Sin

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Such is Our Duty

This time of year reminds me of a church discipline from childhood I’ve long discarded. It’s called the “Easter Duty,” the obligation each Catholic has to go to Confession sometime during Lent. In theory it’s a beautiful and sensible practice — preparing for a full-blown, no-holds-barred celebration of Easter.

Fact is, no one does it. I haven’t for years. But something is shifting this year, something feels different, something is quickening deep inside. The desire to again look at the directive, perhaps even to reincorporate it into my spiritual practice, is awakening. As with all new growth, it’s fragile and might be easily smothered.  But this year it seems I’m being urged to take a fresh look.

Numerous reasons might be cited. First, and most significantly, my experience as a “spiritual coach” for men in recovery from alcohol or drug addiction has a profound reciprocal effect on me. Everyone familiar with the 12 Steps knows the critical importance of the famed Fifth Step — that arduous encounter with another human being when we admit out loud the exact nature of our wrongs.  This is done after a fearless moral inventory.

One need not be a rocket scientist to see the close connection between the Fifth Step and the Easter Duty. Both traditions are inspired and come to the same conclusion. An honest, accurate and thorough admission — out loud and to another person — of our moral failures with acceptance of responsibility for the wrong we have done engenders the recovery, health, well-being and serenity we seek. Twelve-Steppers understand such acknowledgement is critical and  essential to their recovery.

So, yes, with restored resolve I intend to make my Easter Duty this year. But something more is stirring deep down within this quickening awareness. It’s as simple as the archaic aphorism that has also fallen out of vogue: “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” In fact, I would amend that to say, “What’s good for the adult male goose is good for the gaggle of geese!”

Pope Francis prophetically leads the way in gestures like the one we saw yesterday. In a monumentally historic statement the Roman Pontiff and Russian Orthodox Patriarch jointly affirmed, “We are not competitors but brothers, and this concept must guide all our mutual actions as well as those directed to the outside world.”

Like every courageous and prophetic acknowledgement of moral culpability and consequent responsibility to make amends, such acknowledgement is easily ignored, overlooked if not denied, and often subverted by powers-that-be.

Yes, I intend to make my Easter Duty this year. I propose the “gander” do as well — by this I mean Francis’ fellow bishops and all church hierarchs (not all of whom are ordained). Even more, “What’s good for us geese has got to be good for the gaggle.”

We will gather as one Body in Christ to celebrate the unmerited grace of God at Easter. What then might be our corporate, collective “Easter Duty”? …a collective, corporate, fearless confession of our wrong doing with “a firm purpose of amendment”?

Unquestionably, a good place to start would be for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to launch and fully fund a truly independent, unhampered and fearless “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” regarding clergy sex abuse. But this is only a first essential step, the litmus test by which we demonstrate our sincerity to enter into the “repentance leading to resurrection” offered us in the Easter Triduum.

In the absence of such resolve by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, there is nothing preventing leadership within local dioceses from embracing an authentic season of conversation, shepherding us through death to life. I can think of no better place than our own Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis for this to begin.

Is not this the repentance God seeks, “to loosen the bonds of wickedness, to undo the bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free and break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6). Would this not be a Jubilee Year of Mercy, truly of Biblical proportions?

It is long past time for each and all of us to perform our Easter Duty!

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Judge Not

I’d like to say I’ve given up, but I haven’t. I’d like to say I’ve stopped trying to figure out what makes people tick — why they act the way they do, say what they say (or not!), believe what they believe. But, I can’t!

People continue to baffle me, confound me, sometimes disappointment me. There is some truth in the adage: “Do as I say not as I do!” But that isn’t even always true. People disappoint, act poorly, sometimes their words — or their silence — is deeply hurtful.

Mr Hall, my senior English teacher at Creighton Prep, would be shocked to hear me say this but good literature, novels and short stories help us wrestle with the bumps and bruises of living in families, neighborhoods and with colleagues. What Thomas Merton had to say about famed Southern novelist Flannery O’Connor is a case in point:

The first thing that anyone notices in reading Flannery O’Connor is that her moral evaluations seem to be strangely scrambled. The good people are bad and the bad people tend to be less bad than they seem. … Her crazy people , while remaining as crazy as they can possibly be, turn out to be governed by a strange kind of sanity. In the end, it is the sane ones who are incurable lunatics. The “good,” the “right,” the “kind” do all the harm. “Love” is a force for destruction, and “truth” is the best way to tell a lie.

