, we could callously watch each other drop to the ground.  But I think evolution, human society, medical progress and Gospel grace, have advanced us beyond this.

                                    January, 2010

The Christmas Challenge

   The distinct message of Christmas--that God takes on our human life in Jesus Christ--has probably not been under as much assault as it is today.  Not only do major faiths, descending from Abraham, see this claim as absurd or impossible, but an aggressive atheism has been urging a sober Stoacism on us: our lives are small and insignificant, let's learn to live them as best as we can and then meld back to nature.  Interestingly, this line of argument comes from perspectives thorougly scientific and also thorougly naturalistic.  Our modern brains let us look on humans as either exquisite machines or highly evolved animals.

   This assault, no matter how much we have to learn from it about humility and our place in the universe, needs to be resisted. Why?  Because two crucial affirmations are at stake, one about God, and the other about human transcendence.

   The "deist" God who almost mindlessly creates and then steps away from a creation of particles and forces is far from the God that Christians and Catholics know.  Our God hardly steps away.  Without violating creation and its principles, our God becomes involved in the very dynamic of creation because God is seen as absolute, generous, total love.  Christmas shows us this.  Unless humans can see Absolute Love as the backdrop of all existence, humans tend to lose reverence for creation--and reverence for each other.  For evidence of this we can submit most of the twentieth century.  Christmas tells us what God's love really is.

   Furthermore, human nature, for all it can be conceived as merely mechanical or merely animal, shows a transcendence that outstrips all purposes except the crucial one of relating humanity to truth, love, justice, beauty and God.  To do what evolution says we need to do hardly requires minds that test the very limits of their knowing, and love that goes way beyond affection and romance.  This transcendence explains us more than any other quality; it shows us a destiny beyond the time-space bubble we presently inhabit.

   When we hear the baby crying in the manger we should feel all existence trembling and thrilling.  Here, in this simple spot in Bethlehem, we have a chance to learn who we truly are because of what the God of Absolute Love has called us to be.

    Merry Christmas!  Blessed Christmas!

                                                                         December, 09

My Take on Tiger

     As one of Tiger Wood’s hundreds of millions of admirers, I have been paying attention to the two-week-long unfolding of his problems.  On the one hand, I never thought that sports heroes or movie stars should be held up as proponents of morality; it would drive me nuts to hear Madonna go on about parenting.  On the other hand, Tiger had tied golf to so many “First Tee” qualities—honesty, courage, integrity, patience, etc.—that he clothed himself in such virtues which, if not lived, would lead to shame and failure.  So he stands exposed, without the virtuous garb he seemed to model.

     I have felt that the outrage at Tiger’s “transgressions” (his word) was full of crocodile tears.  A culture that holds up sexual strutting as our does (the tabloids are geniuses at this) should hardly bawl when someone struts.  Our culture has (tragically) prized sexual prowess and sexual activity as among the highest achievements. And now we cry at Tiger’s infidelities?  It’s not convincing to me. 

     But I am modestly encouraged that the outrage seems to stem around the violation of marriage vows.  We are, after all, besieged daily by examples of broken vows and the (ill founded?) presumption that vows routinely are not kept. Do not upholders of the sacredness of marriage usually get scads of marriage violations thrown back in their faces?  Maybe the Tiger episode (or episodes) shows that, underneath it all, we really do believe in marriage, particularly in terms of fidelity.

     Tiger’s indefinite break from golf will deprive hundreds of millions (at least for a while) from seeing this man set almost impossible goals for himself—and then achieve those goals.  Our fantasy of him as a man of total control will never return.  But Tiger now has a chance to show us something that seems at times very hard for us to see—the dynamics of forgiveness.  To ask for, and receive, forgiveness may be among the most courageous things someone like Tiger can do.  What a great lesson he could give on that one, if he dares.

