Hope

by

At Long Last, Hope!

A 60-year-old woman battles a fourth recurrence of cancer and is told by her oncologist that the chemo she has been receiving for the past few months has been ineffective.

A 52-year-old man living in a Catholic Charities residence for chronic alcoholics asks, “Where’s God? I’ve pleaded… on my knees! Why won’t God take away the pain?”

With excruciating grief etched across his face, a father kneels aside his bloodied deceased son. They had gone to their masque in Yemen for Friday prayer when it became the target of a suicide bomber.

To such as these the cliché, “There is always hope!” easily sounds stupid and saccharine if not insulting!  Those who proffer such platitudes either don’t know what they are talking about or they live in huge denial of what this Holy Week is all about.

Many of you know that after twenty years of confronting anxiety and depression I went public in July 2014 with my story of sexual abuse and the compounding anguish of being dismissed by Jesuit leadership. Today I want all to know that a nasty, brutal chapter of my life has found healing and closure.

Jesuit leadership really “stepped up to the plate” and I feel validated, vindicated and reconciled. My deep respect and affection for the Society of Jesus has been affirmed. They eventually responded with the best of what I know them to be capable.

In the often nightmarish ordeal I came to learn something about hope. Just weeks before my twenty-year struggle found resolution, a good friend said to me, “Give it up, the Jesuits aren’t going to do anything.” She of all people should know better — and so should the rest of us!

A woman with cancer, a man with chronic alcoholism, a parent grieving the senseless death of a child, victims of sexual abuse… we need more than pious platitudes or cheap grace. That’s what Holy Week is all about.

At some point or another we will all be bought to a place where optimism crumbles, expectation for easy solutions shatters. We are left with raw, stark, desperate hope! We discover nothing more than a fire-tempered conviction — discovered by a frantic clinging to life — coming from a source other than ourselves.

During my twenty-year ordeal wrestling with the demon of sexual abuse I was never optimistic. In fact, quite the opposite! There was too much pain, too many brick walls, blind denials, freaked-out stares and others battening down their defenses.

As with the dejected friends returning home to Emmaus, I too was tempted, “Just give it up! They’re not going to do anything.”  Yet over time, and wholly separate from my best effort, I ran up against a deep source of energy and conviction from a place certainly other than myself.

Today I would describe this as an insistent gift, a tenacious pulse
that I did not always welcome or experience as consoling. It was
beyond me and, frankly, sometimes a burden I did not wish to carry, a thorn in my side, even a royal pain in the ass. Yet it recurred — despite my impermeability, resistance, fatigue or resignation.

Today I call this involuntary impulse, Hope! We do not profess Faith, Optimism and Love! Each of the theological virtues comes as a pain in the ass from time to time. In that, we learn they are not of our own creation but truly gift.

Recurring cancer, chronic alcoholism, terrorist fanaticism, sexual abuse bring us face-to-face with our abject poverty, structures that defend — even enshrine — personal sin or an impervious culture that seems down right hostile.

Yes, we desperately need and await a savior — not of our own conjuring, not even of our own capacity to imagine. Very much from within our creation, though not of our making. Hope makes its tentative appearance when we — even reluctantly, even wishing it were otherwise or according to our plans — hazard to trust that what we really need will all be given.

Appearing amid the brokenness of our personal and collective lives, hope appears in a way and at a time not of our choosing. It is most assuredly not anything we can provide ourselves. Despite my protestations of personal autonomy, even to say “I accept” the gift sounds increasingly dissonant and much too volitional.

Ultimately, we are brought to our knees. At some time or other we are brought low by the death-dealing that life throws at us. We are invited to our knees during Holy Week because this is the truth of our lives — despite our best efforts, ALL is gift. But, ALL will be given.

This is what we are urged to encounter this week — God giving ALL in Jesus. We are invited to accept our radical inability to save ourselves, or even our ability to protect those we love from life’s death-dealing. We are compelled to recognize the inadequacy of easy optimism and pious platitudes. The very most we can muster is to receive God’s gift — always given as a gift of self!

