Sunday, 22 June 2008
An amazing day again, combining the tragic side of El Salvador's history with the festive. We started the day at the cathedral in San Salvador, in the crypt below the main sanctuary for a "people's mass." We got there early enough to see Romero's tomb, over which is a huge bronze representation of him lying in state. There are multiple bishops and archbishops buried there in the cathedral basement, but Romero occupies center stage; athough it seems that the current bishop there is resisting the canonization process for Romero, he is definitely already a saint by popular acclaim in the minds of a sizeable part of El Salvador's population. The standard concept of martyrdom for a long time has been that a person dies for his or her faith, but what happens when someone is killed by another person who in theory comes from the same faith tradition? Some people argue that Romero was killed because of his political involvements rather than because of the faith, but I genuinely don't understand how his political concerns can be separated from the implications of the gospel for politics and economics. Vatican II itself says that the Church's sole concern is that the reign of God come, and if the reign of God includes, at a minimum, the will of God being accomplished for the well-being and peace of humanity, then the faith, the Church, is inevitably tied up with the social order.
But I digress...After the mass, which lasted a couple of hours and was presided over by a priest who had worked with Romero, we headed out to a town (can't remember the name right now, it's in my notes somewhere) that was having a cultural festival this weekend. We feasted on shrimp and chocolate-covered strawberries and so on, and the students took the opportunity to look at the usual spate of knickknacks that were being sold. A couple of the more fearless students rented horse rides while the rest of them shopped.
Joe Cistone, the CEO of International Partners in Mission, joined us this morning, and he will be with us for the rest of our time in El Salvador. What an interesting guy -- lived in Rome for 7 years or so, ran a refugee center, now spends half his year traveling all over the world -- Africa, Asia, South America -- with groups like ours. Not a bad job if you can get it (although he says he has caught just about every tropical disease out there in his travels!).
(*NOTE*) I'm still in Klagetoh as I write this, and I spent the day on the Hopi reservation, which is actually landlocked by the Navajo Nation. I spend most of my time on two of the three primary mesas, fittingly enough named First Mesa and Second Mesa. The silence, the view, everything was just amazing. The Hopis don't let people take photographs or video within their reservation, so even when I get back to non-dialup Internet access I won't be able to post any pictures, but take my word, it took my breath away.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
El Salvador Day 2 - Saturday, 21 June 2008
NOTE: As I type this, I am in Klagetoh, AZ, deep in the heart of the Navajo Nation. I'm here for about 10 days, visiting the Brothers out here and retreating in this sacred land. I can't post pictures at the moment because the dial-up Internet access would take until Thanksgiving to upload them, but later...
I can’t believe it’s only 9:20 as I write this – I feel like we did about 3 days worth of stuff today, even though it was actually a very relaxed pace. 7:30 was breakfast, and my kind of breakfast – refried beans, plantains, eggs, juice, while people talked about the day ahead and about the rooster that woke everyone up at 4 am. From there we drove out to Aguilares, then to El Paisnal to visit the church where Rutilio Grande, SJ worked and is now buried. As luck would have it, a new priest was being assigned to the church that day, so what looked like half the town was there cleaning, decorating, and so on to prepare for his arrival. We managed to swing some time to talk with two young men who work as catechists and leaders in the base communities there in El Paisnal. It turned out to be better than one of us adults giving the students a talk on liberation theology, because these men talked about what life actually looks like to the people, and the role of the church in their lives. As excited as they were about their new priest coming, the church there obviously has a strong and very active laity – this is not just a place that people go on Sunday morning. Afterwards, the students peppered me with more “scholarly” questions about liberation theology, its pros and cons, but that was only possible because of what they had seen and heard from those two young men.
From there we went for lunch at a place way up in the mountains called Suchitoto, to a restaurant overlooking a huge artificial lake. Again, we took our time and had a wonderful, relaxed meal – the folks from IPM seemed to have no need to herd us along too quickly, and I like their flexibility in giving us input about the whens and wheres of our day. The students asked if we could walk down to the lake, and no problem, then a few of them asked if we could take a boat ride around the lake, and again, no problem. After that, our guide, Julieta, insisted it was time for coffee; never mind that it was 90 degrees out – the local custom is to drink hot beverages in hot weather because it makes you sweat more, so you stay cooler. Whatever you say… Anyway, we went back to Suchitoto and were able to walk around the plaza for a good long time, checking out the vendors’ booths, sampling the foods and beverages, and so on. Of course, some of the more caffeine-addicted students got their coffee, but then went looking for Salvadoran coffee beans because they like the local coffee so much that they want to take it back with them. For dinner that evening we went to another pupuseria, and a few of the students actually asked the women making the pupusas if they could try making a few, and they managed to do a pretty good job, at least to my untrained eye. People were pretty wiped out by the time we got back to the house at 8:30, but I wanted to get them to reflect on the day, so I just asked them about what they had seen that was sticking with them, and they ran with it for 45 minutes. They are coming to appreciate that even though we aren’t “working” like we would have if we had gone to Haiti, immersion is an important task for us, to be present, to listen, to hear about what is going on here without the need to rush in and assume that we can fix everything (or anything) with a week’s worth of unskilled labor. On a side note, the one student who had been in the theology 100 class I taught in the spring kept bringing up things we talked about in class; it gives me a new gratitude for the kind of formation that is possible in that kind of class.
I can’t believe it’s only 9:20 as I write this – I feel like we did about 3 days worth of stuff today, even though it was actually a very relaxed pace. 7:30 was breakfast, and my kind of breakfast – refried beans, plantains, eggs, juice, while people talked about the day ahead and about the rooster that woke everyone up at 4 am. From there we drove out to Aguilares, then to El Paisnal to visit the church where Rutilio Grande, SJ worked and is now buried. As luck would have it, a new priest was being assigned to the church that day, so what looked like half the town was there cleaning, decorating, and so on to prepare for his arrival. We managed to swing some time to talk with two young men who work as catechists and leaders in the base communities there in El Paisnal. It turned out to be better than one of us adults giving the students a talk on liberation theology, because these men talked about what life actually looks like to the people, and the role of the church in their lives. As excited as they were about their new priest coming, the church there obviously has a strong and very active laity – this is not just a place that people go on Sunday morning. Afterwards, the students peppered me with more “scholarly” questions about liberation theology, its pros and cons, but that was only possible because of what they had seen and heard from those two young men.
From there we went for lunch at a place way up in the mountains called Suchitoto, to a restaurant overlooking a huge artificial lake. Again, we took our time and had a wonderful, relaxed meal – the folks from IPM seemed to have no need to herd us along too quickly, and I like their flexibility in giving us input about the whens and wheres of our day. The students asked if we could walk down to the lake, and no problem, then a few of them asked if we could take a boat ride around the lake, and again, no problem. After that, our guide, Julieta, insisted it was time for coffee; never mind that it was 90 degrees out – the local custom is to drink hot beverages in hot weather because it makes you sweat more, so you stay cooler. Whatever you say… Anyway, we went back to Suchitoto and were able to walk around the plaza for a good long time, checking out the vendors’ booths, sampling the foods and beverages, and so on. Of course, some of the more caffeine-addicted students got their coffee, but then went looking for Salvadoran coffee beans because they like the local coffee so much that they want to take it back with them. For dinner that evening we went to another pupuseria, and a few of the students actually asked the women making the pupusas if they could try making a few, and they managed to do a pretty good job, at least to my untrained eye. People were pretty wiped out by the time we got back to the house at 8:30, but I wanted to get them to reflect on the day, so I just asked them about what they had seen that was sticking with them, and they ran with it for 45 minutes. They are coming to appreciate that even though we aren’t “working” like we would have if we had gone to Haiti, immersion is an important task for us, to be present, to listen, to hear about what is going on here without the need to rush in and assume that we can fix everything (or anything) with a week’s worth of unskilled labor. On a side note, the one student who had been in the theology 100 class I taught in the spring kept bringing up things we talked about in class; it gives me a new gratitude for the kind of formation that is possible in that kind of class.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Notes from El Salvador - part 1
Hi everyone,
A group of 6 SLU students and I just got back from a trip to El Salvador, sponsored by campus ministry and hosted by International Partners in Mission, a group that partners with local businesses around the world.
Friday, June 20
In a way quite different from when I arrived in Haiti last summer, I am again confronted by a myriad of responses to this first day in El Salvador. Different, because I don’t have to worry about the “sink or swim” stakes with the language, but now, instead of the constant effort of working in a second language, being the adult in charge of a group of students brings a certain constant low-level awareness of all of the things that could go wrong.
Everyone met in Miami without incident, although the last member of our group showed up at the gate during boarding for the flight to San Salvador, so I had sufficient time to wonder what I would have done if one (or more) of the students’ flights had been delayed. Nevertheless, everything went off without a hitch until we landed in San Salvador. I expected that our guides would have a sign saying “IPM” on it or something, but no luck, and of course I, being the poor planner that I am, realized that I had the number for IPM in the United States, but not for our contact person in San Salvador. Of course, my cell phone didn’t work in El Salvador, so I couldn’t even use it to call the number I did have. Long story short, I was able to find a phone booth that let me connect to the United States, and the IPM representative got me through to one of their people in El Salvador, but by the time she could put a call in to find out where the people who were supposed to meet us were, they met up with the students. It turned out that they had been there the whole time, and they even had a sign with them, but they just didn’t have it out. (*In hindsight, that was the biggest problem we had to deal with all week. After that, IPM was completely on the ball.*) Halfway to the guest house, we stopped for a late lunch at a little roadside restaurant that served pupusas, the local Salvadoran staple, which are like small tortillas stuffed with anything from meat to cheese to beans to vegetables to all of the above. Every table in this place (and in every pupusa restaurant in El Salvador, it seems) had a gigantic glass jar full of spicy pickled cabbage that goes with the pupusas.
In a way quite different from when I arrived in Haiti last summer, I am again confronted by a myriad of responses to this first day in El Salvador. Different, because I don’t have to worry about the “sink or swim” stakes with the language, but now, instead of the constant effort of working in a second language, being the adult in charge of a group of students brings a certain constant low-level awareness of all of the things that could go wrong.
Everyone met in Miami without incident, although the last member of our group showed up at the gate during boarding for the flight to San Salvador, so I had sufficient time to wonder what I would have done if one (or more) of the students’ flights had been delayed. Nevertheless, everything went off without a hitch until we landed in San Salvador. I expected that our guides would have a sign saying “IPM” on it or something, but no luck, and of course I, being the poor planner that I am, realized that I had the number for IPM in the United States, but not for our contact person in San Salvador. Of course, my cell phone didn’t work in El Salvador, so I couldn’t even use it to call the number I did have. Long story short, I was able to find a phone booth that let me connect to the United States, and the IPM representative got me through to one of their people in El Salvador, but by the time she could put a call in to find out where the people who were supposed to meet us were, they met up with the students. It turned out that they had been there the whole time, and they even had a sign with them, but they just didn’t have it out. (*In hindsight, that was the biggest problem we had to deal with all week. After that, IPM was completely on the ball.*) Halfway to the guest house, we stopped for a late lunch at a little roadside restaurant that served pupusas, the local Salvadoran staple, which are like small tortillas stuffed with anything from meat to cheese to beans to vegetables to all of the above. Every table in this place (and in every pupusa restaurant in El Salvador, it seems) had a gigantic glass jar full of spicy pickled cabbage that goes with the pupusas.
From there to the guest house and a brief orientation to the place and the trip before heading back out, this time to a nearby park to see a memorial to those who were killed or disappeared during the civil war. In some ways it reminded me of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington: a long black stone wall with thousands of names inscribed in it. On one hand, I appreciated it because it acknowledges what happened, but the danger is that there are so many names, it can cause a kind of sensory overload, with all those names blurring into a massive background of death and missing the point that each of those names was a real person, not just part of a statistic.
From there we drove up into the mountains and got a panoramic view of the city before hitting another local restaurant and heading back to the guest house to collapse.
I was very surprised at how “Americanized” much of the city is – Burger King, Subway, road crews using the same equipment they would in the United States. I guess I expected it to be more like Port-au-Prince, where I saw NO American franchises and only the shoddiest of upkeep. Our guides tell us that the gap between the wealthy and the poor will be wildly evident when we go out of the city, but at least from what we have seen, globalization is in full swing here.
Friday, June 6, 2008
June 6 -- last day in St. Louis
I just got back in from an exciting day working with Habitat for Humanity here in St. Louis. I’m technically done with work, but I don’t leave for New Orleans until tomorrow, so I decided to put in a couple of days with them since we didn’t get to build all semester (except spring break in New Orleans, of course). Yesterday the temperature was in the 90’s, and we spent all day hauling lumber, swinging the hammer, and finding other ways to make ourselves sweat even more. I honestly couldn’t drink water fast enough to keep up with what I was losing in sweat. We finished about 3:00, and I came home and crashed for an hour or so before going to SLU for the evening. A little group of my students convinced me to cook dinner for them – black-bean spinach burritos, which is about the only thing I know how to cook, and then we got gelato at a new place that opened up in my neighborhood. Nice.
Anyway, this morning I went back to Habitat (partially dreading it, I admit, because yesterday wiped me out so much) but it ended up being much cooler (more on that in a moment). I ended up spending most of the day lugging windows out of an 18-wheeler, some to the houses, others to a flatbed so we could move them to the Habitat warehouse. We did that through mid-afternoon until the heavens opened up on us, and we would have kept working except that the city alerts came out that there was a tornado alert (warning? watch? whichever one means they have actually spotted a tornado). Then we had to pick up the pace to load the last few palettes of windows onto the flatbed so we could get out of there. The guy driving the Bobcat forklift was in a hurry and ended up driving onto my foot – it was my fault too, because I wasn’t paying attention either, but he certainly got my attention when he rolled onto my foot! Anyway, no big deal; it doesn’t hurt much, but I may have broken a toe. Tomorrow morning I’m headed to New Orleans, with a couple of days to spare before our provincial chapter starts. Quiet stretches like these past few weeks remind me how much I miss home, so I really can’t wait to get back. When I was there at spring break, I felt like I want to take a vacation in my own hometown and just go to restaurants and places that I never go to.
Finally, we just got the good news that we have a young man named Kevin Piper joining our province in the fall as a candidate. He has been in seminary for a couple of years but has discerned that his call is to Brotherhood, so he will be moving to our formation house in Syracuse, NY to finish school and do his candidacy. Hooray to Chris Sweeney, our vocation man and my friend, for all the work he has done to help Kevin with his discernment.
