Mercy

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Being Earthly Good

“Y’know, many of us are so heavenly minded we are no earthly good.”  That line, attributed to an old black Baptist pastor, always gets a laugh.  It seems to prove a fundamental principle of good humor — it’s ultimately grounded in fact.  We chuckle because we knowingly recognize its truth.

Those who work Twelve Step programs know how challenging it can be to “walk our talk.”  I didn’t need Jungian analysis or the Enneagram — though both are helpful — to tell me about my propensity to polish my carefully crafted public persona!

When confronted with someone hell-bent on telling others what God expects of us, I have quietly come to wonder: “What is so out of control in their lives that they feel the need to control everyone else?”  The will to power is in all of us and it is strong!

Yes, this is the direction my personal Examination of Conscience needs to go this Lenten season.  My will to control is strong, hopefully not insatiable.  I can too easily resort to my years of theological education and “spiritual practice” to stay safe in the realm of ideas rather than walk-my-talk.  Being articulate can quickly slip into a weapon wielding superiority and arrogance rather than a tool to liberate and empower others.

As our chuckle in response to the black Baptist pastor’s admonition attests to its truth, so we knowingly recognize ourselves in Jesus’ story about the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18:9-14).  In our social interactions, as well as our prayer, we find ourselves easily thanking God we “are not like other men.”

Thomas Merton masterfully cuts through such charade! Clearly asceticism and prayer — rightly understood and rightly applied — are means toward spiritual maturation and personal growth.  But, here is what we don’t want to accept, the roadblock we must eventually traverse… Merton suggests these practices — unfortunately and almost inevitably — will get subsumed into a quest for our own aggrandizement.  Our self-centeredness does not give-up easily or without quite a fight!

There is plenty in our pop culture and the self-help section of bookstores to feed our unbridled ego-ism and deceive us into thinking our happiness is found in “personal fulfillment”.  Merton admonishes his fellow monks as well as the rest of us who feel a tug toward spiritual “solitude” or “would be perfect.” He warns us how easily it is to fool ourselves: “We burn with self-admiration and think, ‘It is the fire of the love of God’.”

A fool-proof litmus test for whether my spiritually is fatally “inverted” in pursuit of my own “perfection” is to ask whether I am actually in search of the consolations of God or seeking the God of consolation.  Are others better off because of my “heavenly minded” machinations?

Thankfully, there is a surefire solution.  Failure!  What saves us is finally, even if begrudgingly, the self-acceptance that we are not our own savior, we are ultimately powerless, we cannot make ourselves perfect or even “worthy.”

What saves us, finally, is love… nothing other than the merciful love of God!  How hard it is for us to accept this!  Fellow Trappist Bernardo Bonowitz writes: “This piercing intuition leads Merton to say, in a beautiful re-phrasing of 1 John 4:10, ‘The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved.  That one is loved by God.  The faith that one is loved by God, although unworthy, or rather, irrespective of one’s worth’.”

With that grace, even quickening in our awareness, we can embark on loving others as ourselves — loving in a way that is of some earthly good.

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This reflection is largely inspired by and based upon Reaping Where Merton has Sown: A Retreat for the Merton Centenary by Bernardo Bonowitz, OCSO published in Cistercian Studies Quarterly 50.1 (2015), p. 56.

 

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Not Selling Ourselves Short

Often we sell ourselves short, letting ourselves off the hook too fast. Life, on the other hand, is not so easy on us!

After saying something hurtful, I can apologize. If we thoughtlessly let down a friend, we can say we are sorry. Most good people — and if you are reading this you probably fit the bill — do not intend to injure others or do what is wrong. When we fail, we generally make amends.  We generally make amends. We generally choose good and avoid evil.

But life is not so easy — either on us or for us. That’s what Lent is all about — getting to that deep human core where we know ourselves to be both powerless and culpable, paralyzed by forces seemingly beyond our control, yet called to break free from that which holds us bound and burdened.  No, life isn’t easy… but too often hard!

Jeanne Bishop, only after more than twenty years, is finally able to say out loud the name of the teenager who murdered her sister, brother-in-law and their unborn child. It took decades for this woman, a Chicago public defender in her professional life, to meet the grown man who was serving a sentence of life without parole.