Our eyes are opened.  We like others before us recognize this in telling our stories, in bread blessed, broken, shared — amid the dejection, the real stuff of our lives, where we most need to be saved.

by

“More Than Ever, I am Aware…”

More than ever, I am aware of how my faith has soothed my cynicism
into humility, how it helped me abide in peacefulness even when the
future is obscured in confusion. It is a faith where we know each
moment, groaning in labor, allows us to bring new life to this
sacramental world.

Fr. Pat Malone, SJ posted these words on his blog for July 12 announcing to friends, family and the parishioners of St. John’s Church on the Creighton campus that he was entering hospice care.

I had the honor of knowing Pat from the day he entered the Jesuit novitiate and the privilege of ministering with him for two years at the Church of St. Luke.

Pat died yesterday afternoon after spending more than half of
his 55 years battling cancer. In reading the rest of his blog-post I
am sure you will agree that he beat the cancer and victory is his.

And so we trust, whether in infirmity or vigor, that we can bear
fruit; we believe we can take the set-backs and surprises in life and
from them become servants of a greater love. We do it not because we
are wise or holy. We have long ago learned that to be a saint, as Ron
Rolheisher wrote, is to be warmed by gratitude, nothing less. We do
it because we sense a kinship by adoption, as Paul wrote, “of being
children of God.” And because we have each other.

For the past four years, the people of St. John’s have refused
anything but to tightly weave their faith and strength into my health
adventure. You made it easy to be shattered with tough news; you made
it inviting to proclaim the awe from unexpected recoveries. Your
close comfort continues to carry me, even now as I move to assisted
living.

This past week, following prayer and conversation with family, the
Jesuits, and the health care professionals, I moved into hospice care.
The medical explanation is simple: it is getting harder to breathe.
So the focus will be more palliative than restorative.

The hope is I can pay attention to a life that keeps revealing a
generous God, and human bonds that have pushed me into inspiration and
affection. This attentiveness will leave sufficient room for
occasional crankiness, but I know the journey ahead has been seeded
with thankfulness and contentment.

We come from abundant love, so all we can do well is try to show it,
play with it, and foster new life with it. May that glorious mission
come with each precious breadth.

Fr. Pat

______________________
Source: http://patrickmalonesj.blogspot.com for July 12, 2014

by

A Bad Day Amid the Ruble

Yesterday was a pretty crappy day! Anyone paying attention would have to conclude that we are in pretty dire straits.

Long gone is the consoling image of Pope Francis’ head pressed in prayer against the wall separating Israel and Palestine on the road to Bethlehem. Who even remembers Pentecost Sunday with Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew hosting Presidents Abbas and Peres in a prayer for peace?

Now Israel has begun a massive ground offensive in Gaza, a passenger plane was shot down in the Ukraine leaving some to say the pilots should have known better than to fly over a war zone, all the while Iraq implodes leading me to wonder what the hell is the point of tens of billions of US dollars and tens of thousands of human lives!

Our collective anxiety and national paranoia are epitomized in the White House lockdown yesterday because an unattended package was found on the lawn. It turned out to be nothing!

On our fenced borders a humanitarian crisis unfolds as children relegate us to bumbling and blundering about an appropriate response. Some would send drones to patrol the border reinforced with even higher fences. They would fast-track legislation to close porous loopholes in US immigration policy.  For God’s sake (literally), it’s not as simple as all that!

Before these zealous protectors of the “American way” adjust their flag lapel pins or a candidate requests another contribution from a faith-based PAC I would ask two things. Please, review your own family history and immigrant roots — why did your family come? … how were they received?

Instead of going to church services this Sunday I propose that more of us stay home and silently pray with Scripture instead. We would do well to begin with Mt 2:13-23, the Flight into Egypt.

Those familiar with the practice of Ignatian mediation might want to assume in prayer the role of the innkeeper — hearing ourselves say, feeling in our own managerial hearts, “There is no room here for you in our inn.”