Anyway, this morning I went back to Habitat (partially dreading it, I admit, because yesterday wiped me out so much) but it ended up being much cooler (more on that in a moment). I ended up spending most of the day lugging windows out of an 18-wheeler, some to the houses, others to a flatbed so we could move them to the Habitat warehouse. We did that through mid-afternoon until the heavens opened up on us, and we would have kept working except that the city alerts came out that there was a tornado alert (warning? watch? whichever one means they have actually spotted a tornado). Then we had to pick up the pace to load the last few palettes of windows onto the flatbed so we could get out of there. The guy driving the Bobcat forklift was in a hurry and ended up driving onto my foot – it was my fault too, because I wasn’t paying attention either, but he certainly got my attention when he rolled onto my foot! Anyway, no big deal; it doesn’t hurt much, but I may have broken a toe. Tomorrow morning I’m headed to New Orleans, with a couple of days to spare before our provincial chapter starts. Quiet stretches like these past few weeks remind me how much I miss home, so I really can’t wait to get back. When I was there at spring break, I felt like I want to take a vacation in my own hometown and just go to restaurants and places that I never go to.
Finally, we just got the good news that we have a young man named Kevin Piper joining our province in the fall as a candidate. He has been in seminary for a couple of years but has discerned that his call is to Brotherhood, so he will be moving to our formation house in Syracuse, NY to finish school and do his candidacy. Hooray to Chris Sweeney, our vocation man and my friend, for all the work he has done to help Kevin with his discernment.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Today is the Feast of the Sacred Heart, and I suppose I am feeling a little homesick at the moment, wishing I could be celebrating our feast with other men in my own order. The Marianists in my local community offered our liturgy this morning for Brothers of the Sacred Heart around the world, which was a really nice touch, but I wish I could sing the old songs and celebrate our community with my confreres in person.
The school year ended a couple of weeks ago, nicely capped off with a weekend trip to South Bend with the parents for my graduation ceremony (yes, I got the piece of paper in the mail back in September, but summer graduates don’t have a ceremony until May. Go figure.). Nice, easy weekend up there, apart from a few glitches related to driving between Chicago and South Bend (I took a bus every summer, so I never learned the roads!), and back to St. Louis just in time for…not much. Mind you, I’ve been very productive in the past couple of weeks since school let out, but there’s only so much campus ministry stuff that we can actually do at this point. My dorm is completely empty apart from the building coordinator (whom I never see), so I have spent some wonderful days in near-total silence – almost a paid retreat!
Now that I’m not in my office with students until midnight every evening, I’m able to get back to some of the stuff I have missed during such a busy year – catching a film with some of the Bro’s (Indiana Jones was fun but kinda hokey at the end, No Country for Old Men was brilliant but downright disturbing), a little rock climbing, plowing through a fraction of the backlog of books I have on my desk.
On that note, I am sure this one will come up again, but I have been working through a book called On Killing, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a psychologist and former Army Ranger. He discusses the incredibly low percentage of soldiers in World War II who actually fired their weapons (15-20%) compared with the percentage in later wars – roughly 50% in Korea, around 90% in Vietnam – to point to what he claims is an innate resistance people have to killing, even if their own lives are in danger, and how much of what is going on psychologically in modern military indoctrination is overcoming that innate resistance. What fascinates me about this guy is that he isn’t coming out of the agenda one might expect, given those claims. He is by no means a pacifist or a military-basher: he’s a career military man, believes in a strong military and the necessity and rightness of warfare in some circumstances. He believes that violence is sometimes a necessary thing and that soldiers can use it for good reasons, but he still claims that it causes well-adjusted people all kinds of psychic trauma to engage in it and that our culture is eroding that resistance to killing by flooding our media with violence. It would be fascinating to get him and Robert Jay Lifton to sit down and talk about psychology and violence – Grossman as a military man, Lifton as a pacifist, but both trained in psychology and examining the effects of violence upon the human psyche.
At the same time, I just started another one called (God) After Auschwitz by Zachary Braiterman. I am hoping to teach a class next spring on the problem of evil, and I would like to do something on post-Holocaust Jewish theology, so I’m reading through a few things looking for possible textbooks. I’m just at the beginning, but I go in with a sense that even though this book is written by a Jewish thinker, basically for a Jewish audience, using Jewish thinkers like Rubenstein, Heschel, and Fackenheim, theology after Auschwitz is a solidly Christian problem as well. What can we say about God after Auschwitz? What can we expect from God viz. horrific evil? Whether it happened to Christians is really immaterial – it happened, and the God whom Christians claim did not put on the emergency brakes and stop it. Hardly “enjoyable” reading, but intensely important.
On that note: Mercy within mercy within mercy…
The school year ended a couple of weeks ago, nicely capped off with a weekend trip to South Bend with the parents for my graduation ceremony (yes, I got the piece of paper in the mail back in September, but summer graduates don’t have a ceremony until May. Go figure.). Nice, easy weekend up there, apart from a few glitches related to driving between Chicago and South Bend (I took a bus every summer, so I never learned the roads!), and back to St. Louis just in time for…not much. Mind you, I’ve been very productive in the past couple of weeks since school let out, but there’s only so much campus ministry stuff that we can actually do at this point. My dorm is completely empty apart from the building coordinator (whom I never see), so I have spent some wonderful days in near-total silence – almost a paid retreat!
Now that I’m not in my office with students until midnight every evening, I’m able to get back to some of the stuff I have missed during such a busy year – catching a film with some of the Bro’s (Indiana Jones was fun but kinda hokey at the end, No Country for Old Men was brilliant but downright disturbing), a little rock climbing, plowing through a fraction of the backlog of books I have on my desk.
On that note, I am sure this one will come up again, but I have been working through a book called On Killing, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a psychologist and former Army Ranger. He discusses the incredibly low percentage of soldiers in World War II who actually fired their weapons (15-20%) compared with the percentage in later wars – roughly 50% in Korea, around 90% in Vietnam – to point to what he claims is an innate resistance people have to killing, even if their own lives are in danger, and how much of what is going on psychologically in modern military indoctrination is overcoming that innate resistance. What fascinates me about this guy is that he isn’t coming out of the agenda one might expect, given those claims. He is by no means a pacifist or a military-basher: he’s a career military man, believes in a strong military and the necessity and rightness of warfare in some circumstances. He believes that violence is sometimes a necessary thing and that soldiers can use it for good reasons, but he still claims that it causes well-adjusted people all kinds of psychic trauma to engage in it and that our culture is eroding that resistance to killing by flooding our media with violence. It would be fascinating to get him and Robert Jay Lifton to sit down and talk about psychology and violence – Grossman as a military man, Lifton as a pacifist, but both trained in psychology and examining the effects of violence upon the human psyche.
At the same time, I just started another one called (God) After Auschwitz by Zachary Braiterman. I am hoping to teach a class next spring on the problem of evil, and I would like to do something on post-Holocaust Jewish theology, so I’m reading through a few things looking for possible textbooks. I’m just at the beginning, but I go in with a sense that even though this book is written by a Jewish thinker, basically for a Jewish audience, using Jewish thinkers like Rubenstein, Heschel, and Fackenheim, theology after Auschwitz is a solidly Christian problem as well. What can we say about God after Auschwitz? What can we expect from God viz. horrific evil? Whether it happened to Christians is really immaterial – it happened, and the God whom Christians claim did not put on the emergency brakes and stop it. Hardly “enjoyable” reading, but intensely important.
On that note: Mercy within mercy within mercy…
Monday, May 19, 2008
Imagining Argentina
I took a social work class this semester entitled "Foundations of Nonviolent Peacemaking." I spent most of my research energy on the kind of stuff I have already been working on -- psychic numbing, dehumanization, that kind of thing -- but in the process of reading for those topics, I stumbled upon the book Imagining Argentina, which I mentioned in my previous post, and I got hooked. What follows is a paper I produced on that book for this class.
My old professor Walter Brueggemann, in his book The Prophetic Imagination, mentions in passing a book by Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina. On a whim, I finally picked it up at the library, more than 5 years after I first studied under Brueggemann, and have been fascinated by Thornton’s quasi-mystical theme as well as Argentina’s “Guerra sucia,” which is the setting for the book. This will not simply be a book report, but given the manner of response that the book offers to the events of the war, I will engage Thornton’s model of imagination as well as the historical happenings of the dirty war itself.
Some months after the abduction of his wife Cecilia by government kidnapping squads, Carlos Rueda, the director of the Argentine National Children’s Theater, begins to see in his imagination people who have been “disappeared.” These imaginative scenarios, although they have the power to shape reality, are beyond his control; whereas at times he sees people being freed or escaping through holes that appear “miraculously” in brick walls, or babies returned to the mothers from whom they have been taken, at other times he sees people being tortured, raped, or killed, and he is powerless to change it. Although he had been apolitical, his wife had been a journalist, writing articles about the abuses and terror tactics of the government. Whereas she had been concerned with hard-nosed reporting of the data, says the narrator, a retired journalist and friend of Carlos and Cecilia named MartÃn Benn, Carlos’ intellectual life “is wholly metaphorical,” (Thornton 18) which at the beginning of the story would have meant “unreal” for Benn. However, Benn’s own awareness of what Carlos’ ability means develops, and he gradually comes to understand, as did Nietzsche, that “truth is an army of metaphors” (Theology of the Old Testament 85); that is, our access to reality is in fact a construct of numerous voices which we try to boil down to one coherent tone, inevitably distorting or silencing those which do not fit our program. Speaking about the silence and complacency of so many Argentines in the face of the disappearances, Benn remarks that they reacted “more or less like the citizens outside Belsen did to the horrors behind the fences, except that we found refuge in a phrase, rather than silence. ‘Debe ser por algo,’ we said, ‘It must be for something.’” (Thornton 20) Thus did the generals’ imagination dominate that of the people – they were willing to accept the generals’ rendering of reality on faith, rather than asking the kinds of questions that might undermine the stasis that the generals’ imaginations inevitably sought. As William Cavanaugh, in his book Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ, states, “To refer to torture as the ‘imagination of the state’ as I have done is obviously not to deny the reality of torture, but to call attention to the fact that torture is part of a drama of inscribing bodies to perform certain roles in the imaginative project which is the nation-state.” (Cavanaugh 279)
Despite the quasi-mystical portrait of Carlos’ imagination that pervades the book, it is not primarily a fantasy book, but a defense of the urgency of imagination, understood as the capacity to see reality in a way other than merely the facts on the ground. Carlos spells this out early on by declaring that there were in fact two Argentinas, the one that the generals believed was self-evident, and the one in the people’s hearts. When the soldiers look at the people, he argues, they see sheep and terrorists; on the other hand, the people “remember a time before the regime, but they do not take their imaginations beyond memory because hoping is too painful. So long as we accept what the men in the car imagine, we’re finished…We have to believe in the power of imagination because it’s all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs.” (Thornton 65) This plays itself out in Carlos’ understanding of General Guzman, who serves as a symbol of the government: “He conceives of himself as a patriot who believes that Argentines are a little mad, ungovernable by ordinary means, and capable of thriving again, of realizing our potential only if we accept the strong hand of people like himself.” (Thornton 90)
Carlos begins to march every week in front of the Casa Rosada, the seat of government in Buenos Aires, with the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, an actual organization which was founded during the dirty war to make visible the faces and names of those who had been disappeared. In response to their signs with names and pictures of disappeared loved ones, Carlos makes a sign of his own: “I AM CARLOS RUEDA. THEY HAVE TAKEN MY WIFE. I CAN HELP.” (Thornton 38) From that point forward, every Thursday evening Carlos holds audiences in his garden, and people from all over come to tell him about their loved ones who had been disappeared, hoping that he could tell them what would become of them. Friends and strangers alike come in ever-greater numbers as their loved ones continue to be disappeared, desperate for some bit of information, whether of hope that their loved ones will escape, or of the minimal but real consolation of at least knowing that they are dead, as opposed to the unknowing that gives way to despair.
Carlos’ imagination moves from his garden into his work at the theater, where he produces a new play called Names, which was about the generals’ belief that they could erase history, erase people’s very existence, by removing people from sight, and the need to keep those names alive by and in memory. Carlos repeatedly sees in his imagination what is happening to his wife and daughter (who is also taken in the wake of the performance of Names), including seeing them being tortured, raped, and, in the case of Teresa, eventually murdered. Benn recounts his heartache each time Carlos asks an acquaintance to tell him about what happened to Cecilia, and later Teresa, partially because of the pain it causes Carlos to see with his imaginative gift what they are suffering, but more because he wishes that Carlos would simply accept reality, namely that they are dead. Even after he sees Teresa’s death in his mind’s eye, Carlos repeatedly goes out to find Cecilia, refusing to accept the version of reality that even his friends would have him believe. After Teresa’s abduction, Carlos follows General Guzman to his house, intending to kill him, until Guzman’s daughter comes outside and Carlos finds himself unable to fire; he later reflects to Benn that, “Everything he [Guzman] sees is small, distorted by his preconceptions…He could never comprehend that my stories are more dangerous to him than the Mannlicher, my words more explosive than bombs planted in the Casa Rosada.” (Thornton 136)
Thornton writes about the willful amnesia that appears as the regime in the book is losing its power; the generals themselves tried to disappear, while simultaneously leaving in their wake the message, “It never happened.” (Thornton 191) Unlike the meticulous record-keeping of the Nazis, the generals in Argentina worked to completely efface, not only their crimes, but the very existence of those whom they had disappeared. No such person ever existed to have been taken, tortured, killed. Faced with the reality that, “It’s only a matter of time before there’s silence in Buenos Aires, in all of Argentina, before the records are shredded, before the bodies are buried too deep to find,” (Thornton 197) Carlos steps up the sessions in his garden, knowing that to not bring his new power of imagination would be to allow the imagination of the generals to win. Such was the same logic of the Madres: by marching with signs with the names and pictures of their children, they resisted the fiction that would deny that their children ever existed. Nevertheless, such testimony retains at best an elusive hold on truth. As Robert Jay Lifton points out, “Hannah Arendt, discussing official deceptions revealed in the Pentagon Papers, emphasizes the ‘fragility’ of ‘factual truths,’ their dependence upon ‘testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses.’” (Lifton 360) Cecilia, for example, despite being deprived of means of writing down the story she was experiencing, made use of the swirling patterns etched into the plaster of her walls as mnemonic devices to remember her story (which she eventually collected in a book called, appropriately, The Wall), in a way reminiscent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
Cavanaugh comments, “Confronted with evidence of the miraculous, Carlos’s friends nevertheless remain skeptical, convinced that Carlos cannot confront tanks with stories, helicopters with mere imagination. They can only see the conflict in terms of fantasy versus reality. Carlos, on the other hand, rightly grasps that the contest is not between imagination and the real, but between two types of imagination, that of the generals and that of their opponents.” (Cavanaugh 278) Whereas his friends see imagination as fantasy, the generals themselves know the power of that kind of alternative rendering of reality, even as they are unable to admit their fear as such to one another: “it is inconceivable that a general, or a ranking member of his staff, would admit to colleagues that he was afraid of a storyteller.” (Thornton 162) However, like J. Edgar Hoover’s ironic comment that Martin Luther King was “the most dangerous man in America,” (ironic because Hoover thought King was a communist, whereas King’s truly prophetic imagination was indeed more dangerous than any amount of armed force that could have been brought to bear on American power structures at the time) the power to reclaim reality by speech, which can be misunderstood as mere skill at making rhyme schemes, authorizes living in a different way. It is for this reason that Yale theologian and torture survivor Miroslav Volf argues, “in order to expose crimes and fight political oppression, many writers, artists and thinkers have become soldiers of memory.” (Volf 18) Following Teresa’s death, Carlos notes that the generals “assumed I would follow Teresa into the whiteness, give up on myself as well as Cecilia, and they were very close to being right. But as I was thinking about letting myself go I understood that Cecilia would drown too, that she lived only because I remained to know she lived.” (Thornton 172) This hope keeps Carlos alive, when the fiction of the generals tells him to give in to grief and take his own life; despite all odds, it eventually culminates in Cecilia’s escape and return to him.