That’s my read of our current situation — and I don’t just mean Presidential politics! O’Connor was getting at something much deeper, persistent and endemic in the human character. Merton goes on to observe that O’Connor’s true-to-life characters place us…

on the side of the fanatic and the mad boy, and we are against the reasonable zombie. We are against everything he stands for. We find ourselves nauseated by the reasonable, objective, ‘scientific’ answers he has for everything. In him, science is so right that it is a disaster.

Isn’t that all too true? My resounding YES! to O’Connor and Merton’s experience had me inserting “morals” for the word scientific and “morality” for science. Some of the most confounding and disappointing people are those who are so certain of their “moral” answers that their “morality” is a disaster.

Right and wrong — judging others — is perilous terrane. Yet, some of us persist in shining bright lights on others’ lives and behaviors. Jesus warned against such Pharisaic preoccupation calling the best of the lot “whitened sepulchers.” Psychologists have long correlated this propensity with a terrific fear of shining that same light on our own lives.

I try not to judge lest I be judged. But sometimes we are judged anyway — and by people who say they care about us. Sometimes other people’s words, actions, even their silence communicate a heavy moralistic judgment. The wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of the world’s great religious traditions, the teaching of Jesus Christ all shed important light on this persistent human propensity — unanimous in its condemnation.

More and more, experience is teaching me the wisdom and urgency of Jesus’ confounding warning about the Last Judgment. How sad it will be for those so certain about what was right and good for others to hear the Judge say, “I do not know you!”

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The first quote by Thomas Merton about Flannery O’Connor is from his book, Mystics and Zen Masters, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967, # 259.  The second Merton quote is from #260 of the same work.

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As Through a Glass Darkly

She is her mother’s daughter, that’s for sure!

For a few years now I have listened to an acquaintance — rather than friend because I consciously keep her at arm’s length — grouse about her 85-year-old mother. It’s a long story spanning their lifetimes which has been recounted to me in brief snippets. Can’t she see what she’s doing? Why doesn’t she understand?

Not only is it a great principle of human psychology, it is an important function of literature to allow us to “transfer” or “project” our own selves onto the characters we envision or read about. Shakespeare remains masterful in creating figures onto whom we can dump or build our hidden selves.

Case in point… To Kill a Mocking Bird vies with Grapes of Wrath for my all-time favorite novel. I love the character of Atticus Finch for his demeanor, delivery and dedication to justice. Now, pre-release publicity suggests that Atticus comes off as something less that saintly or heroic in Harper Lee’s long-awaited sequel.

I don’t want to hear it! Already, I have concocted all sorts of excuses not to read Go Set a Watchman. I don’t want anyone to tinker with my well entrenched opinion of the virtuous Atticus! He’s my idol. He’s the one onto whom I projected my youthful passion for justice. NO, he cannot have feet of clay! I will hear none of it!

A few days ago I was walking where my “arm’s-length acquaintance” typically intercepts me. Her rants have become so tedious I sometimes take other routes to lessen the chances of an encounter. Again, she bad-mouthed her elderly mother and rolled her eyes in disgust to emphasize her frustrations.

What doesn’t she see? Why doesn’t she get it? She is her mother’s daughter! She is a master at precisely the obnoxious, tiring, off-putting manner she accuses her mother of personifying. Pointing this out to her would simply be met with denial — a lifetime of projecting our problems or faults onto others is not going to change because of anything I say.

Perhaps the most I can hope for is that I not be guilty of that which I accuse others. I, too, project and transfer my negativity and culpability. I am too often blind and fail to get-it. I, too, am heavily defended behind walls of denial.

Today, Kayla McClurg has a terrific [reflection] on the Gospel being read in many churches this weekend. She recognizes that when we don’t truly know ourselves, accept ourselves, or be our true selves we fail to listen and learn. When we fail to admit our faults and failures we live forever displaced from the center of our lives.

Even in tedious rants and people we would rather avoid, there lies the invitation to own our own stuff. To be the person on the outside the person we are inside. Yes, to project and transfer both our grandstanding and our greatness onto characters of Scripture and literature. But also to own the fullness of all that is reflected back to us.