What they had to say to each other was hard. Wounds ran deep on both sides. How do two people like this even begin a conversation no less approach reconciliation? Bishop explains the challenge and predicament perfectly. Even after all these years, “it would take time, untangling those stories, like patiently trying to pull apart the chains of two necklaces knotted together.”

Lent entices us past the bland grocery list of minor infractions. If we are willing, and when we are able, Lent nudges us into the deeply tangled knots of our lives. We must proceed without knowing how it will all turn out, even knowing for certain what is the right way to go about it. Such if life! Such is the nudge of grace!

Susan Stabile’s counsel to Jeanne Bishop is spot-on for us as well: “That is the point with God: we don’t get all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed in advance. We’re asked to say yes, knowing the path ahead is clouded in uncertainty — to say yes in faith that God will be with us no matter what.”

Bishop counsels us to accept God’s invitation, to follow God’s gentle but persistent nudge, to take a first step toward reconciliation without knowing what lies ahead. Again, she provides a wonderful metaphor that suggests the unfamiliar terrain we must follow. She compares our terrain to paths in the hills of Scotland where she and deceased sister had travelled with the geometric expansiveness of Illinois where they had grown up.

In Illinois roadways and farm fields are even and linear. Bishop muses that where she lives “you can sit on your front porch and watch your dog run away for a week.” Scotland, Bishop and her sister discovered, remains “a place of rises and curves; even if you are headed in the right way, you couldn’t be sure, because the streets turned and bowed.”

This is the invitation of Lent… to finally approach those parts and places in our lives that are tangled in knots. Not to sell ourselves short by letting ourselves off the hook too fast. With God as faithful companion and guide, we dare to walk a way both turned and bowed.

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In this and in many ways, I am indebted to Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and Making Peace with My Sister’s Killer by Jeanne Bishop. Westminster John Know Press, 2015, pages 124-5.

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Something is Radically Wrong

“When I was young I thought the goal of a spiritual life was some form of bliss or contentment. In my pride, I wanted not only to attain this but to be seen to have attained it. Christian mysticism and Buddhism intrigued me, and of course I understood neither of them.”

This self-admission by John Garvey in the current issue of Commonweal magazine really caught my attention! I became even more intrigued by his honest admission that “being a fool for a while is part of the process.”

Garvey explains that it wasn’t until many years later that he turned around to look at his life and saw that what had led him to where he really was involved a mix of depression, anger, fear, and anxiety. As the wise sage he has become, Garvey observes that “all you can deal with at the start is yourself.”

Seems so obvious, self-evident. But is it? Aren’t most of us inclined to fix everybody else before we get to ourselves? And if we courageously look in the mirror are we not inclined to shift blame?   Even “accepting Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior” can be little more than a delay tactic forestalling life-saving major surgery.

Garvey tells of a man who was ordained a Zen monk, and is now an Orthodox Christian. He teaches meditation and asks his students, “What do you hope to gain from this?” They may say something about having a more whole life, serenity, etc.—the usual clichés that surround the idea of enlightenment.

The monk points out that he is a divorced man, a recovering alcoholic, and has suffered through long periods on unemployment—the point being that nothing, including meditation, can guarantee wholeness or any sense of moral or therapeutic achievement.

It is common for people to think of morality as a major end of the religious life, or some sense of “being right” with God, or of being on the right side of a particular issue. Garvey has come to recognize that this need to be right is at best ego-satisfaction and an idolatrous temptation.

What John Garvey didn’t see when he was younger — and why I resonate so strongly with his reflection — is quite simple: the common insight of the great religious traditions is that something is wrong! Something about ordinary human consciousness doesn’t work, and it only gets worse when we try to put ourselves in control, to fix things.

To admit that I need help and cannot somehow conjure it up through my own power is liberating. We must turn from ourselves to something outside ourselves, hoping it will be gracious. We must acknowledge our core interior emptiness.