Historically, the estimate is that roughly 30,000 people, mostly trade-unionists, students, and activists were disappeared during the dirty war, which the government euphemistically called the “National Reorganization Process,” and which lasted from roughly 1976 until 1983. Whatever the book’s historical inaccuracies may or may not have been, (Thornton is neither a historian nor an Argentine) Thornton communicates something of the nature of living inside a truncated imagination, as most of Argentina did. Although many of them were assaulted, arrested, and even disappeared, the Madres, who continue to exist to this day, were one of the few groups who “successfully countered the military’s calculation that if the terror was absolute enough, no one would dare to complain.” (Sharp 221) The Madres continued to march with signs showing the names and faces of disappeared loved ones until 2006, at which point they said that the government was no longer an enemy, no longer opposing their efforts to find their loved ones.
The scenes in this book that were most horrible to me as the reader were those in which Carlos is forced to see the repeated torture and rape of his wife and his daughter, to know his powerlessness to stop it and the feelings that would accompany such a reality. Is his use of his imaginative gift the appropriate response? Should the sword have joined to the spoken word in efforts to stop the generals’ imagination, even if it would have ended with Carlos sharing the fate of so many of his fellow citizens? Despite having himself been assaulted on several occasions, despite the contemptuous attitude with which Guzman exits the courtroom in which he is eventually found guilty of crimes against humanity, Carlos realized in that moment when the crosshairs of his rifle converged not only on Guzman but on his daughter that to kill Guzman would have made Guzman’s imagination correct; as he puts it, “the bullet would have sent me into exile and silence.” (Thornton 137) However, even though the closing chapter of the book does fast-forward several years after Cecilia’s return, to show the downfall of the generals, it does not linger on the effects on Cecilia of her captivity. Does she ever wake up screaming, feeling the soldiers’ hands on her body, or listening to her daughter scream for mercy? After months or years of captivity and abuse, how damaged is her psyche? Is forgiveness possible? Can she live her life without being consumed by the enormity of trauma she endured? It is one thing to say, as does Walter Wink, “The enemy too believes he or she is in the right, and fears us, because we represent a threat against his or her values, lifestyle, or affluence. When we demonize our enemies, calling them names and identifying then with absolute evil, we deny that they have that of God within them that makes transformation possible.” (Wink 59) It is another to think about the cost to sufferers, to think of the contemptuousness of torturers even when presented with all the evidence of their wrongdoing.
In that vein, psychologist Jordan Peterson talks about a fellow therapist who works with women who have suffered horrific trauma: rape, abuse, torture. Those women who were able to most fully enter in their imaginations into their experiences of trauma, who felt the pain and indignation most completely, got better faster and stayed better longer. Why? Peterson argues that this model of therapy is built on the premise that coming into contact with that which is most terrifying, not running away from it, demonstrates that we can encounter that which frightens us most and not be destroyed; in effect, we can reclaim those lacunae in our “maps of meaning”; even if they remain unfathomable evil, they don’t reduce us to inarticulacy about our own lives. However, it is precisely the effect of torture, says Elaine Scarry, to “unmake” the world: to render the sufferer inarticulate, to shatter the sufferer’s matrix of a coherent world, and, given the unique ability of pain to defy explanation, to deprive them of the ability to describe their experiences.
How, then, does this book and its model of imagination and hope speak to the task of peacemaking? In one way, it clarifies just how painful and tenuous a task peacemaking is: we can get lost in examples of peacemaking that, despite the sufferings of those who participate, make it seem almost “majestic,” to use the term that Martin King used to describe the struggle in Birmingham. Certainly it was atrocious, we say, but it can almost seem to be a mathematical formula: acceptance of suffering leads to the consciences of the oppressors to be stung by seeing the suffering they inflict on the innocent, and the oppressed are upheld as paragons of virtue and selflessness. There is no such formula here: a mother, herself subject to serial rape, is forced to choose which soldier in a group will be the first to rape her daughter, and then forced to listen to it all happen. Those soldiers remain contemptuous, unharmed by guilt, to the very end, while the mother survives but faces a lifetime of trauma, guilt, and terror.
On the other hand, however, the story reinforces the urgency of hope: partially in Wink and King’s sense of the word, that even the most vicious opponents have within them a shred of humanity that contains the seeds of conversion, but also hope in God’s power to make happen more than we are capable of seeing from where we are. This is an awful hope, one that must say that, while everything may well not work out for me, that I may suffer to death, or worse, be left alive to suffer under decades of pain and trauma, hope is still authorized, is in fact essential, for a bigger picture than my own small life.
Similarly, the book points to the need to continually rehumanize those whom oppressors would rather see dehumanized (to justify their violence) or made invisible (to deny their violence ever happened), and the place of the media in fostering the illusion or piercing it with truth. Much of the furor in the book was over the silencing of dissent, often in the form of mass media and artistic expression: critical editorials, dramatic productions in the theater where Carlos worked, intellectuals or students saying the wrong thing. Some people were silent out of fear, while others did so out of ideology, but Thornton’s central point throughout remains consistent: the pen, and by extension the imagination, is genuinely mightier than the sword.
Works Cited
Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. 2nd Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.
---. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.
Cavanaugh, William T. Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ.
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.
Sharp, Gene. Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential. Boston: Extending Horizons Books, 2005.
Thornton, Lawrence. Imagining Argentina. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
Volf, Miroslav. The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 2006.
Wink, Walter. Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.
My old professor Walter Brueggemann, in his book The Prophetic Imagination, mentions in passing a book by Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina. On a whim, I finally picked it up at the library, more than 5 years after I first studied under Brueggemann, and have been fascinated by Thornton’s quasi-mystical theme as well as Argentina’s “Guerra sucia,” which is the setting for the book. This will not simply be a book report, but given the manner of response that the book offers to the events of the war, I will engage Thornton’s model of imagination as well as the historical happenings of the dirty war itself.
Some months after the abduction of his wife Cecilia by government kidnapping squads, Carlos Rueda, the director of the Argentine National Children’s Theater, begins to see in his imagination people who have been “disappeared.” These imaginative scenarios, although they have the power to shape reality, are beyond his control; whereas at times he sees people being freed or escaping through holes that appear “miraculously” in brick walls, or babies returned to the mothers from whom they have been taken, at other times he sees people being tortured, raped, or killed, and he is powerless to change it. Although he had been apolitical, his wife had been a journalist, writing articles about the abuses and terror tactics of the government. Whereas she had been concerned with hard-nosed reporting of the data, says the narrator, a retired journalist and friend of Carlos and Cecilia named MartÃn Benn, Carlos’ intellectual life “is wholly metaphorical,” (Thornton 18) which at the beginning of the story would have meant “unreal” for Benn. However, Benn’s own awareness of what Carlos’ ability means develops, and he gradually comes to understand, as did Nietzsche, that “truth is an army of metaphors” (Theology of the Old Testament 85); that is, our access to reality is in fact a construct of numerous voices which we try to boil down to one coherent tone, inevitably distorting or silencing those which do not fit our program. Speaking about the silence and complacency of so many Argentines in the face of the disappearances, Benn remarks that they reacted “more or less like the citizens outside Belsen did to the horrors behind the fences, except that we found refuge in a phrase, rather than silence. ‘Debe ser por algo,’ we said, ‘It must be for something.’” (Thornton 20) Thus did the generals’ imagination dominate that of the people – they were willing to accept the generals’ rendering of reality on faith, rather than asking the kinds of questions that might undermine the stasis that the generals’ imaginations inevitably sought. As William Cavanaugh, in his book Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ, states, “To refer to torture as the ‘imagination of the state’ as I have done is obviously not to deny the reality of torture, but to call attention to the fact that torture is part of a drama of inscribing bodies to perform certain roles in the imaginative project which is the nation-state.” (Cavanaugh 279)
Despite the quasi-mystical portrait of Carlos’ imagination that pervades the book, it is not primarily a fantasy book, but a defense of the urgency of imagination, understood as the capacity to see reality in a way other than merely the facts on the ground. Carlos spells this out early on by declaring that there were in fact two Argentinas, the one that the generals believed was self-evident, and the one in the people’s hearts. When the soldiers look at the people, he argues, they see sheep and terrorists; on the other hand, the people “remember a time before the regime, but they do not take their imaginations beyond memory because hoping is too painful. So long as we accept what the men in the car imagine, we’re finished…We have to believe in the power of imagination because it’s all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs.” (Thornton 65) This plays itself out in Carlos’ understanding of General Guzman, who serves as a symbol of the government: “He conceives of himself as a patriot who believes that Argentines are a little mad, ungovernable by ordinary means, and capable of thriving again, of realizing our potential only if we accept the strong hand of people like himself.” (Thornton 90)
Carlos begins to march every week in front of the Casa Rosada, the seat of government in Buenos Aires, with the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, an actual organization which was founded during the dirty war to make visible the faces and names of those who had been disappeared. In response to their signs with names and pictures of disappeared loved ones, Carlos makes a sign of his own: “I AM CARLOS RUEDA. THEY HAVE TAKEN MY WIFE. I CAN HELP.” (Thornton 38) From that point forward, every Thursday evening Carlos holds audiences in his garden, and people from all over come to tell him about their loved ones who had been disappeared, hoping that he could tell them what would become of them. Friends and strangers alike come in ever-greater numbers as their loved ones continue to be disappeared, desperate for some bit of information, whether of hope that their loved ones will escape, or of the minimal but real consolation of at least knowing that they are dead, as opposed to the unknowing that gives way to despair.
Carlos’ imagination moves from his garden into his work at the theater, where he produces a new play called Names, which was about the generals’ belief that they could erase history, erase people’s very existence, by removing people from sight, and the need to keep those names alive by and in memory. Carlos repeatedly sees in his imagination what is happening to his wife and daughter (who is also taken in the wake of the performance of Names), including seeing them being tortured, raped, and, in the case of Teresa, eventually murdered. Benn recounts his heartache each time Carlos asks an acquaintance to tell him about what happened to Cecilia, and later Teresa, partially because of the pain it causes Carlos to see with his imaginative gift what they are suffering, but more because he wishes that Carlos would simply accept reality, namely that they are dead. Even after he sees Teresa’s death in his mind’s eye, Carlos repeatedly goes out to find Cecilia, refusing to accept the version of reality that even his friends would have him believe. After Teresa’s abduction, Carlos follows General Guzman to his house, intending to kill him, until Guzman’s daughter comes outside and Carlos finds himself unable to fire; he later reflects to Benn that, “Everything he [Guzman] sees is small, distorted by his preconceptions…He could never comprehend that my stories are more dangerous to him than the Mannlicher, my words more explosive than bombs planted in the Casa Rosada.” (Thornton 136)
Thornton writes about the willful amnesia that appears as the regime in the book is losing its power; the generals themselves tried to disappear, while simultaneously leaving in their wake the message, “It never happened.” (Thornton 191) Unlike the meticulous record-keeping of the Nazis, the generals in Argentina worked to completely efface, not only their crimes, but the very existence of those whom they had disappeared. No such person ever existed to have been taken, tortured, killed. Faced with the reality that, “It’s only a matter of time before there’s silence in Buenos Aires, in all of Argentina, before the records are shredded, before the bodies are buried too deep to find,” (Thornton 197) Carlos steps up the sessions in his garden, knowing that to not bring his new power of imagination would be to allow the imagination of the generals to win. Such was the same logic of the Madres: by marching with signs with the names and pictures of their children, they resisted the fiction that would deny that their children ever existed. Nevertheless, such testimony retains at best an elusive hold on truth. As Robert Jay Lifton points out, “Hannah Arendt, discussing official deceptions revealed in the Pentagon Papers, emphasizes the ‘fragility’ of ‘factual truths,’ their dependence upon ‘testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses.’” (Lifton 360) Cecilia, for example, despite being deprived of means of writing down the story she was experiencing, made use of the swirling patterns etched into the plaster of her walls as mnemonic devices to remember her story (which she eventually collected in a book called, appropriately, The Wall), in a way reminiscent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
Cavanaugh comments, “Confronted with evidence of the miraculous, Carlos’s friends nevertheless remain skeptical, convinced that Carlos cannot confront tanks with stories, helicopters with mere imagination. They can only see the conflict in terms of fantasy versus reality. Carlos, on the other hand, rightly grasps that the contest is not between imagination and the real, but between two types of imagination, that of the generals and that of their opponents.” (Cavanaugh 278) Whereas his friends see imagination as fantasy, the generals themselves know the power of that kind of alternative rendering of reality, even as they are unable to admit their fear as such to one another: “it is inconceivable that a general, or a ranking member of his staff, would admit to colleagues that he was afraid of a storyteller.” (Thornton 162) However, like J. Edgar Hoover’s ironic comment that Martin Luther King was “the most dangerous man in America,” (ironic because Hoover thought King was a communist, whereas King’s truly prophetic imagination was indeed more dangerous than any amount of armed force that could have been brought to bear on American power structures at the time) the power to reclaim reality by speech, which can be misunderstood as mere skill at making rhyme schemes, authorizes living in a different way. It is for this reason that Yale theologian and torture survivor Miroslav Volf argues, “in order to expose crimes and fight political oppression, many writers, artists and thinkers have become soldiers of memory.” (Volf 18) Following Teresa’s death, Carlos notes that the generals “assumed I would follow Teresa into the whiteness, give up on myself as well as Cecilia, and they were very close to being right. But as I was thinking about letting myself go I understood that Cecilia would drown too, that she lived only because I remained to know she lived.” (Thornton 172) This hope keeps Carlos alive, when the fiction of the generals tells him to give in to grief and take his own life; despite all odds, it eventually culminates in Cecilia’s escape and return to him.