Or, reenact with Francis the trek to Bethlehem.  Pick a wall, any wall in your home will do.  Press your head against it in silent prayer.  Absorb the tension and anxiety of Mary and Joseph as they traveled this route.  What were their aspirations, what does every child — Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi, American, Guatemalan, Ukrainian — deserve?

Yes, there is plenty of evidence to indicate the world is a mess and hurting. Despair is one response. Feeling impotent is understandable. Shaking our heads in disbelief is not an option!

 

by

Dare We Hope?

The biggest, boldest headline doesn’t always tell the most important story. That’s the case this week with Pope Francis’ much anticipated and highly publicized meeting with victims of clergy sex abuse. Though survivor advocate groups cited deficiencies and questioned the Church’s resolve, Francis gained generally high marks for personal empathy and promise to hold bishops accountable.

But as ordinary Catholics know and this blog has reiterated many times, the root cause of our sex abuse crisis is the culture of clericalism, hierarchical arrogance and preoccupation with protecting power in the Roman church. Though not as insidious as the sexual abuse of a child, recognition of the urgent need to reform the Vatican Curia is a subset of the same core malignancy.

A sliver of light shone through the long socked-in cloud cover yesterday.  It came in the form of a copyrighted [story] by Carol Glatz for the Catholic News Service — to their credit, this is an arm of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Though it seems not to have even registered on mainline media it portends the level of awareness that must be in place for any meaningful change.  It suggests a few in church leadership are beginning to “get it” and we may have reason for hope beyond what the Pope promised.

“To some it might seem less than prudent to think that the church would go out of its way to seek out even more victims and survivors,” opening up further possibilities for lawsuits, anguish and “trouble,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin told representatives from bishops’ conferences from around the world.

However, when Jesus tells pastors to leave behind their flock to seek out the one who is lost, that mandate “is itself unreasonable and imprudent but, like it or not, that is precisely what Jesus asks us to do.”

Helping perpetrators, victims, parishes, communities and people who are distanced from the church out of “disgust at what has happened to children” won’t happen with “slick public relations gestures or even from repeated words of apology,” Martin said.

“Healing cannot be delegated,” the Archbishop emphasized. It requires every church member be humble and Christ-like in lovingly embracing “wounded men and women, with all the brutality and unattractiveness of wounds.”

It will come when the church recognizes “how compromise and insensitivity and wrong decisions have damaged the witness of the church,” he said, and when its members have their own personal healing, becoming more humble and journeying close to those who are lost and hurting.

“We are not there to tell the survivors what they have to do, but together to find new ways of interacting with respect and care,” and not hoping the problems go away, but seeking them out for reconciliation, he said.

Archbishop Martin was one of a number of speakers at an annual meeting of Conference on the Safeguarding of Children, Young People and Vulnerable Adults. The 2014 conference is being held this week in Rome.

In his address, the Archbishop said, “The greatest harm that we could do to the progress that has been made right across the church is to slip back into a false assurance that the crisis is a thing of the past.”

“What has happened has wounded the entire church,” he said, and “the entire church is called to put right what has happened.”

“We are not that kind of church yet: and by far,” he said.

With this awareness finally being expressed by church leadership there might finally be a toe-hold for hope in this tragic saga of clergy sexual abuse and a few cracks showing in a perverse culture of clericalism.

It’s a refreshing story and a welcome week when the most significant report coming out of Rome originates from someone other than the Pope.
_______________
I have no intention to violate copyright laws and respect the restriction posted on the CNS story that is my source: Copyright (c) 2014 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed. But with good news like this, how could I not share it? I enthusiastically refer you to the full copyrighted story with the link provided above.

by

Going Over to the Dark Side

A woman from Georgia has more to say to me about God than anyone else I know. With feet firmly planted in a working farm she tends with her husband, she simultaneously culls Moses, fourth century Cappadocian monk Gregory of Nyssa and the anonymous fourteenth century author of The Cloud of Unknowing for wisdom.