This is where the Christian story matters so much—brokenness is the beginning of salvation! We must enter our emptiness, return to the radical “nothingness” from which all was created. In a culture addicted to control, power and autonomy this knowledge is hard to come by.

How much more counter-cultural can we get than to believe, to truly profess, that we are the most open to grace when we admit how broken we are. But it is in this that we are saved!

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You may access John Garvey’s excellent reflection [here]. However, Commonweal restricts full access to subscribers.  My post here is largely dependent on his insights so I hope I have done him — and you — justice.

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“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

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Warning: Strong Winds Possible

Remember that old, short, fat guy with big ears? His name was Angelo.

Who wouldn’t feel affection for a man who was so comfortable with himself that he constantly made jokes about his physical appearance? When he once met a little boy named Angelo, he exclaimed, “That was my name, too!” And then, conspiratorially, “But then they made me change it!”

Journalists once expressed concern about the many burdens of his office on such an old man — he was seventy-seven when elected!  They asked, “Do worries, stress or anxiety given all you have to face ever keep you awake at night?” He answered, “Not at all! At the end of the day I say, ‘God, this is your church. I’m going to sleep.’”

An experienced diplomat, a veteran of ecumenical dialogue, and a gifted pastor and bishop, John XXIII brought a wealth of experience to the office of pope. Blessed with a sense of humor and innate humility, he managed to escape the Achilles heel of all Catholics – conflating the hierarchy with the church.

When making a pastoral visit to a Roman medical center named the Hospital of the Holy Spirit he was introduced to the nun who was the administrator of the hospital. “Holy Father,” she said, “I am the superior of the Holy Spirit.” “You’re very lucky,” said the pope, delighted. “I’m only the Vicar of Christ!”

Three months after assuming his office, Pope John caught Vatican bureaucrats off guard by casually announcing his intention to convene an ecumenical council. Curial officers, long accustomed to running things, prepared documents simply reiterating tired old “truths” in the moribund language of ecclesial texts. Entrenched bishops were poised to condemn a whole new syllabus of modern errors.

John gave voice to a different agenda. “The church has always opposed … errors. Nowadays, however, the Spouse of Christ prefers to use the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity.” He also hoped the church might reclaim its true identity and vocation as a “church of the poor.”

The pope hardly spoke during the opening sessions of the Council. He made one crucial intervention. After the first previously prepared document was rejected by a narrow majority, but not enough to table it definitively, John directed that it be returned for complete revision. That empowered the assembled bishops to set aside the entire set of draft documents and start from scratch.

His role was simply to “open the widows” for the spirit of Vatican II. Terminal cancer would cut short his participation but not his humor: “My bags are packed and I am ready to go.”

Four and a half years after becoming pope, John dictated a final message from his deathbed:

Now, more than ever, certainly more than in the past centuries, our intention is to serve people as such and not only Catholics; to defend above all and everywhere the rights of the human person and not only those of the Catholic Church; it is not the Gospel that changes; it is we who begin to understand it better…. The moment has arrived when we must recognize the signs of the times, seize the opportunity, and look far beyond. 

Sound vaguely familiar? As we approach Pentecost this Sunday we do well to remember that this isn’t the pope’s church, it is God’s! For all who would conflate hierarchy with church, the best we could do would be to get out of the way of the Holy Spirit.  We should all be starting more fires!

Saint John XXIII died on this day in 1963.

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I am indebted once again to Robert Ellsberg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses For Our Times. Crossroads, 1999. p 243-4.

Humor is from James Martin, SJ and more may be enjoyed [here].

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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!

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

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Mercy, Mercy!

Imagine my delight! A long-awaited book has finally arrived. I was quite aware of the block-buster frenzy its release made in 2013. But that was in German and I had to await its release in English. Well, it arrived this weekend!

The book is Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life by Walter Kasper who served as president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity from 2001-2010. Warning: you will likely be reading more about this book on this blog in the weeks ahead.

Regulars recall my reveling in the linguistic connection between the Hebrew words for mercy and womb. They come from the same root. Those who know Hebrew would immediately catch the connection between God’s mercy and the “womb love” of a mother.