Historically, the estimate is that roughly 30,000 people, mostly trade-unionists, students, and activists were disappeared during the dirty war, which the government euphemistically called the “National Reorganization Process,” and which lasted from roughly 1976 until 1983. Whatever the book’s historical inaccuracies may or may not have been, (Thornton is neither a historian nor an Argentine) Thornton communicates something of the nature of living inside a truncated imagination, as most of Argentina did. Although many of them were assaulted, arrested, and even disappeared, the Madres, who continue to exist to this day, were one of the few groups who “successfully countered the military’s calculation that if the terror was absolute enough, no one would dare to complain.” (Sharp 221) The Madres continued to march with signs showing the names and faces of disappeared loved ones until 2006, at which point they said that the government was no longer an enemy, no longer opposing their efforts to find their loved ones.
The scenes in this book that were most horrible to me as the reader were those in which Carlos is forced to see the repeated torture and rape of his wife and his daughter, to know his powerlessness to stop it and the feelings that would accompany such a reality. Is his use of his imaginative gift the appropriate response? Should the sword have joined to the spoken word in efforts to stop the generals’ imagination, even if it would have ended with Carlos sharing the fate of so many of his fellow citizens? Despite having himself been assaulted on several occasions, despite the contemptuous attitude with which Guzman exits the courtroom in which he is eventually found guilty of crimes against humanity, Carlos realized in that moment when the crosshairs of his rifle converged not only on Guzman but on his daughter that to kill Guzman would have made Guzman’s imagination correct; as he puts it, “the bullet would have sent me into exile and silence.” (Thornton 137) However, even though the closing chapter of the book does fast-forward several years after Cecilia’s return, to show the downfall of the generals, it does not linger on the effects on Cecilia of her captivity. Does she ever wake up screaming, feeling the soldiers’ hands on her body, or listening to her daughter scream for mercy? After months or years of captivity and abuse, how damaged is her psyche? Is forgiveness possible? Can she live her life without being consumed by the enormity of trauma she endured? It is one thing to say, as does Walter Wink, “The enemy too believes he or she is in the right, and fears us, because we represent a threat against his or her values, lifestyle, or affluence. When we demonize our enemies, calling them names and identifying then with absolute evil, we deny that they have that of God within them that makes transformation possible.” (Wink 59) It is another to think about the cost to sufferers, to think of the contemptuousness of torturers even when presented with all the evidence of their wrongdoing.
In that vein, psychologist Jordan Peterson talks about a fellow therapist who works with women who have suffered horrific trauma: rape, abuse, torture. Those women who were able to most fully enter in their imaginations into their experiences of trauma, who felt the pain and indignation most completely, got better faster and stayed better longer. Why? Peterson argues that this model of therapy is built on the premise that coming into contact with that which is most terrifying, not running away from it, demonstrates that we can encounter that which frightens us most and not be destroyed; in effect, we can reclaim those lacunae in our “maps of meaning”; even if they remain unfathomable evil, they don’t reduce us to inarticulacy about our own lives. However, it is precisely the effect of torture, says Elaine Scarry, to “unmake” the world: to render the sufferer inarticulate, to shatter the sufferer’s matrix of a coherent world, and, given the unique ability of pain to defy explanation, to deprive them of the ability to describe their experiences.
How, then, does this book and its model of imagination and hope speak to the task of peacemaking? In one way, it clarifies just how painful and tenuous a task peacemaking is: we can get lost in examples of peacemaking that, despite the sufferings of those who participate, make it seem almost “majestic,” to use the term that Martin King used to describe the struggle in Birmingham. Certainly it was atrocious, we say, but it can almost seem to be a mathematical formula: acceptance of suffering leads to the consciences of the oppressors to be stung by seeing the suffering they inflict on the innocent, and the oppressed are upheld as paragons of virtue and selflessness. There is no such formula here: a mother, herself subject to serial rape, is forced to choose which soldier in a group will be the first to rape her daughter, and then forced to listen to it all happen. Those soldiers remain contemptuous, unharmed by guilt, to the very end, while the mother survives but faces a lifetime of trauma, guilt, and terror.
On the other hand, however, the story reinforces the urgency of hope: partially in Wink and King’s sense of the word, that even the most vicious opponents have within them a shred of humanity that contains the seeds of conversion, but also hope in God’s power to make happen more than we are capable of seeing from where we are. This is an awful hope, one that must say that, while everything may well not work out for me, that I may suffer to death, or worse, be left alive to suffer under decades of pain and trauma, hope is still authorized, is in fact essential, for a bigger picture than my own small life.
Similarly, the book points to the need to continually rehumanize those whom oppressors would rather see dehumanized (to justify their violence) or made invisible (to deny their violence ever happened), and the place of the media in fostering the illusion or piercing it with truth. Much of the furor in the book was over the silencing of dissent, often in the form of mass media and artistic expression: critical editorials, dramatic productions in the theater where Carlos worked, intellectuals or students saying the wrong thing. Some people were silent out of fear, while others did so out of ideology, but Thornton’s central point throughout remains consistent: the pen, and by extension the imagination, is genuinely mightier than the sword.
Works Cited
Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. 2nd Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.
---. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.
Cavanaugh, William T. Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ.
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.
Sharp, Gene. Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential. Boston: Extending Horizons Books, 2005.
Thornton, Lawrence. Imagining Argentina. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
Volf, Miroslav. The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 2006.
Wink, Walter. Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
teacher vs master
Tonight was the last hall mass of the school year that our regular presider, Fr. Wayne Hellmann, OFM Conv., can attend; we will do mass next week, but we'll have another priest come in for that one evening because he'll be at a conference. Anyway, he and I alternate preaching; one week he gives a homily, the next I do a little reflection. I put a lot of work into the things I come up with, and I pepper them with quotes from theologians, Merton, whoever, and they're ok, I suppose. Fr. Hellmann, on the other hand, speaks extemporaneously, and it is clear that he is a scholar's scholar (he brings in a lot of Francis of Assisi and Bonaventure, two people on whom he is an expert), but even when what he says is earthy, simple stuff, there's a clear difference between my reflections and his homilies. That's the difference between a teacher and a master: I try to make it pertinent and give people something to take away that can feed them, maybe give them something new to think about, but when he talks, it's clear that he is a real master of the tradition. He is full of energy when he preaches, and it's contagious; he does more than just engage our minds (although he does that too); he draws us into sharing his sense of wonder at the richness of God, and that's a gift.
I'm in the middle of reading Lawrence Thornton's book Imagining Argentina at the moment, a book that Walter Brueggemann, my old professor and mentor, mentions in the beginning of his phenomenal little book The Prophetic Imagination. In brief, it is set during the "dirty war" in Argentina, in the 1970s. A man finds himself with a gift for imagination, to see what has happened to those who have been disappeared by the goon squads, and what he imagines comes to be. He can't control it, but things in his imagination that are seemingly impossible in fact come to pass. The mythic framework is something like this: there are two Argentinas, that of the generals, and that which the people carry in their hearts, and their imaginations are in conflict, and the imagination of the people has to be stronger than that of the government. It isn't imagination as fantasy, but imagination as the capacity to picture alternative ways of existing -- it doesn't have to be like this, it shouldn't be like this, and we can create a vision of reality that is other than what they are telling us it has to be like. It is a compelling story, as much for that mythic model of imagination as for the story itself, and the spirit of that kind of imagination runs through Brueggemann's writings.
Lastly, I just started a little book by Robert Waldron called Thomas Merton: Master of Attention, the basic premise of which is that Merton cultivated attentiveness to beauty, to the present moment, as a pillar of his interior life. I'm not very far in it yet, but it so far is compelling, using a lot of stuff from Simone Weil as well as Merton. A couple of days ago I spent a little time outside on a bench, and reading led me into contemplation -- one of those books that you read for a few pages and put down, not because it isn't good, but because it creates a contemplative spirit that lends itself to being read slowly and leading into prayer itself. He quotes Cistercian Michael Casey: "Lectio divina is like reading poetry: we need to slow down, to savor what we read, and to allow the text to trigger memories and associations that reside below the threshold of awareness." (29) Nice. I'm looking forward to having the time to do that, to not just have to plow through readings for the sake of product.
I'm in the middle of reading Lawrence Thornton's book Imagining Argentina at the moment, a book that Walter Brueggemann, my old professor and mentor, mentions in the beginning of his phenomenal little book The Prophetic Imagination. In brief, it is set during the "dirty war" in Argentina, in the 1970s. A man finds himself with a gift for imagination, to see what has happened to those who have been disappeared by the goon squads, and what he imagines comes to be. He can't control it, but things in his imagination that are seemingly impossible in fact come to pass. The mythic framework is something like this: there are two Argentinas, that of the generals, and that which the people carry in their hearts, and their imaginations are in conflict, and the imagination of the people has to be stronger than that of the government. It isn't imagination as fantasy, but imagination as the capacity to picture alternative ways of existing -- it doesn't have to be like this, it shouldn't be like this, and we can create a vision of reality that is other than what they are telling us it has to be like. It is a compelling story, as much for that mythic model of imagination as for the story itself, and the spirit of that kind of imagination runs through Brueggemann's writings.
Lastly, I just started a little book by Robert Waldron called Thomas Merton: Master of Attention, the basic premise of which is that Merton cultivated attentiveness to beauty, to the present moment, as a pillar of his interior life. I'm not very far in it yet, but it so far is compelling, using a lot of stuff from Simone Weil as well as Merton. A couple of days ago I spent a little time outside on a bench, and reading led me into contemplation -- one of those books that you read for a few pages and put down, not because it isn't good, but because it creates a contemplative spirit that lends itself to being read slowly and leading into prayer itself. He quotes Cistercian Michael Casey: "Lectio divina is like reading poetry: we need to slow down, to savor what we read, and to allow the text to trigger memories and associations that reside below the threshold of awareness." (29) Nice. I'm looking forward to having the time to do that, to not just have to plow through readings for the sake of product.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
a quick note or two...
OK, I know I have a lot of stuff to cover, because I have been buried under work and school for a few weeks now, but I have to start out with one of those funny teacher stories that you sometimes get in the email. In my intro theology class a few weeks ago, we had been talking about the Battle of Milvian Bridge and how the sign of Christ became a symbol of military victory, and how within the next few centuries, images of Christ in art started to depict Jesus in Roman garb, holding the accoutrements of power. On the test, one of the students put, “the image of Christ did empirically change after the battle.” Ha!
What else? So much stuff going on of late. All the mob violence in Haiti has forced us to change our plans and go with El Salvador; that’s fine with me, and the organization who is putting together our trip (International Partners in Mission) really has its act together, but switching plane tickets, dealing with students who want to back out, and so on is a real headache. I can’t complain because it’s not me handling all those details, but I feel like I’m in the hotseat with my boss because this is costing her so much energy (and more money than we had hoped).
Yesterday was the conclusion of Iran Aware Week, sponsored by Pax Christi to bring up issues concerning the current escalation with Iran, and they held a panel looking at warfare in a few of the world religions. I did the one on Buddhism, and Doc Winright, one of the profs in the theology department, did the one on Christianity. I’ve got a gigantic paper that I’ve been working on for a while, so putting together the presentation made me a little nervous just because of the time commitment (which is partially why I haven’t been on this blog in a while, but it felt good to get back to doing something on nonviolence instead of just plowing through all of the systematics stuff I’ve been reading for the past month or so.
On another note, it has finally gotten warm enough to want to be outside, and it has stayed that way for more than 24 hours. I finally bit the bullet and got a bicycle – all last year I had used one that belonged to one of the Marianists, but it didn’t really fit me well, so now I’ve been using it to get to and from work just about every day. The fact that gas is around $3.50 per gallon helps make that decision a little easier…
Has it really been two months since I have put anything on this blog? Good grief. I need to get my head out of the books a little more often.
What else? So much stuff going on of late. All the mob violence in Haiti has forced us to change our plans and go with El Salvador; that’s fine with me, and the organization who is putting together our trip (International Partners in Mission) really has its act together, but switching plane tickets, dealing with students who want to back out, and so on is a real headache. I can’t complain because it’s not me handling all those details, but I feel like I’m in the hotseat with my boss because this is costing her so much energy (and more money than we had hoped).
Yesterday was the conclusion of Iran Aware Week, sponsored by Pax Christi to bring up issues concerning the current escalation with Iran, and they held a panel looking at warfare in a few of the world religions. I did the one on Buddhism, and Doc Winright, one of the profs in the theology department, did the one on Christianity. I’ve got a gigantic paper that I’ve been working on for a while, so putting together the presentation made me a little nervous just because of the time commitment (which is partially why I haven’t been on this blog in a while, but it felt good to get back to doing something on nonviolence instead of just plowing through all of the systematics stuff I’ve been reading for the past month or so.
On another note, it has finally gotten warm enough to want to be outside, and it has stayed that way for more than 24 hours. I finally bit the bullet and got a bicycle – all last year I had used one that belonged to one of the Marianists, but it didn’t really fit me well, so now I’ve been using it to get to and from work just about every day. The fact that gas is around $3.50 per gallon helps make that decision a little easier…
Has it really been two months since I have put anything on this blog? Good grief. I need to get my head out of the books a little more often.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Reflection for 24 February 2008 (third Sunday in Lent)
Last summer I spent 3 weeks in Haiti, and we lost running water for days at a time, so we had to carry buckets of water up to our house from a well. The first time it was novel, like I was really “roughing it,” but the coolness quickly wore off: we couldn’t take a shower, and even trivial things like washing clothes or flushing a toilet involved going down 5 flights of stairs to street level to get water and then coming back again, sometimes several times. On another occasion we ran out of bottled water, which was worse because then we literally had nothing to drink until we could go out and get more (the tap water in Haiti is not safe to drink), and even if that were only a few hours, in a hot climate like Haiti, it could seem like an eternity. Those two simple experiences brought home to me how important water is, and how terrible thirst can be. Part of me wants to dismiss the Israelites for so quickly complaining about wanting water, even after all the miracles they had seen from God, but then I remember how being thirsty feels. Part of me wants the woman at the well to ask Jesus better questions, but then I think about what it would entail to have to carry water every day, and what a dream it would be for a woman in her situation to never have to do so again.