Please… before dismissing her as pious or preachy, you must know that she writes for those of us who are “in deep need of faith right now, but the kind you inherited from your parents is not cutting it. You want something that asks more of you than to sit and listen quietly while someone else tells you how to live.”

I eagerly await everything Barbara Brown Taylor writes. We are about the same age. She served a good part of her life as an Episcopal priest. Having left active ministry I resonate with her honesty: “I also discovered a number of things about my Christian tradition that had not been apparent to me while I was busy upholding it.”

In her most recent spiritual memoir, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor says chief among these is the way Christian teaching thrives on dividing reality into opposed pairs: good/evil, church/world, spirit/flesh, sacred/profane, light/dark. Keeps life simple… you don’t even have to be Christian to know who are the “winners” and the “losers.”

Separating the world into opposing camps makes it easy to know who is closer to God and who isn’t. This really simplifies life for those who don’t care to spend much time thinking about whether their categories hold (or are even Christian). Such clarity provides a strong sense of purpose by focusing daily battles they will take on as their moral duty. The more we beat back the powers of the flesh or of darkness the closer we get to God.

BBT brilliantly coins this as “a bad case of solar affective disorder” or “full solar spirituality. She suggests we can usually recognize a full solar church by its emphasis on the “perks” of faith — a sure sense of God’s presence, certainty of belief, divine guidance in all things, and reliable answers to prayer. Members strive to be positive in attitude, firm in conviction, helpful in relationship, and unwavering in faith.  She asks, who wouldn’t want to dwell in God’s light 24/7?

But then life happens — Christian life happens! You lose your job, maybe your house. Your marriage turns sour. A grandchild is born with a serious genetic disorder. Sure, the full-solar Christians will be there for you and express genuine care. But the shady side of life will soon exhaust their resources. Too many of us are woefully ill prepared to enter the dark-side of life without putting our own faith at risk. We are prepared to deliver a hot-dish casserole when human hungers are so much more insatiable!

The great thing about BBT is that her profound observations are never a self-righteous judgment or divisive condemnation. If it were she would be guilty of the very dualistic thinking and separating into “winners” or “losers” she bemoans. Rather, Learning to Walk in the Dark is a refreshing invitation to embrace “lunar spirituality,” a realistic true-to-life faith that recognizes that the divine light available at any given time waxes and wanes with the seasons of our lives.

It’s not whether we have enough faith to explore the darkness — life itself provides more than enough incentive — but whether we are willing to bump into the things that frighten us and ask the darkness to teach us what we need to know.

Christian faith professes that Jesus was crucified, died and was buried, descended into hell, on the third day rose from the dead and only then ascended into heaven. Sounds like pretty intense darkness to me! Does this not proclaim the way and the truth of our lives?  Should we really expect it to be any different?

_________________
This reflection is largely based on the Introduction to Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor. HarperOne, 2014.

 

by

“Primary Wonder”

Problems connecting to the internet prevent me from posting what I have written on our laptop.  Being restricted to an iPad provides the opportunity to share one of my all-time favorite poems:

PRIMARY WONDER

Days pass when I forget the mystery.

Problems insoluble and problems offering

their own ignored solutions

jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber

along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing

their colored clothes; caps and bells.

And then

once more the quiet mystery

is present to me, the throng’s clamor

recedes: the mystery

that there is anything, anything at all,

let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,

rather than void: and that, 0 Lord,

Creator, Hallowed one, You still,

hour by hour sustain it.

— Denise Levertov

by

Beyond Denial to Genuine Hope

A week ago at church we heard that terrific passage from 1 Peter 3:15 suggesting we should always be ready to give reason for our hope. Yesterday at church I experienced reason for great hope in the most unimaginable way – Father Dale matter-of-factly referred to rape in his homily. It felt like fresh Spring air reviving the church.

Regulars here will remember that I am beyond exasperation with clerical sex abuse in the Catholic Church. As with the vast majority of rank and file Catholics my outrage transcends those who committed acts of sexual exploitation. Collective outrage correctly rests with a culture of clericalism – like fish, the ordained are typically unaware of the water in which they swim!