December 2009

On the Road

   As October, 2009, starts, I find I’ll be on the road almost non-stop until the middle of December.  The list of places sounds strange for a New Yorker—Rochester, NY; Saskatoon, Saskatachewan; Iowa City, IA; Duluth, MN; Monroeville, PA; Lynchburg, VA; Waterloo, IA; Austin, TX; Brooklyn, NY; and finally Hicksville, NY in Long Island. 

   I ask myself how any of this makes sense in terms of a person’s life because it often feels like a constant fog interrupted by a few hours of clarity as I present my message or give my sermons.  What is the background fog out of which all of this comes?  Is this undermining whatever sanity I have left?

   What comes to mind, as I examine the fog, are these points.  My basic mental foundation is prayer, the sense of God’s constant presence—a presence of absolute love—which I respond to with my times of prayer, both from the Liturgy of the Hours and in meditation.  I think the feeling that I am always relating consciously to God forms the glue of my mind.  Then, of course, I have a book or two to read, The New Yorker and Theological Studies, as well as the bigger issues that crowd my cerebral lobes—what is happening in society today, how can it better know God, and how can we develop ministries to help modern people experience and respond to the transcendent in their lives?

   In between those layers are the relationships that my cell phone keeps alive, with family and friends, and with brother Paulists, who have been my larger family for fifty years, since 1959 when I entered the seminary.  As I see people and settings, it reminds me of my friends in Oregon or New York or Chicago or Washington—in a way, my mind has made me an “accidental” traveler whose life stays constant, even though the locations always change.

   Most of all, I guess I get a big kick out of thinking I’m a bit like St. Paul—always ready to move for the sake of the Good News, albeit with a lot more luxury than he had.  What better prayer can I have than this: to ask to be more like Paul, so that Christ might live more  fully in me?

                            October, 2009

Sexual Tension

   One would have to be worse than an ostrich to ignore the many ways that society, and the Church, are feeling a lot of sexual pressure.  Many of the issues now come down to “equality” and “rights,” because modern people do not see sexuality as a part of the human person, but rather as something constitutive of the human person.  Sexuality is “who I am,” an inherent part of the modern “self.”  Any agency, then, that would somehow repress sexuality seems, in effect, to be suppressing human beings themselves.

   Before Freud people did not really carry assumptions like this.  In fact, as far as Freud goes, it is not clear that he fully subscribed to the sexuality=person equation.  While he certainly prized sexual expression, and rejected sexual repression, he saw whole roles for culture, for propriety and even for a “sublimation” whereby sexual energy could be “lifted” into higher realms of culture.  Libido, unchecked, was not his motto.

   But we are now post-Freud, with the assumption that almost any kind of sexual expression is licit (except for pedophilia in its various guises, and adultery—particularly when committed by a politician or other public figure).  Indeed, in today’s world, one feel awkward asking questions like, “How do you think sexuality is integrated into a moral vision?”  Or “Do you think people, being more sexually active, are really happier, more committed or more secure in life?”  Just to ask such questions seems to unsettle the unspoken equation of sexuality=person.

   Nevertheless, if that’s where society is now, it still cannot ignore the deeper questions of human sexual meaning.  If one would fault older versions of Christianity for a near-neurotic Puritanism, one can just as easily fault modern sexual freedom for its blindness to the deeper ways sexuality cuts into human personality—the way the deepest parts of our self-image and self-esteem is undermined by irresponsible sex (not to mention the marriages ruined, the children uncared-for, the rampant diseases, etc.).

   When I hear arguments about “same sex marriage,” and other forms of a more tolerant attitude of society toward sexual expressions (and sexual persons), I also cannot blank out the way these issues can cloud a deeper one: have we humans ever comprehended our erotic impulses, and will we ever be able to put sex into perspective.

        July, 2009

America and the Gospel IV

   The sense of expansiveness—of unlimited horizon and unlimited growth—has been part of the American (and Canadian) self-understanding virtually from the beginning.  Escaping from landscapes in Europe which were being converted from agrarian-based havens to early industrialized-blight, and fleeing from a religious and political environment that was choking people, immigrants and pilgrims made their way to a new continent, as yet unexplored, and as yet untainted.