When I was young I wanted to be Atticus Finch! Perhaps now that I am approaching 65 I do need to read Go Set a Watchman more than ever. It is a gift that Harper Lee waited fifty years to release her sequel — only now am I starting to recognize even the great ones have clay feet. We all do!

Those I deem to be tedious, tiring and troubling may simply be holding up a mirror for me to see more clearly. Truth is, I am also my acquaintance’s reflection. If not in exactly the same ways, then at least more than I want to admit.

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Returning to Our Roots

We are hoping to go to Germany sometime this Fall. I’ve been there once — more than thirty years ago I was able to visit Bergheim-Esch, near Cologne, from where my Burbach family emigrated in 1850. This time we hope to see  the very small village of Weiburg northwest of Kassel in central Germany from which my mother’s German ancestry came in 1860.

Other attractions fill our wish list… I’ve never been to Berlin or what was East Germany. Everyone says the city is magnificent. As a child of the Cold War I am also motivated to see for myself that place which, like no other, symbolized the Iron Curtain. On a lighter note, we dream of doing the Sound of Music tour in Salsburg.

On Monday we saw the movie, Woman in Gold. Like the Sound of Music it recalls the terrifying days of the Nazi juggernaut. Woman in Gold also chronicles a dramatic escape to America. You will cheer the ultimate, improbable outcome and feel ennobled by the tenacity of those few who demand justice even after many decades.

Woman in Gold ironically awakened in me a deep personal desire to visit a concentration camp — most likely Dachau not far from Strasburg. Born in 1950 of German heritage, I have often wrestled with the unanswerable question: How could the insidious perversion of Nazism take hold in a culture so grand, a people so great? What is it in humankind, within my own DNA, that could give rise to such collective evil?

Seventy years ago today, April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany for participating in the conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler. There is no doubt of the Lutheran theologian and pastor’s “guilt” — he had been a member of the conspiracy since 1940. Where did he find the courage? What inspired him when so many of his fellow Christians acquiesced?

Biographers point to a visit to the United States in 1930-31 as a turning point. Among the friends he made was an African-American student from Alabama.  His new friend introduced Bonhoeffer to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he was moved by the depth of conviction he witnessed in the preaching and worship.

Bonhoeffer also traveled to the South, where he was appalled at the racial injustices he observed. He wrote home that the segregated “conditions are really unbelievable …when I wanted to eat in a small restaurant … with a Negro, I was refused service.”

With the rise of National Socialism in 1933, Bonhoeffer had already devoted much thinking — and, ultimately, action — to the question of how the church must respond to racism and anti-Semitism. Bonhoeffer declared “the church has an unconditional obligation towards the victims of any ordering society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community” and that the church was charged “not to just bind up the victims beneath the wheel, but to halt the wheel itself.”

How is it that such a devout Christian, who so often spoke and wrote about the importance of the Sermon on the Mount, could partake in an assassination conspiracy? He saw clearly that what we profess to “believe” must be joined by responsible action in the real world in which we each live.

How could evil of Nazism happen? How could such perversion take hold among a “Christian” nation so grand and great? Could it happen again? What is in our DNA that makes human beings capable and culpable of such atrocities? I must return again to my German roots.

Like Bonhoeffer and the Jewish heroine of Woman in Gold, a very small remnant draw from some deeper source to challenge injustice against ridiculous odds and at great personal cost. What is that source, that strength, that conviction which upholds the greatness of human potential of which we are capable? I must return again to the Scriptures.

Seventy years may seem like a long time ago. Let us not forget or ignore the Gospel narrative being lived out by thousands of Christians being martyred in our own day.

Can it happen again?

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I am indebted to Kirk O. Kolbo for his marvelous commentary in today’s Star-Tribune from which I quote and heartily recommend to you [here].

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How Long Must We Endure?

Today is a really, really, really hard day to be Catholic in Minnesota! If you care to read the details that leave me somewhere between exasperated on the way to enraged you can find them [here].

Let me simply summarize by saying that I called for the resignation of John Neinstedt as Archbishop of St Paul & Minneapolis [here] one month ago today. Now I am confident that it will only be a matter of time!  But how long, oh Lord?  How long?