For the record, I believe Archbishop John Nienstedt should resign. My reasons are not based in anger or revenge, though I freely admit my anger and belief he must bear the consequences of his malfeasance. He should resign because he has squandered authority and lost the trust of the people. No one can provide moral leadership from such a position of deficit.

He is not likely to resign. Such is the culture of clericalism – ordination is often misconstrued as divine right, direct delegation from God Almighty! He appears to me as one who remains blithely unaware of the water in which he swims. Clerics are too often preoccupied with fulfilling “their” vocations, their individual “call” from God. It’s tied up in power!

If Archbishop Nienstedt were a Good Shepherd he would recognize that it’s not about him! Neither is it about public anger, revenge, power or even legitimate authority. It’s about the church, the People of God. The eight years to Nienstedt’s mandatory retirement age of 75 is simply too long for this Archdiocese to wait for the leadership it deserves and desires.

But neither is my point ultimately about an Archbishop. It’s about hope, fresh air, speaking the truth, proclaiming a Word recognized as the Truth! It’s about what’s happening in parishes in this Archdiocese and across this country. It’s about priests like Father Dale who know the water in which they swim, who love the communities they shepherd, and about mature Christians who recognize and require truth be spoken.

Yesterday Dale introduced his homily, masterfully focused on the Ascension of the Lord, with a passing reference to the death of Maya Angelou and her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In that context he mentioned that she had been raped at age seven and lived for the next ten years not speaking. Rape. Seven-years old. In church, out loud!

This never would have happened in the church of my childhood. Such topics were verboten, unspeakable, mentioned only in the privacy of Confession. That too was an ocean in which we swam unaware of the toxicity of our waters.

Today churches, schools and civic organizations have “safe child” trainings, policies guiding the actions of supervising adults, and a heightened sensitivity to good-touch/bad-touch. This is as it must be. This all is necessary to transform our culture and heal our communities.

But something more was in the air yesterday at church – freedom, truth, openness. It feels like a genuinely safe and transparent community when rape of a child can be factually admitted and publicly grieved. It went far beyond training, policies or supervision!

This was not the point of Dale’s Ascension homily – and that is my point. No more cover-ups. No more denial. No more lies. Truth vivified the air. What a healthy community in which to raise a child. What a truly safe church we really are becoming.

At the Ascension Jesus promised to send us the Spirit. We have good reason for deep and abiding hope!

by

Iznik, 2025

You know the look! It’s beyond glazed – that moment just before a friend’s eyes begin to roll back, often with a smothered yawn. At dinner with friends last evening at our favorite German restaurant I knew not to bring up the topic – we were there to have fun.

Earlier yesterday I had gasped upon hearing the news. Immediately doing the math, I calculated with delight, yes, I’d live to see the day! I wonder if my expectancy resembles that of a couple who are the only ones in the world who know they are pregnant — an irrepressible impulse breaks open, an indomitable hope and assurance of a future.

The only thing comparable in my lifetime came with the challenge set by President Kennedy on May 25, 1961: “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

With a stillness and the nearly imperceptible display that invariably distinguishes God’s most dramatic “annunciations”, it has been disclosed that Christianity will be getting a Nicaea III.  A what? you say! (Please, fight the glaze rolling over your eyes. Resist the impulse to click the “close” icon.)

Who can calculate the consequences of the Great Schism of 1054? History books tell us of the centuries-old split between the Christian East and the West, with all the socio-political consequences from which our world still suffers. Only in our lifetime are we seeing healing, requisite humility and hope for reconciliation – the kind that is beyond human abilities and can only come from God.

The first Council of Nicaea called by Emperor Constantine occurred in 325 and bequeathed to us the core Christian beliefs we profess today – think: Nicene Creed. 318 bishops gathered at Constantine’s summer home to hammer out how this human being, Jesus of Nazareth, could also be God – funny how we seem to have the opposite issue today!