We know how much misery exists in the world: hunger, disease, lack of potable water, inadequate housing, and on and on. With so many people lacking sufficient access to the basic goods necessary to sustain life, we can think that our task goes no further than meeting those needs. Important though it is to meet those needs, however, we know well that even people who have a surplus of material goods can still lack something fundamental to authentic human existence: hope, meaning, compassion. “We boast in hope of the glory of God,” says Paul in the second reading, despite all the physical sufferings he has endured in his travels – his life is valuated by something apart from simply meeting physical needs, by the hope of newness coming in Christ.
My theology 100 class is reading Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild, which looks at a well-off young man who gave up all his possessions after graduating from college and spent the next two years on the road, finally dying of starvation in a remote area in Alaska. Why would anyone give up a life in which all of the physical necessities were met (and then some) in exchange for a life of hunger and uncertainty? What could be “out there” to be found that is worth risking one’s life for, that is worth giving one’s life for? He realized that as terrible as hunger and thirst can be (and it can be truly terrible), to ignore or bury one’s hunger and thirst for truth, for authenticity as a tragedy in its own right, regardless of one’s physical state of being. While the protagonist of Krakauer’s book would not have used theological language to discuss it, we see in the pursuit of that ultimate, transcendent horizon a thirst for the “living water” that Jesus offers the woman in today’s gospel, “welling up to eternal life.” In his newest encyclical letter, “Spe Salvi,” Pope Benedict XVI speaks of this “eternal life” as “the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality…like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.” It is this to which Jesus invites the woman at the well, this of which Paul speaks to the Romans, this for which we continue to thirst in our own lives.
We know how much misery exists in the world: hunger, disease, lack of potable water, inadequate housing, and on and on. With so many people lacking sufficient access to the basic goods necessary to sustain life, we can think that our task goes no further than meeting those needs. Important though it is to meet those needs, however, we know well that even people who have a surplus of material goods can still lack something fundamental to authentic human existence: hope, meaning, compassion. “We boast in hope of the glory of God,” says Paul in the second reading, despite all the physical sufferings he has endured in his travels – his life is valuated by something apart from simply meeting physical needs, by the hope of newness coming in Christ.
My theology 100 class is reading Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild, which looks at a well-off young man who gave up all his possessions after graduating from college and spent the next two years on the road, finally dying of starvation in a remote area in Alaska. Why would anyone give up a life in which all of the physical necessities were met (and then some) in exchange for a life of hunger and uncertainty? What could be “out there” to be found that is worth risking one’s life for, that is worth giving one’s life for? He realized that as terrible as hunger and thirst can be (and it can be truly terrible), to ignore or bury one’s hunger and thirst for truth, for authenticity as a tragedy in its own right, regardless of one’s physical state of being. While the protagonist of Krakauer’s book would not have used theological language to discuss it, we see in the pursuit of that ultimate, transcendent horizon a thirst for the “living water” that Jesus offers the woman in today’s gospel, “welling up to eternal life.” In his newest encyclical letter, “Spe Salvi,” Pope Benedict XVI speaks of this “eternal life” as “the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality…like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.” It is this to which Jesus invites the woman at the well, this of which Paul speaks to the Romans, this for which we continue to thirst in our own lives.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Reflection for 17 February 2008 (second Sunday in Lent)
We tend to think of Lent only as it applies to paving the way for Easter, and insofar as it does prepare us for Easter, great, but the danger is that we focus to simplistically on the glory of the resurrection and too easily think that everything has been accomplished. Lent does prepare us for Easter, of course, but it also should prepare us for real life, which is so often marked not by glory, but by grief, loss, and suffering which seem not to be vindicated in any way that we can readily discern. Whatever we can say theologically about the meaning of the resurrection as a key to transforming suffering and death, we can’t claim that it has done away with either one, so insofar as salvation is an integration and reconciliation of every aspect of alienation, and not just something that happens when we die, the work of salvation continues, and we have a place in it. Paul brings out the paradox in 2 Timothy: he begins by urging the reader to bear suffering well, but then concludes by pointing out that Christ has destroyed death and brought life. What can that mean? If death is overcome, what are we to say about its continued existence?
In the first reading, Abram gets a taste of the glory to come: he will become the ancestor of a great nation, people will use his memory to invoke blessing. It all seems like a pretty good deal, and it indeed comes to pass, but we know how the story carries on after this initial encounter: decades of waiting, wondering, hoping, eventually experiencing the joy of having a son (Ishmael) with Hagar, and later Isaac with Sarah, only to see those hopes dashed when Hagar and Ishmael are banished and God demands the sacrifice of Isaac, which involves the threat not only of losing a child, which is horrible enough, but seeming abandonment by the God who had so long ago promised Abraham a future. There is a lot of anguish to go through before Abraham’s faith is vindicated, and he doesn’t even live to see the “great nation” that will eventually claim him as their ancestor.
The gospel, the story of the Transfiguration, does just about the same thing: it gives the disciples a taste of the glory to come, while not allowing them to get too comfortable there. This text falls immediately after Jesus has told the disciples that he would go to Jerusalem to suffer and die and rise, and Peter isn’t having any of it. After all of this unpleasant and unexpected stuff, this is a welcome change, and what they had been expecting all along: we’ve backed the right horse, and it seems that we’re going to win even more glory than we had expected, since Jesus is important enough to stand in the company of Moses and Elijah. Peter likes this version of the story so much that he wants to put up tents and stay a while, because otherwise Jesus might get back to telling them that suffering is on the way. When the voice of God chimes in, it is the first time since Jesus’ baptism, and God says the same thing as at the baptism: this is my beloved Son. It adds the “listen to him” part to make clear that Jesus is not just playing an unfunny prank on the disciples: whatever the Transfiguration has to say about the end of the story, it is not how the next few acts are going to unfold. Instead, perhaps it is just enough of a hint of glory to keep them in the game long enough to face the reversals that are to come. As with God’s promise early on to Abraham, if they only knew what was yet to come, perhaps they would have opted out of the whole thing. You can’t handle it all at once, God says, so let me give you a peek at the back of the book so you don’t panic. Maybe that’s something to keep in mind with the responsorial psalm for today: “Lord, let your mercy be upon us, as we place our trust in you”: Go easy on us, Lord, when we can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel of hardship and pain.
In the first reading, Abram gets a taste of the glory to come: he will become the ancestor of a great nation, people will use his memory to invoke blessing. It all seems like a pretty good deal, and it indeed comes to pass, but we know how the story carries on after this initial encounter: decades of waiting, wondering, hoping, eventually experiencing the joy of having a son (Ishmael) with Hagar, and later Isaac with Sarah, only to see those hopes dashed when Hagar and Ishmael are banished and God demands the sacrifice of Isaac, which involves the threat not only of losing a child, which is horrible enough, but seeming abandonment by the God who had so long ago promised Abraham a future. There is a lot of anguish to go through before Abraham’s faith is vindicated, and he doesn’t even live to see the “great nation” that will eventually claim him as their ancestor.
The gospel, the story of the Transfiguration, does just about the same thing: it gives the disciples a taste of the glory to come, while not allowing them to get too comfortable there. This text falls immediately after Jesus has told the disciples that he would go to Jerusalem to suffer and die and rise, and Peter isn’t having any of it. After all of this unpleasant and unexpected stuff, this is a welcome change, and what they had been expecting all along: we’ve backed the right horse, and it seems that we’re going to win even more glory than we had expected, since Jesus is important enough to stand in the company of Moses and Elijah. Peter likes this version of the story so much that he wants to put up tents and stay a while, because otherwise Jesus might get back to telling them that suffering is on the way. When the voice of God chimes in, it is the first time since Jesus’ baptism, and God says the same thing as at the baptism: this is my beloved Son. It adds the “listen to him” part to make clear that Jesus is not just playing an unfunny prank on the disciples: whatever the Transfiguration has to say about the end of the story, it is not how the next few acts are going to unfold. Instead, perhaps it is just enough of a hint of glory to keep them in the game long enough to face the reversals that are to come. As with God’s promise early on to Abraham, if they only knew what was yet to come, perhaps they would have opted out of the whole thing. You can’t handle it all at once, God says, so let me give you a peek at the back of the book so you don’t panic. Maybe that’s something to keep in mind with the responsorial psalm for today: “Lord, let your mercy be upon us, as we place our trust in you”: Go easy on us, Lord, when we can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel of hardship and pain.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Reflection for 10 February 2008 (first Sunday in Lent)
Reflection for 10 February 2008 (first Sunday in Lent)
Again and again in the readings for this past week we heard calls to change our hearts, to cut through whatever system allows us to substitute “doing it right” and feeling justified about it in place of the proper response, which is extending to others the boundless mercy we have received. “Rend your hearts, not your garments,” says the prophet Joel, (2:13) while Isaiah criticizes the people for allowing their fasts to degenerate into legalistic attempts at controlling God while not breaking through to the justice that is the legitimate aim of the fasts. “This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke.” (58:6) Jesus warns his disciples against doing even good things for the wrong reasons: don’t bother to give alms, or fast, or pray if all that it will do is give your ego something to hang its hat on, some way to feel “justified” before God, to feel good about yourself, to make other people think more of you.
The readings for today compare the way of life that has prevailed from the beginning of time with the new way of living that Jesus exemplifies. The man and the woman in GN 2 were created to live in immediacy to God, “naked,” as it were, with nothing to prove, no ego to defend, no need for any further identity than the only true identity they had – who they were in God, that is, beloved son and daughter, made in the very image of God. The “fall” into sin was at once an “ascent” into knowledge, but with it came the loss of that cosmic humility that engendered naked immediacy toward God and toward one another, so it also entailed the need to hide the parts of ourselves we aren’t proud of, to create identities for our egos to hang on to, whether the identities of “success,” popularity, power over other people, religiosity, degrees earned, or anything else that would name us apart from our true identity – the simple, unadorned self that we are in God.
Jesus was tempted by all that same falsity: “If you are the Son of God,” says the tempter over and over, then it’s all about you, but Jesus makes clear that to be the child of God is to be centered upon God, not using God as an excuse to center upon ourselves. We see it in today’s gospel: the temptation to use his power for himself, to garner cheap popularity with a magic trick on top of the temple, to “sell his soul,” that is, to forego his stance of total self-giving to God, for the sake of power. I can imagine the tempter urging Jesus, “Think of all the people you could help with all this power, all the laws you could pass to help the poor, all the good things you could do.” However, it would still make the “you” the center of the equation, instead of making him transparent to the will of God. The pattern set from the beginning of human history, a pattern that places me at the center of every equation, is now reversed by the pattern of Jesus, the new man, the new model of authentic humanity, who made himself transparent to the will of God.
Again and again in the readings for this past week we heard calls to change our hearts, to cut through whatever system allows us to substitute “doing it right” and feeling justified about it in place of the proper response, which is extending to others the boundless mercy we have received. “Rend your hearts, not your garments,” says the prophet Joel, (2:13) while Isaiah criticizes the people for allowing their fasts to degenerate into legalistic attempts at controlling God while not breaking through to the justice that is the legitimate aim of the fasts. “This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke.” (58:6) Jesus warns his disciples against doing even good things for the wrong reasons: don’t bother to give alms, or fast, or pray if all that it will do is give your ego something to hang its hat on, some way to feel “justified” before God, to feel good about yourself, to make other people think more of you.
The readings for today compare the way of life that has prevailed from the beginning of time with the new way of living that Jesus exemplifies. The man and the woman in GN 2 were created to live in immediacy to God, “naked,” as it were, with nothing to prove, no ego to defend, no need for any further identity than the only true identity they had – who they were in God, that is, beloved son and daughter, made in the very image of God. The “fall” into sin was at once an “ascent” into knowledge, but with it came the loss of that cosmic humility that engendered naked immediacy toward God and toward one another, so it also entailed the need to hide the parts of ourselves we aren’t proud of, to create identities for our egos to hang on to, whether the identities of “success,” popularity, power over other people, religiosity, degrees earned, or anything else that would name us apart from our true identity – the simple, unadorned self that we are in God.
Jesus was tempted by all that same falsity: “If you are the Son of God,” says the tempter over and over, then it’s all about you, but Jesus makes clear that to be the child of God is to be centered upon God, not using God as an excuse to center upon ourselves. We see it in today’s gospel: the temptation to use his power for himself, to garner cheap popularity with a magic trick on top of the temple, to “sell his soul,” that is, to forego his stance of total self-giving to God, for the sake of power. I can imagine the tempter urging Jesus, “Think of all the people you could help with all this power, all the laws you could pass to help the poor, all the good things you could do.” However, it would still make the “you” the center of the equation, instead of making him transparent to the will of God. The pattern set from the beginning of human history, a pattern that places me at the center of every equation, is now reversed by the pattern of Jesus, the new man, the new model of authentic humanity, who made himself transparent to the will of God.
Reflection for 7 February 2008
Reflection for 7 February 2008
Every Lent it usually takes me a few days to make the mental transition to remembering to do the “Glory and praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ,” as opposed to "the A-word" (heh) before the gospel, but perhaps it is good to recall just how paradoxical those words are as we begin Lent. Our image of Jesus tends to spend a lot of energy on the glory and the praise, I think, and if we were to ask why that is so, perhaps we just jump to the easy answer, “Because he’s God,” never mind the linguistic difficulties of such an undialectical statement (see Rahner’s article to that effect). But the gospel today should radically critique our usual notions of glory: when Jesus says, “The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised,” it passes us right by because we know the story. If you read around this passage, though, it’s quite clear that it is a huge scandal for the disciples; it doesn’t make any sense, I presume because they believed that Jesus was the kind of Messiah that lots of other Jews of the time were expecting (and the kind we would want if we were in the situation of occupation and oppression that they were facing): a warrior, a king, in short, a butt-kicker against Rome.
I went to see the musical Jesus Christ Superstar last weekend, and in it there is a scene in which after Simon tries to get Jesus to whip the adoring crowds up into frenzy against Rome, sings:
“Neither you Simon, nor the fifty thousand
Nor the Romans, nor the Jews
Nor Judas, nor the twelve
Nor the priests, nor the scribes
Nor doomed Jerusalem itself
Understand what power is
Understand what glory is
Understand at all”
It’s a touching scene, countering the energy and movement of the crowd with the still voice of Jesus, but it shows insight into the paradox of glory that Merton writes about in his prose poem, “Hagia Sophia,” in which the She is Sophia (Holy Wisdom), and He is Christ:
“She crowns Him not with what is glorious, but with what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty.”