   While Spain had its own version of expansion, which involved immediate and outright military conquest, English settlers came with other dreams—a “city on the hill”—the chance to form an ideal society, one that mirrored, as much as possible, the future state of heaven.  Yet these English dreams, which have come to dominate the way the United States and Canada think of themselves (much more so than images from Spain), occurred on the shores of an expansive continent, one whose extent could not be determined.

   Even as populations moved across the continent in great efforts to settle the West (and, incidentally, drive Native inhabitants out), even as crowding was experienced not only in Eastern Cities, but in Chicago and St. Louis in the mid-West, Americans have kept the vision of expansiveness vibrant, uncovered with dust.  If land gets filled in, one thinks upward, with skyscrapers and airplanes.  As populations grow in density, one then thinks of expansive dreams—new inventions, new methods of relating, new ideas and new wealth.

   The non-exploitive side of expansiveness has a lot to say to modern American (and Canadian) society—how dreams naturally veer toward the horizon, toward the edges of experience, toward the foothills of the sky, toward the entranceways of heaven.  Where does all this dreaming, all this openness point, if not to a transcendent destiny?  Where does the modern love of expansiveness lead if not to the unlimited life offered by God?

   When Kate Smith sings “God Bless America,” something has to stir.  Not only, for sure, the images of purple mountains and amber waves of grain.  Far more, the sense of being blessed by God, not for our own selves but for the sake of a Kingdom, a destiny, that outstrips and guides us all.

                                         November, 2008

   If anything seems essential to the idea of “America,” freedom has to be at the top.  One only has to think of the early cries for “Liberty” that arose from each of the 13 original colonies, some with more passion than others, to see how much freedom is a constitutive part of the American imagination.

   Freedom dominates the American mind, whether it’s our insistence on privacy in our daily lives, our demand for involvement in civic laws that affect our lives, our process of electing (and booting out of office if necessary) people who represent us, our instinctive reaction to bullies, and our willingness to defeat oppressive enemies even at the cost of our own lives.  Americans don’t like tyrants, and we hold our bosses in limited awe.

   Such freedom has its roots, of course, in the spread of the Gospel.  After all, most ancient society was organized around those who were free and those who had some kind of dependent (and often slave) relationship with the free.  To think of people being beholden to other people for their sheer existence strikes us moderns as nutty; nevertheless, it was the common experience in the ancient world. 

   The Jewish Scriptures, while recognizing slavery as a system, enjoined a kind of humanism upon those who held servants and slaves, even encouraging their periodic freedom.  But at the time of Jesus Jewish life itself had its own system, its own leaders, its own interpreters, and its own narratives of the meaning of Jewish life.  While Jesus was part of the first century Jewish world, he was also its most conspicuous victim, dying in shame because of the very Jewish, but very challenging, message he proclaimed about the Kingdom of God.

   The resurrection of Jesus signals the shape of liberty, of freedom, because in it Jesus transcends not only the boundary of life (death itself) but also the constraints of the systems Judaism had evolved.  His resurrection transcended the Temple, transcended nationalism, transcended even the elements of Jewish law which had come to mark Jewish identity in the first century.  Paul, who encountered Jesus on his way to persecute Jesus’ followers, knew instinctively that Jesus now created a new, universal and free way of accessing God.

   American freedom, as an achievement, and as a goal still yet to be attained, corresponds with this Christian sense of liberation.  True, America can distort freedom into all kinds of idiotic things, but, in its core, the dream of freedom is analogous with the experience of liberation in Jesus Christ.  To proclaim the Gospel in America is to appeal, one way or another, to this innate sense of freedom which so defines our culture.

                                 September, 2008.