The second Council of Nicaea was held in the eighth century to clarify that it was okay and even helpful to use objects like icons to enhance worship space and prayer – hardly a burning issue compared to Jesus’ humanity and divinity! (Sorry! Glazed eyes are starting to roll… let’s move on!) 

Now in our own day, after a thousand years of division bordering on animosity, Bartholomew II, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, has announced that an ecumenical “gathering” will be held in Nicaea in 2025 — seventeen centuries after the first ever ecumenical council gathered there in 325!

“The dialogue for unity between Catholics and Orthodox” Bartholomew explains, “will start again from Jerusalem. In this city, in the autumn [2014], a meeting of the Catholic-Orthodox Joint Commission will be hosted by the Greek Orthodox patriarch Theophilos III. It is a long journey in which we all must be committed without hypocrisy”.

Kennedy’s May 1961 challenge was achieved on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong became the first human to step onto the lunar surface – a time frame not unlike the one set by the Patriarch for Nicaea in 2025.

That which was thought to be inconceivable happens even in our lifetime – for even when the past appears barren, nothing is impossible with God! (cf., Luke 1:26-38)
_________________
Nicaea is now Iznik, Turkey and rests in a fertile valley aside a lake 56 miles SE of Istanbul.

See the exclusive report with Patriach Batholomew’s announcement [here].

by

Be Not Afraid

Too many of us are hamstrung by fear, anxiety and shame. No, not the prudent fear that keeps kayakers off the raging Minnehaha Creek running wildly out of its banks. Neither should we tolerate true mental illness that too often goes unrecognized and untreated with tragic consequences.

But we should be wary of overly inflated egos or a consumer culture which often belie self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy.  A mom disciplining her eight-year old daughter coming out of church on Sunday perfectly expressed the right balance: “Honey, I know that’s what you want, but right now it’s not about you getting your way.” Hurray for this mom! What a fortunate child!

The sort of fear and anxiety I’m talking about functions more as subtle undertow on our sense of self and emotional well-being. For example, I tire of well-intentioned warnings to “Be careful – that’s dangerous!” when others learn that I ride a scooter. I’ve learned to reframe these as an expression of care, even affection, that comes out sideways.

Too often fear and anxiety get tangled up with legitimate concern and appropriate caution. Again, a parent struck the right balance: Rather than telling her child, “No, get off the wall, you’ll get hurt!” I saw a mom attentively teaching her four-year old son how to walk on top of a two foot high retaining wall along the sidewalk. Good for her! That’s a child who will grow into mature self-esteem.

Shame is where fear and anxiety get really embedded and problematic. Healthy guilt comes with an appropriate regret for something I have done wrong. Shame is that toxic self-judgment that something is wrong with me and that I am deficient in who I am as a person.

Addiction finds a receptive host in shame. Marketing of all sorts feeds off this fear and suggests we will be happy or whole if we buy this product. We are awash – like Minnehaha Creek running out of its banks – with consumer products that brazenly promise what they cannot deliver.

Churches are all too often purveyors of fear, anxiety and shame as well. We joke about “hell, fire and brimstone” but know that humor always carries an element of truth. America carries in our DNA the heritage of Jonathan Edwards’ 1741 sermon: “Sinners in the Hands of a Vengeful God.” Why else do so many smile knowingly to another’s comment about being a “Recovering Catholic”?

Ronald Rolheiser, a contemporary American preacher I much prefer, offers a clever way to slip behind our puritanical heritage. He tells of a dream in which he was to go to the airport to pick up Jesus arriving on a flight.  He characterized the dream as anxiety producing! How would he recognize him? What would he look like? How would Jesus react to his chauffeur? What would he say to him? Would Rolheiser like what he saw? Would Jesus like what he saw?

Dispensing with pious overlays of what we’ve been told in church or given as “Gospel truth” this simple exercise slips behind such filters. Don’t dismiss it too quickly, or at least before you honestly ask whether fear, anxiety or shame is at the basis for “not wanting to go there.”  Give it try! Your personal meeting-up with Jesus at the airport is what counts!