Perhaps this is perfect context in which to reaffirm that our Christian faith is grounded — not in humans, not in a church or any authority, not even in any human interpretation of Scripture — but ultimately and solely in God alone.

So today is a day in which I feel the cost, challenge and pain of loving a church that is corrupt, sinful and in desperate need of a thorough house-cleaning! All the more need to keep my eyes focused on God alone! All the more reason to stay with the very same theme I had planned for today — living in the dark!

Yesterday, before the bomb shell news report, I could never have anticipated how I would come to value Barbara Brown Taylor’s quote from the 14th century classic, The Cloud of Unknowing: “… darkness and cloud is always between you and God, no matter what you do.”

Let me be clear, the anonymous author of this Christian classic was speaking of “darkness” as that intriguing, beguiling, frustrating mystery of God that is as impenetrable as its opposite, trying to look directly into the sun. This darkness — only metaphorically apprehended in what mystics express as a “dark night of the soul” — is the direct polar opposite of the sin and corruption we so vividly see in the Church of St Paul and Minneapolis.

Keeping our sights singularly fixed on God alone, we acknowledge that some things we will simply never be able to see by the light of human understanding. At times — thankfully not most of the time — faith feels like a forced exile, if not a long captivity, the spiritual life weighs like an imposing burden.

The anonymous text from the 14th century remains a classic because of its incomparable ability to express our universal and perennial experience. Ultimately, like the penultimate lawgiver, Moses, we are able to encounter or “see” the Holy One — if at all — only from within a cloud of luminous darkness.

Moses never made it to the Promised Land, being given only the gift of seeing it beckoning on the horizon. Others lead the People’s crossing over from slavery into freedom.

How long, oh Lord? How long!!! Our trust rests in you alone.

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Barbara Brown Taylor’s reference on p 48 of Learning to Walk in the Dark is from The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Emilie Griffin.  HarperSan-Francisco, 1981. p 15.

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Excess of Virtue

Preachers are probably delighted if we recall the gist of anything they say even twenty-four hours after their homilies. I remain spell-bound by a sermon I heard more than twenty-four years ago.

It happened in the late 1980s on a Sunday in Spring when I happened upon Peter J. Gomes preaching at Memorial Chapel on the Harvard campus. It would be fair to hold Rev. Gomes to a high standard – his positions as University Chaplain and professor of homiletics were endowed appointments.

I hear his message as if it were yesterday: An excess of virtue is more dangerous than an excess of vice! (pregnant pause) Yes, an excess of virtue is more dangerous than an excess of vice… because virtue is not subject to the constraints of conscience.

Rev. Gomes went on to explain that for good people trying to live good lives – and we’d be on safe ground presuming any who’d show up at church on Sunday would qualify – too much of a good thing is just that, too much! It leaves us feeling exhausted, dissipated and “on empty”.

We have likely all been there. Teachers, ministers, those in the helping professions and most parents seem to be especially vulnerable. Of course, we need to evaluate on a case by case basis. But, I personally believe that women are still socialized in our culture to be at higher risk than men.

So, why is this if we have all felt the dire consequences? … because virtue is not subject to the constraints of conscience. The practice of virtue is a good thing… Right? Not always! Human conscience best functions as a moral “alarm system” for right/wrong behaviors. It is not well calibrated for right/right choices or modulating virtuous actions.

So what’s a person to do? This week I happened upon Thomas Merton’s No Man Is An Island. Perhaps Rev. Gomes was prompted by Merton’s observation: The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

Merton understands and commiserates with our dilemma. His prescription is nothing more than what Moses and the Gospels prescribe: to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength; and your neighbor as yourself (cf, Deut.6; Matt. 22).

Yet, Merton nuances these truths with a wisdom born of a life of honesty and humble virtue: “It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When we do this we will be able first of all to face and accept our own limitations. As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be ‘as gods’. We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in ourselves for the lack in another.” 

Even the great preacher and apostle, Paul struggled to learn what Christ labored to teach: But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.  (2 Cor 12:9)

Why do I still recall Rev. Gomes’ sermon these twenty-four years later? Perhaps because, after more than 63 years, Christ’s lesson is one I still need to embrace!

