The other day I saw someone on Google+ who described himself as a 'lapsed atheist.' I found the term a little fascinating, and I was reflecting on it as I walked home from Mass at the Poor Clares this morning.
I guess we tend to think of the theist as the one who makes assertions and claims, while the atheist does not. In other words, in our somewhat godless society, atheism is the default position. To confess God is to make claims that are alternative, and indeed rebellious.
In fact, however, this is a false imagination. Even though many of us religious people operate under it all the time, it is atheistic in its presumptions.
Atheism is, in fact, a very strong sort of claim or set of claims. Often it is based on an appeal to reason, though taking great (and ultimately useless) pains to avoid the intuition that the very reasonableness of the cosmos and the ability of our minds to interface with it through our own reason have been ordinary paths to the intuition of Reason itself, and the great religious intuition that this Reason is not a what, but a benevolent Who.
To be a theist, on the other hand, is just to surrender to the actuality of things, and I mean 'actuality' in all of its metaphysical force and theological richness.
So I like the idea of a 'lapsed atheist' and I'm thinking of adopting the language for myself. It suggests that the position of faith or the confession of God is not some sort of claim or set of claims that are adopted in a positive way, but simply an admission of what is and surrender to its implications.
In other words, the religious person is not someone who has become special by adopting some extraordinary outlook or worldview, but someone who has become ordinary by just accepting things as they are. We must never let ourselves become, in so many subtle ways, the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not like other men.
May I lapse from my atheism today. Amen.
October 17, 2011
October 15, 2011
Sexual Abuse
Everything going on in my life these days has meant a lot of walks. I've always been someone who thinks and processes experience in the solitude of walking. Everywhere I live I fall into habitual routes.
On my walk yesterday I was thinking about the big news of the indictment of bishop Finn. From there I got to remembering another priest, whom I met very early on in my religious life. He had that perfect mixture of sincere devotion and don't-take-it-all-too-seriously bemusement that seems to be the charm of us Franciscans. He was fun and full of quotes from the saints. He seemed self-confident in his love of the vocation. I looked up to him, and hoped that one day I would be like him.
Today he's in prison.
When I think about this it reminds me of how sexual abuse in the Church is still an issue. Now I'm not putting down all the programs and checks that are in place for the protection of children; I have great respect for the folks who work hard at implementing and administrating these things, and I have no doubt that they have been a great help. But I am saying that I don't think we have yet taken seriously the larger problems of the use of power and endemic emotional immaturity of which the sexual abuse of children by priests is just the horrific, criminal edge.
It gives me pause to remember that a friar who seemed in every way to fit in, and was even someone to look up to in his apparent happy adjustment to our life, and to whom I myself looked up in my first steps as a religious, is in prison as I write this post. But the betrayal I feel as I think back on myself innocently looking up to a friar who seemed so successful and cool is but the tiniest taste of the injuries of those who have been abused by priests.
But maybe God wills that tiny taste to be an invitation.
A couple of years back there was a spell when it would often come up in my prayer that I should accept some particular penance or work of reparation for the sexual abuse committed by my brother priests. I don't think I ever decided on anything. Maybe it's time to seek such a thing again in my prayer.
On my walk yesterday I was thinking about the big news of the indictment of bishop Finn. From there I got to remembering another priest, whom I met very early on in my religious life. He had that perfect mixture of sincere devotion and don't-take-it-all-too-seriously bemusement that seems to be the charm of us Franciscans. He was fun and full of quotes from the saints. He seemed self-confident in his love of the vocation. I looked up to him, and hoped that one day I would be like him.
Today he's in prison.
When I think about this it reminds me of how sexual abuse in the Church is still an issue. Now I'm not putting down all the programs and checks that are in place for the protection of children; I have great respect for the folks who work hard at implementing and administrating these things, and I have no doubt that they have been a great help. But I am saying that I don't think we have yet taken seriously the larger problems of the use of power and endemic emotional immaturity of which the sexual abuse of children by priests is just the horrific, criminal edge.
It gives me pause to remember that a friar who seemed in every way to fit in, and was even someone to look up to in his apparent happy adjustment to our life, and to whom I myself looked up in my first steps as a religious, is in prison as I write this post. But the betrayal I feel as I think back on myself innocently looking up to a friar who seemed so successful and cool is but the tiniest taste of the injuries of those who have been abused by priests.
But maybe God wills that tiny taste to be an invitation.
A couple of years back there was a spell when it would often come up in my prayer that I should accept some particular penance or work of reparation for the sexual abuse committed by my brother priests. I don't think I ever decided on anything. Maybe it's time to seek such a thing again in my prayer.
October 14, 2011
The Solitude of the Cross
Yesterday I spent some time with one of the wisest Christian teachers I know. This is a riff on something he said:
Why do families tend to fight on vacation and around holidays? I think it's because of a certain frustrated utopianism. There's this idea that the time of vacation or holiday will a perfect and wonderful time of peace and harmony, but when this doesn't exactly happen a lot of frustration and anger can come out.
Something analogous can happen in a Christian community; part of the reason there can be so much tension, frustration, and anger is that our optimism and idealism made us think that a Christian community, whether it be a religious house or a marriage or whatever, would also be a kind of utopia, as if the Kingdom of God were already here in its fullness.