I will share one memorable encounter conjured for me by this exercise – I was seven years old. My favorite grandma, now in her eighties, was visiting. I dashed through the kitchen door and saw her seated on a straight-back chair near the warm radiator. Thinking it to be an odd place to sit I asked, “Grandma, why are you sitting there?” Without missing a beat she said, “Because it’s next to the window and I can see you sooner coming home from school.” Can a child feel more loved?

We probably all get tangled up in fear, anxiety and shame because at some deep level we doubt whether we are loved, unconditionally. I thank God today for my Grandma, for the mom with the eight year old daughter at church and the parent who taught her son to walk on top of retaining walls!

_______________

The complete story of Ronald Rolheiser’s dream is in his book, Prayer: Our Deepest Longing. Franciscan Media, 2013. p 17.

by

Forgiveness

I can’t pray the Our Father anymore – at least as I have in the past. Honesty requires that I admit my paralysis. Most of my prayer remains sincere but I now get hung up on “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Integrity demands that I admit deep resistance and objection.

It’s easy in conversation to accept that Jesus’ command to love our neighbor as ourselves is pretty radical. In every day practice we might be able to transcend our urge to extract “an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth”. But love my enemies, pray for those who persecute? Offer forgiveness, not just once but seven times seventy? Do not resist an evil doer but offer the other cheek as well to the one who strikes you?

Last weekend we went to see The Railway Man, a searing account of a former prisoner of war who is unable to overcome the emotional trauma of his past. Based on a true story, Eric Lomax was one of thousands forced into slave labor to build the notorious Burma Railway, known as the “Death Railway” because of the thousands who perished during its construction.

“The Railway Man” begins three decades after the war. It’s long shadow of looms over his marriage. Lomax has terrifying nightmares, and his behavior is erratic, at times violent. His wife sees he is shell-shocked and desperately wants to help. But Lomax refuses to discuss what happened in the internment camp. Intending revenge, Lomax instead travels to Asia to confront his tormentor.

How are such victims to forgive? Are they to be forgiven as they forgive those who have trespassed against them? Locally, two men “sucker punched” and kicked in the head of a young dad who now lies in critical condition struggling for his life. What should “forgiveness” look like for this wife and mother?

Perhaps the ultimate test for our generation is clerical sexual abuse. We all know too well that such a victim never does fully recover from such a profound violation of trust. Unspeakable pain lingers. Emotional landmines lie hidden while spawning a veritable tsunami of collateral damage. Relationships are forever poisoned.

Our generation has been collectively victimized, violated, traumatized. One need not have experienced explicit physical exploitation to know the deep pain. What angers us, what hurts most, is not simply the reprehensible behavior of initial perpetrators. We have come face to face with the fact that the Church itself has failed us all. Unconscionable behavior by the hierarchy seems relentless — like [this] out of Seattle yesterday.  We are all victims of their abuse.

How do we pray with integrity “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”? One thing I have recognized is my tendency to link my need to be forgiven with my willingness to forgive – quid pro quo, we are forgiven as we are capable of forgiving. I’m doomed if my forgiveness is contingent upon or in proportion to my capacity to forgive.

Where is the hope? And, yes, there is always hope! Whether a prisoner of war like Eric Lomax, an anguished wife and mother in Mankato or a “cradle Catholic” in the pew on Sundays, forgiveness sometimes requires a superhuman act. In reality only God can forgive.

“Who can forgive sins but God alone?” remains as pressing in our day as for the Pharisees grilling Jesus. (Luke 5:21). Despite the normative teaching of Jesus in the Our Father, forgiveness is really only possible through God’s saving action in Christ (Rom 3:25f).

Ultimately, God has reconciled us to Himself and to one another while we were still sinners (Rom 5). That gives me hope despite my paralysis in prayer. That is the sole grounds on which we may have hope for the Church as well.

God save us!
_________________
Again, I am indebted to Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life by Walter Kasper, Paulist Press, 2013 for prompting much of these reflections; esp., pp 138-142.