Perhaps in addition to the usual slate of penance-type activities this Lent, going down into the soil of these kinds of paradoxes is a good thing to spend some time with for the next 40 days.
Every Lent it usually takes me a few days to make the mental transition to remembering to do the “Glory and praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ,” as opposed to "the A-word" (heh) before the gospel, but perhaps it is good to recall just how paradoxical those words are as we begin Lent. Our image of Jesus tends to spend a lot of energy on the glory and the praise, I think, and if we were to ask why that is so, perhaps we just jump to the easy answer, “Because he’s God,” never mind the linguistic difficulties of such an undialectical statement (see Rahner’s article to that effect). But the gospel today should radically critique our usual notions of glory: when Jesus says, “The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised,” it passes us right by because we know the story. If you read around this passage, though, it’s quite clear that it is a huge scandal for the disciples; it doesn’t make any sense, I presume because they believed that Jesus was the kind of Messiah that lots of other Jews of the time were expecting (and the kind we would want if we were in the situation of occupation and oppression that they were facing): a warrior, a king, in short, a butt-kicker against Rome.
I went to see the musical Jesus Christ Superstar last weekend, and in it there is a scene in which after Simon tries to get Jesus to whip the adoring crowds up into frenzy against Rome, sings:
“Neither you Simon, nor the fifty thousand
Nor the Romans, nor the Jews
Nor Judas, nor the twelve
Nor the priests, nor the scribes
Nor doomed Jerusalem itself
Understand what power is
Understand what glory is
Understand at all”
It’s a touching scene, countering the energy and movement of the crowd with the still voice of Jesus, but it shows insight into the paradox of glory that Merton writes about in his prose poem, “Hagia Sophia,” in which the She is Sophia (Holy Wisdom), and He is Christ:
“She crowns Him not with what is glorious, but with what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty.”
Perhaps in addition to the usual slate of penance-type activities this Lent, going down into the soil of these kinds of paradoxes is a good thing to spend some time with for the next 40 days.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
too busy...
It's just ridiculous that I haven't posted in this long, dang it...It isn't like there hasn't been anything going on to talk about. 
Anyway, a really good retreat. Just after that, classes started back, and this time around I've got an intro theology class: 30 freshmen, quite different from the 8 upperclassmen I had last semester, but still I think it's in good shape. We've spent our time so far doing the usual introductory stuff, including a bit on Catholic Biblical interpretation, and working through GN 1-3 (my 3 favorite chapters of the whole Bible, I think, so I've spent a little extra time with them).
Plenty more stuff going on, including a couple of paper proposals I'm putting out there: one for the Notre Dame Peace Conference, which I attended last year, and one for the 2009 Merton Society conference. I also finally met tonight with the students who are going to Haiti with me in June and met the students from Habitat for Humanity who are going to New Orleans with me at Spring Break. Oh, I was also finally able to participate in a sweatlodge that some people around here offer once a month. A deep ritual, one I had been missing the past few years since I left Arizona, and one I intend to keep doing. I wrote a paper last semester on an anthropological consideration of baptism and the sweat lodge, but it's probably too much to put on this blog. Needless to say, it remains an area of interest because I am so convinced that baptism when it is done right can be amazingly potent as a ritual, and I know from firsthand experience how rich the lodge can be. More soon, hopefully not a month and a half this time...
So, in my last post, I mentioned the Ignatian Retreat. I think that of all the retreats that we offer at SLU, this is my favorite. Lots of open time, plenty of space to walk around, and you get past all the usual retreat fare, the icebreaker-small group-game playing stuff that can be fun in small doses but that gets old fast. We went out to a retreat center run by an Episcopal church in Illinois, and it was great: cold cold, but with a couple of big fireplaces that became focal points for people all weekend, partly because it was so cold, partly because fire is just hypnotizing. Here are a couple of pictures, which really don't represent the retreat because I didn't want to take pictures of people during a silent retreat -- it didn't seem like it would be in the spirit of the thing.
Anyway, a really good retreat. Just after that, classes started back, and this time around I've got an intro theology class: 30 freshmen, quite different from the 8 upperclassmen I had last semester, but still I think it's in good shape. We've spent our time so far doing the usual introductory stuff, including a bit on Catholic Biblical interpretation, and working through GN 1-3 (my 3 favorite chapters of the whole Bible, I think, so I've spent a little extra time with them).I'm also working on vocation week in campus ministry, which is next week (and which is tough because so many vocation directors want to get in on it, you end up with more of them than students -- what I call the "feeding frenzy" model of vocation ministry -- yeesh. For Lent this year, I also pitched the idea of offering a couple of overnight getaways for students, what we are now calling "midweek escapes" -- after classes on a Wednesday, go to the university's retreat center, which is just off campus, feed the students, give them a little talk on entering silence, and then just leave them alone until the next morning, when we feed them and bring them back to campus. It sounds really simple, and it is, but my idea was to enable students to create some psychic distance from campus and quiet down. We're offering two this year, but we'll see if it goes anywhere.
Last night I took the Micahs to the ceramics studio, which I did last year as well, to hopefully encourage the doing of theology with the right side of the brain -- making symbols, making meaning. It was one of the favorite activities last year, and it seemed to be equally popular this time. We'll go back in a couple of weeks to glaze the pieces they made.
Plenty more stuff going on, including a couple of paper proposals I'm putting out there: one for the Notre Dame Peace Conference, which I attended last year, and one for the 2009 Merton Society conference. I also finally met tonight with the students who are going to Haiti with me in June and met the students from Habitat for Humanity who are going to New Orleans with me at Spring Break. Oh, I was also finally able to participate in a sweatlodge that some people around here offer once a month. A deep ritual, one I had been missing the past few years since I left Arizona, and one I intend to keep doing. I wrote a paper last semester on an anthropological consideration of baptism and the sweat lodge, but it's probably too much to put on this blog. Needless to say, it remains an area of interest because I am so convinced that baptism when it is done right can be amazingly potent as a ritual, and I know from firsthand experience how rich the lodge can be. More soon, hopefully not a month and a half this time...Sunday, December 23, 2007
a rerun
Hi all,
I'm back in New Orleans for the moment, visiting friends, Brothers, family. The SLU Ignatian retreat is coming up in a couple of weeks, and I have to prepare a talk on sin, but doing so got me reading back to last year's talk, on the kingdom of God. That thing came before this blog got up and running, so I figured I would do a "rerun," since the television shows seem to be doing the same thing these days. Here goes:
When I was in high school, I was pretty heavily involved in the martial arts, and I thought I was a pretty tough kid. I was strong, I could hit hard, and I figured I knew a lot about fighting. The best lesson I ever learned came one day, though, when we were doing an exhibition at some little county fair type thing. After I did my thing, three good old boys in their 20s (I must have been about 16) came over to me and talking smack for about 5 minutes. I let them say their thing and paw at me without a word, but afterward I felt ashamed for not standing up and letting them have it. I went through the incident a hundred times in the next couple of weeks before I figured out that, had I gone with my impulse to get after it with one or all three of those guys, I would either have gotten my butt kicked or gotten in trouble with the law, or both, just because my ego got bruised by someone questioning how tough I really was. Later on, my teacher told me that the loudest of this trio had come over to him and told him, “I want that guy,” meaning he wanted to have a go at me. “Oh, you can have him, just come on back when we’re finished,” my teacher told him, presumably because he knew the guy was full of hot air. Needless to say, the guy never came back. I spent all that energy, not trying to defend myself from an attack, but defending my ego from an insult from a stranger whose opinion really didn’t matter to me at all. That impromptu test ended up teaching me more than the tests I took for any of those belts, any of the little weekly sparring sessions we would have in class. That was the real beginning of my education; up until that time I had been building the skill to know how to fight guys like those three dudes, but that day I learned a lesson about fighting the need to “prove” how tough I was to myself or anyone else.
In all three synoptics there is also a tradition of Jesus being tested in the desert, but MT and LK expand MK's quickie version into the familiar story of the three tests. In both cases, of course, the tests immediately follow the experience he has at his baptism, namely the experience of being identified as beloved son. The texts say Jesus was driven out into the desert by the Spirit and tempted or tested by the devil, which I think means he had to work through what it could possibly mean to be beloved Son of God. Whether you believe in “the devil” or not, the tests that Jesus undergoes are just the kind of thing that someone with his kind of power HAS to undergo; the person who doesn’t face his/her “demons” of egocentrism will become a manipulator or a tyrant or an eternal adolescent. Did you ever notice that in two out of the three temptations, the tempter starts off with, “If you are the Son of God,…” trying to define for Jesus what being Son of God “should” be about? Jesus passes the tests by refusing to make life secure for himself or use his power for his own benefit. Spiritually, this is right on. For most of us, we would think that to be the Son of God or Daughter of God means having the divine hook-up. If God’s the king, that makes us the prince or princess, and everybody knows how the prince or princess is expected to live. We all know that Paris Hilton has the luxury of acting like a complete juvenile because she can bask in the perks of having a rich father. We also know that simply having power doesn’t make you a hero or even an adult, but whether you use that power for the sake of others, whether you are willing to put yourself on the line.
The first temptation is for Jesus to turn stones to bread after having fasted for a long time. In other words, “if you are the Son of God,” says the tempter, you shouldn’t be hungry, vulnerable, in need. On the contrary, Jesus knows that what it means to be the Son of God is not focusing on his own comfort or his own security, but on “every word that comes from the mouth of God," allowing his consciousness to be transformed for doing the will of God. Second, following MT’s order rather than LK’s, the tempter encourages him to throw himself down from the top of the temple, so everyone can watch as angels catch him, because “if you are the Son of God,” you should be acclaimed, popular, surrounded by crowds cheering your miracles. Sometimes that happens to Jesus, but more often, he is unpopular, rejected, misunderstood. To be the Son of God does not mean gaining cheap popularity through magic or miracles, getting followers who want tricks more than transformation, but being centered enough to deal with failure and unpopularity. The third temptation is perhaps the most insidious – the temptation to gain power by “selling your soul,” that is, selling out on what you know to be right, doing even the right thing, but for the wrong reason. I imagine the tempter telling Jesus, “Think of all the good you could do if you ruled all those kingdoms, all the good laws you could pass and the people you could help” and certainly, a man with Jesus’ intelligence and insight could easily have become a popular, well-respected Pharisee or even a powerful leader of a Zealot movement, a “Messiah” in the military sense that the people expected, had he so chosen. All it would have taken is for Jesus to make himself, not the Kingdom of God, the center of his vision. This is focusing on the ends without regards to the means; when Luke Skywalker asks Yoda if the Dark Side of the Force is stronger, and Yoda replies, “No. Quicker, easier, more seductive,” this is what he is talking about.
What Jesus encounters out there, that I think leads him directly to his vision of the kingdom of God, is one truth repeated in each of the three tests: it isn’t about me. I’m going to say it again because this is about the hardest thing we can hear: My life is not about me. Sure, at one level it is all about me, so that God is more “for me” than I am for myself, but in fact that means that it is about handing myself back over to something much bigger than I, to God’s purposes in the world. To truly be the son of God, the daughter of God, is to be like God, who is absolute self-giving; it is not to cling to the perks of power that come with having connections, or even merely to enjoy the consolation of having a warm-and-fuzzy prayer life. Paul understood that, which is why he incorporated the following early Christian hymn into Philippians 2:
Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:5-11)
What is it, according to this hymn, that leads to Jesus’ glorification as Lord? His self-emptying (the Greek word is kenosis) all the way to death. Unlike the rest of us, who grasp after status and thereby lose it, Jesus doesn’t grasp after it, he lets go of any kind of ego-reinforcement, and paradoxically, that’s what brings him glory. At some instinctive level, we all know that this is how it works: we code it into all of our myths and stories, from lives of the saints right down to comic books. Archbishop Oscar Romero is able to say, “If they kill me, I shall rise in the Salvadoran people,” because his concern for their liberation went all the way to his death. Martin Luther King is upheld because he was more concerned with getting his people to the Promised Land than making sure he got there with them. Spider-Man is revered as a hero by the people of New York because he lays his life on the line for them, because he knows that his power isn’t for him, that “with great power comes great responsibility.” This preoccupation with our own egos is the central struggle of our lives; if you think our focus on self doesn’t run right to our roots, ask yourself this: whenever I look at a photo album, say on Facebook or in a yearbook, whose face do I look for first? It is because it is so difficult to de-center the ego that we prefer to put our heroes on a pedestal, to worship from a distance rather than imitate, to make the cross into a piece of jewelry or a decoration for our walls rather than a pattern for living and dying and rising. The problem is that Jesus says very little about “worship me” and a lot about “follow me,” and following Jesus leads to the cross, where we just can’t bear to go.
So, what does any of this have to do with the kingdom of God? Well, everything. For Ignatius, the Exercises are about following Jesus, and that which we see Jesus doing is announcing and bringing about the kingdom: preaching and healing, healing and preaching. For us to encounter Jesus is to encounter the kingdom of God being made present, like Gandhi’s quote, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” The term “kingdom of God” is code language for the fulfillment of God’s will, for the world to run the way God wants it to run. Jesus tells us as much in the Our Father: “Your kingdom come” – what does that mean? “Your will be done.” It isn’t so much going to heaven (although that's in there) as the coming of heaven to earth. This is why I have never understood it when people say, “Everything happens for a reason.” Seeing genocide, rampant starvation around the world, the global AIDS epidemic or any other horrible reality through that lens would mean that God has written all this awful stuff into some cosmic script for a larger purpose that would allegedly make it ok. No! The very point of the kingdom of God is that things are NOT as they should be, that God’s will is NOT being done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Getting there from here is just as urgent, and just as difficult, as it was in Jesus’ time, because it demands that people de-center their egos and risk change, rejection, death, all of which we avoid at all costs. That is, for God’s kingdom to come, it means that my kingdom, the tower of success and popularity that I dream of creating, may well have to go. We can’t even reduce the kingdom to trying to fix all the problems of the world “out there,” because, to quote Thomas Merton, we first of all recognize that the power of error “was after all not in the city, but in ourselves.” How easily we can do ostensibly good things, helping others, protesting war or fighting unjust conditions out of an unenlightened egocentricity, a smug certitude of our own superiority and righteousness against the warmongers and the overlords, hating the rich rather than loving the poor. Ignatius does not intend for us to become social workers or to create messiah complexes in us, but to be converted to the person and ministry of Jesus as a necessary first step of our own ministries.