The Pascal Celebration, 2007

The Pascal Mystery that we celebrate is a layered complexity, bringing together various merged celebrations among the Jewish People with other merged celebrations (of Spring, for example), all under the experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. These layers make it hard to see all the implications of the Pascal feast; rather, it’s just easier to be captured by one or another.

I’ve been thinking of the Pascal Mystery in terms of three mirrors, such as one might find at a fancy clothing store. All the mirrors reflect something to us about ourselves or God. But each from a different angle.

One mirror looks at Jesus as an object – the object of the cruelty inflicted on him, ultimately by the Roman occupiers. This mirror shows us the levels of cruelty, hatred, pride, anger and power that dominate the human heart. When we see Jesus suffering, we see the effects of our sins. Jesus died, in this way, “because” of our sins. This is the suffering of the “Servant” of Isaiah.

Another mirror looks at Jesus as a subject – in two senses. Jesus speaks, first of all, for all of us in our own suffering. His cries are our cries. His meaningless death represents the meaningless deaths that characterize all our human experience. These are the “loud cries and supplications” of the letter to the Hebrews.

Another sense in which Jesus is subject touches on what Jesus speaks which we, on our own, cannot speak: his absolute obedient trust in God, his “faith” and “faithfulness” to the vision of his Father for the Kingdom, in whose name he dies. This is why we are saved only through Jesus. We must be with him on the Cross, passing with him to the Father’s Kingdom, because our own hearts cannot, on their own, come to this complete, obedient trust.  This is where we hear, "Father, in your hands I commend my Spirit."

Yet a final mirror reflects God’s love for us, shown in the death and resurrection of Jesus. In Jesus, God speaks to us, telling us, through the suffering and faithfulness of Jesus, how unlimited, powerful, effective and transforming is God’s love for humankind. We see in Christ the representation of a love beyond full comprehension. We see a God embracing us up to our very death, making our death his own divine experience in Christ.

A complex layer, but all those layers necessary to begin to grasp the richness of the Pascal Mystery.

CONVERSION’S MANY SENSES

            We Paulists have just celebrated our key patronal feast, the Conversion of St. Paul.  The image of Paul, thrown to the ground, with Christ’s voice powerfully addressed to him, is represented by a huge bas relief on the front of our mother church, St. Paul the Apostle, in New York.  Our Paulist founder, Isaac Hecker, frequently talked about the conversion of America.

            Sometimes, however, I think we have only one image of conversion – the adult, somewhat Anabaptist model of grown up people throwing off their old ways of life for the sake of something new, often as the result of a powerful personal experience.  Because we have this image, we Catholics, along with Orthodox churches and many mainline Protestant communions – do not tend to think of ourselves as converted.  After all, we are baptized as children.  What is there to turn away from?

            But conversion need not have only this “adult-radical-change” meaning.  Rather, all Christians recognize that conversion has to happen again and again.  Conversion is not a end but a beginning. 

            Even more subtly, sometimes conversion happens over the period of one’s growth in faith, as something gradual, from the beginning.  I think of this as “conversion by culture” – that is, conversion through a culture of faith. 

            We only need to think of how the faith came to us, or of people who were important in passing the faith down to us.  How did they do it?  Often through their lives, and the culture embedded in their lives.  Ritual, memorized prayers, sacred songs, patterns of education, communal expectations, corrections and rewards, words and deeds of faith – all of this forming a Catholic culture which, until recently, was a powerful and effective way to bring people to the Gospel. 

            Recent generations have felt a bit of a disjunction with Catholic culture because of changes in the Church (good ones, almost entirely) and changes in culture (child rearing and media, for the most part).  So conversion by culture is being tested in substantial ways.  However, we would loose so much were we to discount and dismantle the elements of our Catholic culture, especially if we were to do so under seduction by a nave view of adult conversion.  Our Catholic culture has a lot to tell us about faith, and conversion.  We should not be tempted to dismiss its value because of other values, or other visions, of conversion.