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See a rich assortment of quotes from No Man Is An Island [here].

 

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No Jumping Allowed

Reverend Fred Phelps, the founder of the nefarious Westboro Baptist Church, is reportedly dying at a hospice in Kansas.  We all know him for organizing protests at the funerals of anti-LGBT hate crime victims, soldiers, and celebrities under the slogan “God Hates Fags.”  It was a proud Sunday morning about twelve years ago when we at the Church of St. Luke warranted his angry attention.  Never had the 9:30 lower church community sung “All are Welcome” with as much vigor, resolve and celebration.

I wish we had done something explicitly prophetic to merit Westboro’s ire. “Lukers” truly were a community of faith-filled, joyful, inclusive, prayerful and socially committed Christians. Truthfully, we were simply one of a series of churches targeted by Phelps in a media-mongering march to our neighbors at St. Paul Reformation Lutheran Church.  Reformation had recently called a lesbian to serve as an associate pastor.  Still, this moment stands out as a very proud day within a very distinguished history of what was Church of St. Luke.

It came as a shock to learn that Fred Phelps had been a champion of civil rights.  Unbelievable.  Hard to imagine but the evidence is irrefutable.  In a PolicyMic post on Twitter, Matthew Rozsa explains the inconceivable. After moving to Topeka in 1954, Phelps developed a reputation for taking civil rights cases that other attorneys — black as well as white — refused handle. Phelps’ reputation reached the point that he became the go-to litigator for victims of racist persecution. Rozsa reports, even after he received numerous threats and had his windows shot out, Phelps persisted in his work. By 1987 Phelps won an award from the Bonner Springs branch of the NAACP for his “steely determination for justice during his tenure as a civil rights attorney.”

So what happened?

Rozsa debunks the argument that Phelps merely took those cases to make money. He also discredits as far too simplistic the idea that Phelps’ subsequent hate-mongering proved his earlier work was insincere.  We want to believe there is an impermeable wall between that which makes one person a “hero” and another one a “villain.” Rather, the frightening fact we so tenaciously want to deny is that good and evil simultaneously reside within each of us.

Rozsa’s uses Phelps’s life to illumine the truth we want to flee – not only can good and evil co-exist within each of us, they often spring from the same source. Rozsa credits philosopher Eric Hoffer’s classic The True Believer when explaining: Individuals who invest their life’s work in larger social causes often do so for psychological as well as ideological reasons. Regardless of the exact beliefs of the movements in question — whether they are religious or political, left-wing or right-wing, intellectual or visceral — people who become “true believers” in those causes frequently do so to fulfill a variety of needs to both their egos and their ability to comprehend the dauntingly complex external world. Indeed, as Hoffer demonstrated, this fanatical personality type could be found behind causes ranging from Communism and Nazism to Christianity and Islam… with “true believers” able to flip from one point-of-view to a seemingly contradictory one precisely because their core psychological needs were still met.

Consequently, instead of viewing Phelps’s earlier civil rights activism as an angel to his subsequent raging homophobe’s devil, we should see them as different manifestations of a single root drive. We need to recognize that the same fervent conviction and inner belief system that can fuel the cause of justice can also be used to deny justice to others, even though the genesis of both those forces can sincerely hold that each is serving a righteous cause.

Nothing excuses malevolence or hate.  But it helps, especially during Lent, to hear the warning implicit in Fred Phelps’ tragic life:  Everyone — progressives, conservatives, libertarians, centrists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists — is capable of being both a hero and a monster. We all believe what we do as much out of pride and the need to be swept up by a “greater cause” as we do out of detached intellectual and moral analysis.

It’s not just about Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church is it?  It’s not about self-congratulatory contentment with communities as objectively praiseworthy as St. Luke’s.  It is not about a single protest or revolting slur.  It’s not outside “us” or about “them.”  It is about me, you, us, all of us together. It’s about each of our faith communities and our nation.  It is about sin, violence and all that lurks in the human heart.  It is about grace, love and becoming the Imagio Dei we are at our core.  It’s about giving ourselves over to the paschal mystery.

It’s about not leap-frogging Lent in our desperate need for Easter.
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Matthew Rozsa is a Ph.D. student in history at Lehigh University as well as a political columnist.  His article on PolicyMic is available [here].