Paradoxically, the point of all of this stuff is not to deny who we are; it is, in fact, to bring to bear all the abilities that we have, to become our best selves. We become men and women of the kingdom not by becoming some sort of emotionless robot, not trying to live up to some kind of abstract, “one-size-fits-all” holiness, but by incarnating holiness in the unique mix that we are. The history of Christian holy men and women should make clear that there is no one standard for what we have to do to be holy or to help bring about the kingdom: Mother Teresa cared for the dying, Dorothy Day fed the hungry, Martin King went to jail, Thomas Merton wrote books, Karl Rahner taught theology. There are others, though, that are less “churchy”: Oskar Schindler ran an enamelware factory to protect Jews from execution, Adam Neiman runs a fair trade clothing company, Bill Quigley teaches law students to seek justice rather than manipulate the system, and Jim Deshotels runs a free mobile clinic on the streets of New Orleans. You have something in you that can help others, and at a certain level, it doesn’t much matter whether that something is saving thousands of lives or making a really fine banana cream pie: the point is not to abandon that, but to us it for the center that lies beyond you, instead of using it to make yourself the center. The Hindu tradition puts it this way: “Plunge into the heart of battle and lay your heart at the lotus feet of the Lord.”
It is a really hard balance between using our gifts and letting ourselves shore up our own egos with them. Notice how often throughout the gospels we see Jesus urging people to focus away from whatever would lead them to shore up their egos and find their identity in something other than God: avoid all greed, sell all you have, take up your cross, whoever wishes to be first must be last. Think about it like this: what kind of value would I see in myself if I didn’t “produce” anything, if I weren’t doing something “useful” that gave my ego something to latch onto? This is the real value of the desert for Jesus, I think – it’s like the Buddha under the bo tree, helping him understand that life still goes on just fine without him. I can imagine Jesus in the desert arguing with himself, his ego trying to come up with reasons to leave the desert – there are sick people out there to be healed, there are outcasts to be forgiven, and you’re not helping anyone out here: you aren’t “producing.” Can you hear the insidiousness of this kind of thinking? It leads us to convince ourselves that we are acting nobly, desiring to help others, when in fact we are probably looking to convince ourselves that we are important, we are accomplishing things, so we can feel good about ourselves. When all those self-images are stripped away, who am I? What if no one paid me any compliments, what if I couldn’t work, what if I were unable to be a “useful” or “productive” member of society? What would my identity be then? When I went to the Navajo Nation to start teaching, it was a real culture shock, because the students were not very emotionally expressive, and I was used to getting lots of emotional feedback from my white, upper-middle-class, all-boys’-school students. I had to totally redefine my style and my expectations, because it let me know clearly that my life was definitely NOT about me.
As our self-created identities get ripped away, we slowly figure out that who we finally are is defined by our relationship to God and nothing else. It takes a lifetime to even begin to figure this out in our guts, but once we start we don’t have to try so hard to protect our little false identities, and we can stand with the powerless, who are precisely those who have no socially created identity to hang their hats on – the poor, the socially and religiously unclean, the disposable members of our world. This is why Jesus so often moves among the nonpersons of his society – to let them know that God’s valuation of them does not depend on what society thinks of them. I find it interesting that MT has Jesus say, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” and LK’s parallel is, “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.” What does it mean to be perfect, and in particular, what does it mean to be like God? Be compassionate. The episodes in each gospel that immediately follow Jesus’ testing are instructive, because each is about compassion: in MT, the first protracted episode is the Sermon on the Mount, which lays out Jesus’ vision for the Kingdom, beginning with the Beatitudes, which can be broken down into two groups: blessed are the downtrodden, and blessed are those who put themselves on the side of the downtrodden. In LK, Jesus goes home to Nazareth and reads to his neighbors the text that answered his question of what it means to be the Son of God: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to announce a year of favor from the Lord.” (LK 4:18-19)
I'm back in New Orleans for the moment, visiting friends, Brothers, family. The SLU Ignatian retreat is coming up in a couple of weeks, and I have to prepare a talk on sin, but doing so got me reading back to last year's talk, on the kingdom of God. That thing came before this blog got up and running, so I figured I would do a "rerun," since the television shows seem to be doing the same thing these days. Here goes:
When I was in high school, I was pretty heavily involved in the martial arts, and I thought I was a pretty tough kid. I was strong, I could hit hard, and I figured I knew a lot about fighting. The best lesson I ever learned came one day, though, when we were doing an exhibition at some little county fair type thing. After I did my thing, three good old boys in their 20s (I must have been about 16) came over to me and talking smack for about 5 minutes. I let them say their thing and paw at me without a word, but afterward I felt ashamed for not standing up and letting them have it. I went through the incident a hundred times in the next couple of weeks before I figured out that, had I gone with my impulse to get after it with one or all three of those guys, I would either have gotten my butt kicked or gotten in trouble with the law, or both, just because my ego got bruised by someone questioning how tough I really was. Later on, my teacher told me that the loudest of this trio had come over to him and told him, “I want that guy,” meaning he wanted to have a go at me. “Oh, you can have him, just come on back when we’re finished,” my teacher told him, presumably because he knew the guy was full of hot air. Needless to say, the guy never came back. I spent all that energy, not trying to defend myself from an attack, but defending my ego from an insult from a stranger whose opinion really didn’t matter to me at all. That impromptu test ended up teaching me more than the tests I took for any of those belts, any of the little weekly sparring sessions we would have in class. That was the real beginning of my education; up until that time I had been building the skill to know how to fight guys like those three dudes, but that day I learned a lesson about fighting the need to “prove” how tough I was to myself or anyone else.
In all three synoptics there is also a tradition of Jesus being tested in the desert, but MT and LK expand MK's quickie version into the familiar story of the three tests. In both cases, of course, the tests immediately follow the experience he has at his baptism, namely the experience of being identified as beloved son. The texts say Jesus was driven out into the desert by the Spirit and tempted or tested by the devil, which I think means he had to work through what it could possibly mean to be beloved Son of God. Whether you believe in “the devil” or not, the tests that Jesus undergoes are just the kind of thing that someone with his kind of power HAS to undergo; the person who doesn’t face his/her “demons” of egocentrism will become a manipulator or a tyrant or an eternal adolescent. Did you ever notice that in two out of the three temptations, the tempter starts off with, “If you are the Son of God,…” trying to define for Jesus what being Son of God “should” be about? Jesus passes the tests by refusing to make life secure for himself or use his power for his own benefit. Spiritually, this is right on. For most of us, we would think that to be the Son of God or Daughter of God means having the divine hook-up. If God’s the king, that makes us the prince or princess, and everybody knows how the prince or princess is expected to live. We all know that Paris Hilton has the luxury of acting like a complete juvenile because she can bask in the perks of having a rich father. We also know that simply having power doesn’t make you a hero or even an adult, but whether you use that power for the sake of others, whether you are willing to put yourself on the line.
The first temptation is for Jesus to turn stones to bread after having fasted for a long time. In other words, “if you are the Son of God,” says the tempter, you shouldn’t be hungry, vulnerable, in need. On the contrary, Jesus knows that what it means to be the Son of God is not focusing on his own comfort or his own security, but on “every word that comes from the mouth of God," allowing his consciousness to be transformed for doing the will of God. Second, following MT’s order rather than LK’s, the tempter encourages him to throw himself down from the top of the temple, so everyone can watch as angels catch him, because “if you are the Son of God,” you should be acclaimed, popular, surrounded by crowds cheering your miracles. Sometimes that happens to Jesus, but more often, he is unpopular, rejected, misunderstood. To be the Son of God does not mean gaining cheap popularity through magic or miracles, getting followers who want tricks more than transformation, but being centered enough to deal with failure and unpopularity. The third temptation is perhaps the most insidious – the temptation to gain power by “selling your soul,” that is, selling out on what you know to be right, doing even the right thing, but for the wrong reason. I imagine the tempter telling Jesus, “Think of all the good you could do if you ruled all those kingdoms, all the good laws you could pass and the people you could help” and certainly, a man with Jesus’ intelligence and insight could easily have become a popular, well-respected Pharisee or even a powerful leader of a Zealot movement, a “Messiah” in the military sense that the people expected, had he so chosen. All it would have taken is for Jesus to make himself, not the Kingdom of God, the center of his vision. This is focusing on the ends without regards to the means; when Luke Skywalker asks Yoda if the Dark Side of the Force is stronger, and Yoda replies, “No. Quicker, easier, more seductive,” this is what he is talking about.
What Jesus encounters out there, that I think leads him directly to his vision of the kingdom of God, is one truth repeated in each of the three tests: it isn’t about me. I’m going to say it again because this is about the hardest thing we can hear: My life is not about me. Sure, at one level it is all about me, so that God is more “for me” than I am for myself, but in fact that means that it is about handing myself back over to something much bigger than I, to God’s purposes in the world. To truly be the son of God, the daughter of God, is to be like God, who is absolute self-giving; it is not to cling to the perks of power that come with having connections, or even merely to enjoy the consolation of having a warm-and-fuzzy prayer life. Paul understood that, which is why he incorporated the following early Christian hymn into Philippians 2:
Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:5-11)
What is it, according to this hymn, that leads to Jesus’ glorification as Lord? His self-emptying (the Greek word is kenosis) all the way to death. Unlike the rest of us, who grasp after status and thereby lose it, Jesus doesn’t grasp after it, he lets go of any kind of ego-reinforcement, and paradoxically, that’s what brings him glory. At some instinctive level, we all know that this is how it works: we code it into all of our myths and stories, from lives of the saints right down to comic books. Archbishop Oscar Romero is able to say, “If they kill me, I shall rise in the Salvadoran people,” because his concern for their liberation went all the way to his death. Martin Luther King is upheld because he was more concerned with getting his people to the Promised Land than making sure he got there with them. Spider-Man is revered as a hero by the people of New York because he lays his life on the line for them, because he knows that his power isn’t for him, that “with great power comes great responsibility.” This preoccupation with our own egos is the central struggle of our lives; if you think our focus on self doesn’t run right to our roots, ask yourself this: whenever I look at a photo album, say on Facebook or in a yearbook, whose face do I look for first? It is because it is so difficult to de-center the ego that we prefer to put our heroes on a pedestal, to worship from a distance rather than imitate, to make the cross into a piece of jewelry or a decoration for our walls rather than a pattern for living and dying and rising. The problem is that Jesus says very little about “worship me” and a lot about “follow me,” and following Jesus leads to the cross, where we just can’t bear to go.
So, what does any of this have to do with the kingdom of God? Well, everything. For Ignatius, the Exercises are about following Jesus, and that which we see Jesus doing is announcing and bringing about the kingdom: preaching and healing, healing and preaching. For us to encounter Jesus is to encounter the kingdom of God being made present, like Gandhi’s quote, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” The term “kingdom of God” is code language for the fulfillment of God’s will, for the world to run the way God wants it to run. Jesus tells us as much in the Our Father: “Your kingdom come” – what does that mean? “Your will be done.” It isn’t so much going to heaven (although that's in there) as the coming of heaven to earth. This is why I have never understood it when people say, “Everything happens for a reason.” Seeing genocide, rampant starvation around the world, the global AIDS epidemic or any other horrible reality through that lens would mean that God has written all this awful stuff into some cosmic script for a larger purpose that would allegedly make it ok. No! The very point of the kingdom of God is that things are NOT as they should be, that God’s will is NOT being done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Getting there from here is just as urgent, and just as difficult, as it was in Jesus’ time, because it demands that people de-center their egos and risk change, rejection, death, all of which we avoid at all costs. That is, for God’s kingdom to come, it means that my kingdom, the tower of success and popularity that I dream of creating, may well have to go. We can’t even reduce the kingdom to trying to fix all the problems of the world “out there,” because, to quote Thomas Merton, we first of all recognize that the power of error “was after all not in the city, but in ourselves.” How easily we can do ostensibly good things, helping others, protesting war or fighting unjust conditions out of an unenlightened egocentricity, a smug certitude of our own superiority and righteousness against the warmongers and the overlords, hating the rich rather than loving the poor. Ignatius does not intend for us to become social workers or to create messiah complexes in us, but to be converted to the person and ministry of Jesus as a necessary first step of our own ministries.
Paradoxically, the point of all of this stuff is not to deny who we are; it is, in fact, to bring to bear all the abilities that we have, to become our best selves. We become men and women of the kingdom not by becoming some sort of emotionless robot, not trying to live up to some kind of abstract, “one-size-fits-all” holiness, but by incarnating holiness in the unique mix that we are. The history of Christian holy men and women should make clear that there is no one standard for what we have to do to be holy or to help bring about the kingdom: Mother Teresa cared for the dying, Dorothy Day fed the hungry, Martin King went to jail, Thomas Merton wrote books, Karl Rahner taught theology. There are others, though, that are less “churchy”: Oskar Schindler ran an enamelware factory to protect Jews from execution, Adam Neiman runs a fair trade clothing company, Bill Quigley teaches law students to seek justice rather than manipulate the system, and Jim Deshotels runs a free mobile clinic on the streets of New Orleans. You have something in you that can help others, and at a certain level, it doesn’t much matter whether that something is saving thousands of lives or making a really fine banana cream pie: the point is not to abandon that, but to us it for the center that lies beyond you, instead of using it to make yourself the center. The Hindu tradition puts it this way: “Plunge into the heart of battle and lay your heart at the lotus feet of the Lord.”
It is a really hard balance between using our gifts and letting ourselves shore up our own egos with them. Notice how often throughout the gospels we see Jesus urging people to focus away from whatever would lead them to shore up their egos and find their identity in something other than God: avoid all greed, sell all you have, take up your cross, whoever wishes to be first must be last. Think about it like this: what kind of value would I see in myself if I didn’t “produce” anything, if I weren’t doing something “useful” that gave my ego something to latch onto? This is the real value of the desert for Jesus, I think – it’s like the Buddha under the bo tree, helping him understand that life still goes on just fine without him. I can imagine Jesus in the desert arguing with himself, his ego trying to come up with reasons to leave the desert – there are sick people out there to be healed, there are outcasts to be forgiven, and you’re not helping anyone out here: you aren’t “producing.” Can you hear the insidiousness of this kind of thinking? It leads us to convince ourselves that we are acting nobly, desiring to help others, when in fact we are probably looking to convince ourselves that we are important, we are accomplishing things, so we can feel good about ourselves. When all those self-images are stripped away, who am I? What if no one paid me any compliments, what if I couldn’t work, what if I were unable to be a “useful” or “productive” member of society? What would my identity be then? When I went to the Navajo Nation to start teaching, it was a real culture shock, because the students were not very emotionally expressive, and I was used to getting lots of emotional feedback from my white, upper-middle-class, all-boys’-school students. I had to totally redefine my style and my expectations, because it let me know clearly that my life was definitely NOT about me.