Not having that cognate in English, this understanding and appreciation is lost on many of us. We Anglo-Saxon English-speakers can easily apply juridical connotations when we speak of mercy – unwarranted forgiveness, commutation of punishment due us, sheer gratuity from a just authority. Yes, that’s a part of mercy! But think of how much we miss if translations fail to convey the fullness of meaning.

Well, folks, imagine my delight when the translator’s preface to Kasper’s Mercy makes the very same point – but not in relation to Hebrew but in terms of German. Please bear with a few technicalities… it’s important!

Kasper uses the German words barmherzigkeit and erbarmen to describe God’s “merciful” attitudes and actions.  Here’s the point… the root “barm” implies physical tenderness and concrete action. Erbarmen means literally “to cherish in one’s bosom, press to one’s heart.” A second root in barmherzigkeit is the word for heart, herz. The translator wants the reader to appreciate that this German word suggests that one has his or her heart with those who are poor or in distress.

The translator of Mercy from German into English further emphasizes this critical understanding by drawing the equivalent connection with the Latin, misericordia and the word cor meaning heart.

Womb-love, being cherished in the bosom of another, or a God whose heart is with the distressed and poor is not the first place my thoughts go when the priest says, “Let us call to mind our sins.  Pray for God’s mercy!”

Unfortunately, my old Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic heritage still sends me into a nose-dive of pleading for unwarranted forgiveness, guilty as accused and deserving of punishment by a just authority.

How much more blessed – and accurate – we English speakers would be if the next time we prayed “Lord, have mercy!” we recognized the poverty of our English translation and again got in touch with the richness conveyed in the German, Hebrew and Latin originals.

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Mercy Me!

Who knows where such thoughts originate! For the last twenty-four hours the melody of “There’s Wideness to God’s Mercy” has been resonating through my mind. It’s been mostly consoling, also a bit tedious. I don’t especially care for the tune – too saccharine for my spiritual proclivities:

If our love were but more simple,
We should take Him at His word;
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the sweetness of our Lord. 

Sorry, that sort of sentimentality simply doesn’t cut it for me! Composer Frederick William Faber (1814-1863) was just too 19th century British for my tastes. Though the Victorian style is off-putting I confess very much appreciating the hymn’s concluding refrain: 

But we make His love too narrow
By false limits of our own;
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal He will not own.
Was there ever kinder shepherd
Half so gentle, half so sweet,
As the Savior who would have us
Come and gather at His feet?

I guess its in the air — much is being said about mercy these days. Pope Francis talks about it incessantly. Mercy certainly permeates the Lenten air we breathe. April 27, Divine Mercy Sunday, is the day chosen for the celebration in Rome of the canonization of Saints John XXIII and John Paul II. Perhaps these are all factors for the “wideness of God’s mercy” being such a resonate refrain.  It might just as well be a simple recognition and reluctant admission that I am in need of such “sweetness of the Lord.”

A much more appealing “resonance” comes from Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ. I vividly recall the refreshment – “plentiful redemption” – I experienced about twenty-five years ago when I came upon her ground-breaking classic, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. In theory we might all agree that God is ultimately indefinable, beyond all images and words. In God’s design and given human nature, we need the Incarnation of Emmanuel, God-With-Us. But we easily get hamstrung regarding gender. God is neither male nor female! God can and needs to be spoken of in terms of either and/or both genders.  Male and female are equally Imagio Dei and mutually interdependent.

She Who Is honors that truth by meticulously demonstrating that our Jewish and Christian scriptures are replete with female images of God — provided we have eyes to see and hearts open to receive! For example, in the Hebrew Bible, the word for mercy is taken from the root word for womb, rechem. In our prayers for mercy, we are actually asking God to have womb-love, to forgive us the way a mother does the child of her womb. In praying that God have mercy on us we are asking that God “mother-us” back into the fullness of life.

Few scholarly insights or theological teachings have warmed my heart and transformed my prayer as this deeper appreciation for God’s merciful love. There is a wideness to God’s mercy …and plenteous redemption!

Mercy me! Mercy me!
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Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ is Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Fordham University. Her website, especially the section “Professional Influence”, is illuminating and liberating.