Power

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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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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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What Difference Does It Make?

Know that experience of meeting people who seem like kindred spirits? Some people just immediately feel like soul mates! Conversation flows easily around topics of substance and mutual interest. I had that experience over the last few days.

Doug and Sheila live in Chicago and were in MSP for the wedding of their son. We share many friends in common and their reputation as missionaries in Mali, West Africa had already gained my admiration. The fact they were parenting three young sons at the same time heightened my curiosity.

A small dinner for six provided a rare opportunity for more personal sharing.  Doug now works with congregations in the U.S. around issues of inter-cultural communication. I was amazed by the wisdom with which he placed conditions on the “Golden Rule.” Isn’t doing onto others as you would have them do onto you one thing all great religions share in common? Didn’t Jesus himself teach this as the very bedrock of a moral life?

But, think about it in the context of Christian mission! Doug helped me see how ethnocentric and self-referential this can become in a cross cultural setting. Instead he proposed something much better, something known as the “Platinum Rule”: Do onto others as they would do unto themselves!

It’s not easy to improve upon Jesus but something tells me he’s thinking, “Gee, wish I had said that!” I believe Jesus taught the Platinum Rule by his actions and way with people. Doug just has a gift for putting a better spin on Jesus’ own words than Jesus did himself.

Conversation with Sheila was equally stimulating. We discovered a mutual affection for Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor. Her book An Altar in the World had stopped each of us dead in our tracks. Shortly after returning from a one-week mission trip to Haiti the book pierced my sense of self-congratulatory virtue: “Our community with them is human community,” Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “yet who could be better equipped to pop the locks on our prisons than people in whom we see nothing of ourselves?”(p. 94)

I recognized that Sheila knows in her bones what Barbara Brown Taylor meant in quoting Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image, for only then can we see past our own reflections in the mirror to a God we did not make up.”(p. 100)  She has lived this with greater intentionality than I probably ever will!

Sheila would be the first to admit her struggles and share how extremely challenging mission service in Mali was for her and for her family. But the fact remains that for ten years – not just my seven days – they labored to live what Barbara Brown Taylor counsels: “The assignment is to get over your self … the assignment is to love the God you did not make up with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and the second is like unto it: to love the neighbor you also did not make up as if that person were your own strange and particular self.” (p. 105)

Does it make a difference to go to Haiti for a week? …to Mali for ten years? Are we ever able to step outside of our own cultural bias long enough to do onto others as they would have us do unto them? Gospel preachers like Barbara Brown Taylor — but also people like Doug and Sheila — nudge us to see the mutual reciprocity essential for any such encounter.

Perhaps the vital question is not about the difference we make in Haiti or Mali. Rather, this is a rare moment when the Gospel challenges us to be more self-referential – what conversion does Mali or Haiti work in us? This alone protects us from being self-congratulatory purveyors of cultural bias or blind-guides looking to form clones of ourselves.

In a topsy-turvy world where the first are last and the last first, the only mission worthy of the Gospel is a life of mutual love and deferential service that reverences the truth that we are indeed kindred spirits, soul mates at the deepest level, equally members of one human family sharing a common home.

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Party-Pooper

Okay, so the Catholic world is gathering this weekend in Rome to celebrate the saintliness of two popes. Probably harmless enough. Perhaps even helpful for those of a certain cultural religiosity. Me? I will read/watch the news reports but would rather spend my time enjoying a really beautiful Spring weekend in Minneapolis with family and friends.

Count me among those party-poopers like the highly regarded Vatican-expert Thomas Reese, SJ who believes that “canonizing popes is a dumb idea.” [link] It’s all too politicized from my perspective. Too many want their favorite “made a saint so he can be presented as the ideal pope that future popes should imitate. It is more about church politics than sanctity” according to Reese.

Thank God for Pope Francis! Traditionalist Catholics and Polish nationals adored JPII and began an intense push for immediate sainthood. Although the cardinals and bishops of Vatican II expressed a similar spontaneous call for John XXIII upon the conclusion of the council, his cause languished for fifty years.

Francis has tempered the “political/ideological” fervor with the ingenious pairing of the two. Reese insightfully notes that Pope Francis is fighting the same divisions that Paul faced in Corinth, where some would say, “I belong to Paul,” and others, “I belong to Apollos” or “Cephas.” We are bigger and better than all of that!

That having been said, we must not gloss over genuine concerns and just “make happy”. Count me as well among those who think we have moved way too fast with John Paul II. In no way do I question the man’s global influence, considerable brilliance, obvious holiness and long-suffering virtue. But should we rush to canonize his “saintliness”? More time should have been taken for his full legacy to become known. That sort of patience and forbearance is the wise practice and time-proven tradition of the Church.

Specifically, I am curious about his culpability in the global sex abuse scandal. Sufficient evidence indicates he was apprised of the burgeoning crisis as early as 1984. He consistently defended a model of clericalism, hierarchy, power and prestige of the priesthood that rank and file Catholics recognize as the real source of  the sex abuse crisis.  Thomas P. Doyle has written a blistering critique based on his first hand experience of transmitting information to the Vatican as a staff assistant to U.S. papal nuncio Cardinal Pio Laghi. [link]. 

Ultimately, millions of people coming together to celebrate the holiness of others cannot be a bad thing. What’s going on in Rome will be a memorable moment of grace and religious zeal for those who participate. That’s good! It’s a true blessing.

Then after those of us who actually remember John XXIII and John Paul II pass on to our own heavenly reward, their memories will fade along with that of St. Pius X (1903-14) who ferociously fought the “heresy of Modernism” and went kicking and screaming trying to keep the Catholic church from embracing the 20th century!