As our self-created identities get ripped away, we slowly figure out that who we finally are is defined by our relationship to God and nothing else. It takes a lifetime to even begin to figure this out in our guts, but once we start we don’t have to try so hard to protect our little false identities, and we can stand with the powerless, who are precisely those who have no socially created identity to hang their hats on – the poor, the socially and religiously unclean, the disposable members of our world. This is why Jesus so often moves among the nonpersons of his society – to let them know that God’s valuation of them does not depend on what society thinks of them. I find it interesting that MT has Jesus say, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” and LK’s parallel is, “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.” What does it mean to be perfect, and in particular, what does it mean to be like God? Be compassionate. The episodes in each gospel that immediately follow Jesus’ testing are instructive, because each is about compassion: in MT, the first protracted episode is the Sermon on the Mount, which lays out Jesus’ vision for the Kingdom, beginning with the Beatitudes, which can be broken down into two groups: blessed are the downtrodden, and blessed are those who put themselves on the side of the downtrodden. In LK, Jesus goes home to Nazareth and reads to his neighbors the text that answered his question of what it means to be the Son of God: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to announce a year of favor from the Lord.” (LK 4:18-19)
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Gethsemani
Well, friends, if you have been reading this blog for a while, you've put up with me mentioning the class trip to Gethsemani for a while now. Last weekend we finally pulled it off, with some funding help from the good people in Arts & Sciences. We stayed in Louisville Friday night and drove to Gethsemani Saturday morning (Dec. 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception). It was an ugly day viz. weather, but it was a great day to be at the monastery. We had time to see Merton's grave (yes, I recovered my cross that I left there in October) and walk around a bit before tierce/mass, after which we met up with Br. Paul. He had to cook, so we drove to Bardstown for lunch and came back, at which point he took us to the hermitage. I had been hoping for maybe a half hour of his time, but he gave us a good hour and a half, which included reading part of "Rain and the Rhinoceros" to us (it was raining at the time), building a fire in the hermitage and telling us stories about Merton, discussing the meaning of the monastic life (fantastic!) and reciting some poetry for us. It got pretty smoky in there because the flue wouldn't open in the fireplace, but it was worth every second. After we left, the students later came to the consensus that Br. Paul is a great example of what 50 years of monastic life lived well can produce -- a humble, thoughtful, deeply warm and human person, no hangups, no foolishness.
We left there and went down the road to the Bethany Spring retreat center, home of the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living and my friend Jonathan Montaldo. Jonathan, a graduate of Cor Jesu, a former Brothers' school in New Orleans, is the epitome of southern hospitality. Even though he had a group there on retreat, he spent a long time with us, talking about what they do there, feeding us banana bread and taking us on a walk around the place. Another great experience for the students to hear from a real Merton expert. We left there to get back on the road to St. Louis, stopping in Louisville just long enough to visit the plaque at 4th and Muhammad Ali, which was once "4th and Walnut," the street corner at which Merton had a breakthrough to solidarity with the world rather than contempt for, or rejection of, the world.
So, that's it. It wasn't a particularly BUSY trip, but I felt like we got to see and do quite a bit (at least, to see and do the stuff that mattered). Oh, we even got to buy some monastery cheese -- now our trip can truly be called a success! Now all that remains is to read the final papers and start fiddling around with the syllabus for next time (hoping I get to teach this class again, and sooner rather than later). Mercy within mercy within mercy...
So, that's it. It wasn't a particularly BUSY trip, but I felt like we got to see and do quite a bit (at least, to see and do the stuff that mattered). Oh, we even got to buy some monastery cheese -- now our trip can truly be called a success! Now all that remains is to read the final papers and start fiddling around with the syllabus for next time (hoping I get to teach this class again, and sooner rather than later). Mercy within mercy within mercy...Sunday, December 2, 2007
SOA/WHINSEC and more...
Let’s see, what’s been going on lately? Two weeks ago, I went to Fort Benning, GA for the annual School of the Americas vigil. It’s a big deal for the Jesuit universities and high schools because of the connection of the SOA to the deaths of the 6 Jesuit martyrs in El Salvador, and campus ministry hosts a trip down there every year, so I felt like I should do it so I could see for myself what is going on there. I’ve read a decent amount of stuff on both sides of the argument over the years, and still don’t feel like I’ve ever been able to nail down what my position should be. After a 12-hour bus ride down there, some of us were able to take a tour of WHINSEC (the current school for members of Latin American military personnel) and talk to a number of people who work there, all of whom were very hospitable and gracious. We were able to attend an hour-long Q&A panel with several higher-ups from the school, during which time I asked a question about the difference between the SOA (then) and WHINSEC (now) but which, I thought, no one really answered. Still, there was a lot of emphasis placed on the amount of human-rights education going on now at WHINSEC, and an obvious effort to distance themselves from the SOA, which is fine if they are indeed doing so much stuff right these days. If there were improprieties and even training in techniques that did not respect human rights back in the SOA days, that doesn’t mean closing WHINSEC is the right move, but it sure would be nice of the government to admit to it. Sunday was the big march down the street leading to the gates of Fort Benning, and the procession was some 20,000 people strong, as the speakers at the microphones spent several hours reading off the names of men, women and children killed or disappeared in a number of Latin American countries over the past few decades. Again, that doesn’t mean the closure of WHINSEC is the proper response (that depends on what is going on there now), but there is something is really right in keeping vigil for the innumerable people who were affected by their governments’ violence.
Throughout the trip, I saw a number of our students (and a number of people from other schools) doing the “violent pacifism” kind of thing that Merton hated about the peace movements of the 1960s – so dehumanizing the folks at WHINSEC, refusing to allow real discussion to happen, that they were in fact the violent ones, despite their rhetoric of being strictly nonviolent on the trip. Part of me wonders (not knowing all the background on that time period) if part of the problem with the protest folks is that the truth and reconciliation commissions in El Salvador allowed for amnesty for people who were guilty of human-rights abuses if they would tell the truth about their involvement – as good as the idea is in principle, it leaves a lot of unmanaged anger and the reality of a lot of guilty people not being punished. That means the urge to assign guilt is still out there, especially since the U.S. government hasn’t done much in the area of acknowledging its complicity with some genuinely dirty regimes. The need on our part is not to let our students stay at the level of simply being angry liberals – they will simply keep on banging heads with angry conservatives and fuel the fire of anger and mistrust. It is much harder and more costly to stand in the shadow of the cross, wanting to seek the truth with the folks on the other side, than to simply rail at injustices.
Since then has been less exciting, but still busy. A good trip home at Thanksgiving, a nicely cooked Tofurkey courtesy of my sister and a few hours of cracking a tiny fraction of the pecans that were in her yard, and a couple more days to spend with the parentals, seeing my mom’s new place, going for a bicycle ride with my dad, and still finding time to read a couple of books. Back to StL on Monday morning, and right back to the grind. That Tuesday after Thanksgiving was an information meeting about the trip to Haiti this summer, and I had a good turnout – between those who came to the meeting and those who couldn’t but emailed about their interest, I’ve got about 30 people in the hopper. We’ll see how many actually turn in applications…
These past couple of weeks have been crazy busy, even with the Thanksgiving break, so I’ve been fairly sleep-deprived and getting increasingly out of shape. Perhaps (ha) the Christmas break will be a chance to ameliorate both, but I doubt it. I’m finally shaping up my theological foundations class for the spring, but I still have to parse out the readings across the semester. Hard to believe this upcoming week is the last week of classes in the semester – next weekend is our much-anticipated trip to Gethsemani. On that note, I’ll go ahead and finish this little ramble with my old standby from Merton: mercy within mercy within mercy…
Throughout the trip, I saw a number of our students (and a number of people from other schools) doing the “violent pacifism” kind of thing that Merton hated about the peace movements of the 1960s – so dehumanizing the folks at WHINSEC, refusing to allow real discussion to happen, that they were in fact the violent ones, despite their rhetoric of being strictly nonviolent on the trip. Part of me wonders (not knowing all the background on that time period) if part of the problem with the protest folks is that the truth and reconciliation commissions in El Salvador allowed for amnesty for people who were guilty of human-rights abuses if they would tell the truth about their involvement – as good as the idea is in principle, it leaves a lot of unmanaged anger and the reality of a lot of guilty people not being punished. That means the urge to assign guilt is still out there, especially since the U.S. government hasn’t done much in the area of acknowledging its complicity with some genuinely dirty regimes. The need on our part is not to let our students stay at the level of simply being angry liberals – they will simply keep on banging heads with angry conservatives and fuel the fire of anger and mistrust. It is much harder and more costly to stand in the shadow of the cross, wanting to seek the truth with the folks on the other side, than to simply rail at injustices.
Since then has been less exciting, but still busy. A good trip home at Thanksgiving, a nicely cooked Tofurkey courtesy of my sister and a few hours of cracking a tiny fraction of the pecans that were in her yard, and a couple more days to spend with the parentals, seeing my mom’s new place, going for a bicycle ride with my dad, and still finding time to read a couple of books. Back to StL on Monday morning, and right back to the grind. That Tuesday after Thanksgiving was an information meeting about the trip to Haiti this summer, and I had a good turnout – between those who came to the meeting and those who couldn’t but emailed about their interest, I’ve got about 30 people in the hopper. We’ll see how many actually turn in applications…
These past couple of weeks have been crazy busy, even with the Thanksgiving break, so I’ve been fairly sleep-deprived and getting increasingly out of shape. Perhaps (ha) the Christmas break will be a chance to ameliorate both, but I doubt it. I’m finally shaping up my theological foundations class for the spring, but I still have to parse out the readings across the semester. Hard to believe this upcoming week is the last week of classes in the semester – next weekend is our much-anticipated trip to Gethsemani. On that note, I’ll go ahead and finish this little ramble with my old standby from Merton: mercy within mercy within mercy…
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Sheesh, I can't believe how long it has been since I have posted something that isn't academic in nature. There has been a lot of great stuff going on, so I guess it is just a matter of having time to put together something worthwhile.
The next weekend was the annual retreat for the same group of students, and this year, for the first time, we went to a state park and did more of a nature-y retreat; in previous years, we had gone to St. Meinrad Archabbey, which was fine, but this had a very different feel, and I think, a better one. We spent time introducing the students to centering prayer, walked the labyrinth (my small contribution to the weekend), had an amazing drum circle (see below) and a great evening around a bonfire. The drum circle was led by my friend Brian Robinette, a professor in the theology department (and a drummer in a local band), and it went something like this: he brought a couple of dozen percussion instruments, from drums to cymbals to tambourines to his kids' toy xylophones, enough for everyone to have an instrument, and he would play a basic beat and invite everyone to add the noise of their particular instrument, and somehow it ended up blending together really well.
That Monday I took off from work because I was at the retreat all weekend, and I went to go see the film Into the Wild, based on the book of the same name by Jon Krakauer, which I had read a few years ago. A powerful film, not perfect, but going a long way to show the intensity and honesty of this young man who goes into the wilderness of Alaska to discover what is most true in human existence. It made me seriously consider using that book in the theological foundations class I will be teaching in the spring. I'm considering that one, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Night by Elie Wiesel, and a couple of other books that, although not explicitly theological, deal with "the big questions."
Where to begin? The weekend before Halloween the Micahs (the service-learning community with which I work at SLU) put on a Halloween party at a local elementary school here in St. Louis. If it's possible, I think our students had more fun than the little kids -- like last year, they had all kinds of crazy costumes and put on a bunch of goofy activities -- wrapping kids in toilet paper to "mummify" them, making them feel bowls of various nasty substances that were supposed to be innards, face painting, and so on. You know how those kinds of things go, so I'll just let the pictures do the talking:
The next weekend was the annual retreat for the same group of students, and this year, for the first time, we went to a state park and did more of a nature-y retreat; in previous years, we had gone to St. Meinrad Archabbey, which was fine, but this had a very different feel, and I think, a better one. We spent time introducing the students to centering prayer, walked the labyrinth (my small contribution to the weekend), had an amazing drum circle (see below) and a great evening around a bonfire. The drum circle was led by my friend Brian Robinette, a professor in the theology department (and a drummer in a local band), and it went something like this: he brought a couple of dozen percussion instruments, from drums to cymbals to tambourines to his kids' toy xylophones, enough for everyone to have an instrument, and he would play a basic beat and invite everyone to add the noise of their particular instrument, and somehow it ended up blending together really well.
That Monday I took off from work because I was at the retreat all weekend, and I went to go see the film Into the Wild, based on the book of the same name by Jon Krakauer, which I had read a few years ago. A powerful film, not perfect, but going a long way to show the intensity and honesty of this young man who goes into the wilderness of Alaska to discover what is most true in human existence. It made me seriously consider using that book in the theological foundations class I will be teaching in the spring. I'm considering that one, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Night by Elie Wiesel, and a couple of other books that, although not explicitly theological, deal with "the big questions."
This past weekend I worked on a Habitat for Humanity project with some of the students from the SLU Habitat chapter, and it was overall very good, mostly last-minute touches on a house that is just about ready to be lived in. That night a group of campus ministry folks went to see a film called Lars and the Real Girl, which sounded really weird but was getting good reviews. In a nutshell, the story is this: a reclusive young guy (Lars) in small-town Minnesota or Wisconsin who buys a life-sized plastic doll of a girl has a delusion that she is real and that he is in a relationship with her. There is a total innocence about the guy, nothing twisted about him, but his brother and sister-in-law, who are horrified by the whole thing, talk to the local psychologist, who tell them to play along so he can work through it on his own terms. What follows is a marvelous story of the entire town participating for Lars' sake, and the story was at once gentle and deep, with subtle use of drama to convey rich symbol. I couldn't get it out of my mind for the rest of the weekend.
Finally, this week has been hell on wheels from the start. A group from SLU, myself included, are going to the SOA/WHINSEC Ignatian Teach-In at Fort Benning, GA this weekend, so we have a laundry list of activities connected with that. Tuesday was the annual Campus Ministry Chili Cook-Off, a benefit for our annual Food Drive, so I made my not-so-famous apple-sweet potato chili; despite all my work in the kitchen and all my shameless self-promotion at the Cook-Off, I took a close second to my friend Laura. Next year…
All for now. I suspect I will have plenty to report on after the SOA trip. Mercy within mercy…
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