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Eyes that Refuse to See

Yesterday I was in my doctor’s office for a routine lab test to confirm that the 10 mg of generic Lipitor is keeping cholesterol within my doctor’s prescribed limits. An issue of WebMD was the best choice among really lame publications in the waiting area. Passing over articles on reducing belly fat, seven ways to prepare chicken and secrets for a good night’s sleep I was attracted to a report out of Australia that older people who have an active social life – that is, friends – live 22% longer! Do we really need WebMD to tell us that?

Many bemoan the apparent disintegration of our families and communities. Millennials are disaffiliating from their parents’ religion at unprecedented rates. Schools, Scouts and service centers are finding it virtually impossible to recruit sufficient volunteers for essential programming. Sociologists chart the disintegration of urban neighborhoods as the rural areas continue to empty of population. Some frantically bewail an attack on the very definition of marriage and family. The result is a broad-based anxiety, heightened sense of isolation and fear for personal safety all the while we become more isolated. No wonder we don’t need a magazine in our doctor’s office to tell us that people with a rich assortment of friends are happier and live longer.

Our social reality is an ideal “place” from which to hear the Gospel for this Fourth Sunday in Lent – the story of the man born blind. Deborah J. Kapp, professor of Urban Ministry at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago brilliantly debunks the simplistic claim that families and communities of the past were more connected, attentive and supportive – that people took better care of each other! Kapp invites us to more carefully look at the story of the man born blind through this “lens of anxiety about collapsing social capital.”

We see that our prized and protected presumptions about some prior idyllic age are what collapse. Each of the social supports that were supposed to be in place for the blind man fails to deliver. The man’s communities, the religious authorities, even his family want to see a certain “reality” and fail to “see” him for who he is or appropriately “deliver” for the man. Religious leadership doesn’t want to believe the man’s story because it opposes the story they want to tell and the power they want to retain – authority to define sin and dispense grace is a blinding narcotic! Even the man’s parents put their own social standing before their son’s welfare. Perhaps we too are so blind to this overly-familiar text that we fail to see its compelling relevance for our lives.

Yesterday, something else I was reading jumped off the page. This time I was at home in my recliner, not the doctor’s office. Although it is not an ancient text nor reverenced as Scripture, it delivered a corroborating indictment of blindness in…

those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past. A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying. In neither case is one really concerned about Jesus Christ or others. … In some people we see an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time. 

What do we see when we look upon our families, neighborhoods, work places, faith communities?  How do we view and exercise authority? How are we called to receive, to heal, to serve? Are our eyes opened when we read the Scriptures? Do we truly recognize the Christ before our eyes?
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The contemporary text is from Pope Francis’ The Joy of the Gospel, #94-95. You may link to the original [here] which opens to the entire document.

Professor Deborah J. Kapp’s insightful analysis of John 9:1-41 may be found in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year A, Vol. 2 edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. pp.116-120.

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A Sign of Hope

We have ground for hope, genuine signs of vitality and reason to risk optimism! Regular readers will recall that I recently expressed blunt criticism and serious disappointment in Pope Francis [link] accusing him of being insensitive and out of touch regarding clergy sex abuse.  I bemoaned the fact that he seemed to defend a perverted “clericalism” that underlies a corrupt power-structure in the Catholic church.  I had largely concurred with canon lawyer and priest Thomas P. Doyle: The survivors of abuse and countless others from the church and from society in general have been waiting for three decades for evidence that the institutional church “gets it.” There not only is no real evidence that it has, but from all appearances the hierarchy will remain on the defensive, hoping the problem will go away.  Fair is fair so I am here today to suggest — to express genuine hope — that I was premature in my harsh criticism and profoundly wrong.

Over the past 24 hours media have favorably reported on the new Pontifical Commission on the Protection of Minors.  It has to be significant that the first to break this story [link] in the U.S. was John L. Allen, Jr. for the Boston Globe.  You may recall it was the Globe who tenaciously pursued and really broke open the American clergy sex abuse scandal in 2002.  In a journalistic coup and demonstration of its resolve to provide ongoing and incisive coverage, the Globe recently recruited Allen from the equally tenacious, progressive and independent National Catholic Reporter. My purpose is not to repeat what is already well reported but to express welcome surprise and highlight reasons to be hopeful.

Of the eight commission members, four are women.  I have long argued that had women held meaningful leadership in the Catholic church – or the male hierarchy of college sports a la Penn State — the scandal of sex-abuse would have been addressed and resolved much more swiftly and with immediate reforms.  Five of the eight commission members are laypersons.  That in itself is a refreshing change.  Significantly, one member is an outspoken survivor of rape by a priest when she was 13 years old. Corroborating this non-clerical, non-hierarchical composition is that Pope Francis explicitly left it to the eight commission members to choose their own leadership and selection of additional members.

It also has to be sobering for bishops and national conferences of bishops to recognize that their only representation comes with Cardinal Sean O’Malley, OFM — of Boston! Having only one bishop on a pontifical commission of such import sends a pointed message.  Equally significant, and something I have not seen adequately appreciated, is that the other two ordained members are Jesuits.  The fact that all three “clerics” are members of religious orders is a message that cannot be lost on church hierarchs!  As religious, these three have had very different formation than their diocesan brothers and are much more insulated – and one would hope inoculated – from the careerism that is endemic to ecclesial bureaucracies.

The commission is bound to face strong head-winds of resistance, centuries of entrenched power interests and decades of denial – such is the nature of all abuse of power as with this distinctively “Catholic” manifestation. We owe them gratitude and uncompromising support. 

Commonweal magazine provides a little known reason to inspire additional hope [link].  In the current issue editors cite sources suggesting Jorge Bergoglio possesses the finest-honed political instincts of any Argentine since Juan and Eva Perón.  Let’s all pray the editors are right — we need such gifts right now!