This can easily become a sort of double denial:
First, we forget that there is a fullness of the Kingdom of God to which we look forward in Christian hope, and second, that the Cross means that each of us, in the solitude of his own heart, has to surrender to carrying not only the burden of his own sins and imperfections, but those of the whole community as well. This is what it means, as individual Christians, to take seriously that the Church as communion derives from Christ crucified.
Without that solitude, there is no Christian person to offer as a communion with others, and Christian community comes to be based only on emotional needs and the other concerns of the flesh. And then we wonder why it falls apart at any sign of trouble.
Why do families tend to fight on vacation and around holidays? I think it's because of a certain frustrated utopianism. There's this idea that the time of vacation or holiday will a perfect and wonderful time of peace and harmony, but when this doesn't exactly happen a lot of frustration and anger can come out.
Something analogous can happen in a Christian community; part of the reason there can be so much tension, frustration, and anger is that our optimism and idealism made us think that a Christian community, whether it be a religious house or a marriage or whatever, would also be a kind of utopia, as if the Kingdom of God were already here in its fullness.
This can easily become a sort of double denial:
First, we forget that there is a fullness of the Kingdom of God to which we look forward in Christian hope, and second, that the Cross means that each of us, in the solitude of his own heart, has to surrender to carrying not only the burden of his own sins and imperfections, but those of the whole community as well. This is what it means, as individual Christians, to take seriously that the Church as communion derives from Christ crucified.
Without that solitude, there is no Christian person to offer as a communion with others, and Christian community comes to be based only on emotional needs and the other concerns of the flesh. And then we wonder why it falls apart at any sign of trouble.
October 13, 2011
The School of Humility
Early on in my religious life I had an insight that has served me well: Life in community could help me to become good, or even a saint, but if it ended up making me worse I would be far worse than I would have been without it. In this sense I think religious life is hazardous; the possibilities for sanctity are many and great, but so are the possibilities for ruin.
Arriving in any new arrangement of common life, I bring my desire to be a good religious and a brother to my confreres and indeed to every creature. But I also bring my sins, immaturities, blind spots, idiosyncrasies, and things I'm just not good at. My mind and heart are weeds and wheat, as the Lord said in his parable.
The challenge of common life is that my weeds come to interface with other people's weeds, and the rotten blossoms of personality conflicts, imperfections in religious observance, and failures in charity and zeal begin to emerge.
It can get pretty uncomfortable. It's enough to make you think that there's something wrong with religious life, and of course there is. (It's called original sin, or at least the wound that original sin has left on our humanity.) But the danger here is to respond to the dysfunction with only lamenting, complaining, and blaming. Too easily these only lead to the sort of gossip, detraction, and backbiting that only reinforce and harden the difficulties.
As I get older in the religious life I realize that, at least in some sense, things are supposed to be this way. Why? Because the situation of difficulty, of not finding it easy to get along, of having my faults come into contact with the faults of others and together brew up a rotten cocktail of dysfunction, it's all meant to be a school of patience, charity, and the Cross. Thus, common life becomes an opportunity to let go of blaming and diagnosing in favor of confessing together that we are more or less at fault. Because the common life makes our own imperfections and sins more obvious both to ourselves and others, it is a school of humility. It is in this humility that the resurrection of mutual acceptance and forgiveness emerges.
This confession is the paradox of the Cross revealed in common life. On the individual level this paradox is revealed like this: the way to stop committing a particular sin is not to try real hard not to do it, but to surrender to the God who wants to free you from not only some stupid sin but your whole self. So it is in common life; the way for a collection of characters to begin to be saved from the common entanglement of their individual imperfections is not to resit the situation, but to embrace it and let it teach a sort of common humility.
Asking whose fault it is that common life suffers imperfections is as pointless as asking who killed Jesus Christ. As one of my teachers says, "The only reasonable answer to that question is you and me."
Arriving in any new arrangement of common life, I bring my desire to be a good religious and a brother to my confreres and indeed to every creature. But I also bring my sins, immaturities, blind spots, idiosyncrasies, and things I'm just not good at. My mind and heart are weeds and wheat, as the Lord said in his parable.
The challenge of common life is that my weeds come to interface with other people's weeds, and the rotten blossoms of personality conflicts, imperfections in religious observance, and failures in charity and zeal begin to emerge.
It can get pretty uncomfortable. It's enough to make you think that there's something wrong with religious life, and of course there is. (It's called original sin, or at least the wound that original sin has left on our humanity.) But the danger here is to respond to the dysfunction with only lamenting, complaining, and blaming. Too easily these only lead to the sort of gossip, detraction, and backbiting that only reinforce and harden the difficulties.
As I get older in the religious life I realize that, at least in some sense, things are supposed to be this way. Why? Because the situation of difficulty, of not finding it easy to get along, of having my faults come into contact with the faults of others and together brew up a rotten cocktail of dysfunction, it's all meant to be a school of patience, charity, and the Cross. Thus, common life becomes an opportunity to let go of blaming and diagnosing in favor of confessing together that we are more or less at fault. Because the common life makes our own imperfections and sins more obvious both to ourselves and others, it is a school of humility. It is in this humility that the resurrection of mutual acceptance and forgiveness emerges.
This confession is the paradox of the Cross revealed in common life. On the individual level this paradox is revealed like this: the way to stop committing a particular sin is not to try real hard not to do it, but to surrender to the God who wants to free you from not only some stupid sin but your whole self. So it is in common life; the way for a collection of characters to begin to be saved from the common entanglement of their individual imperfections is not to resit the situation, but to embrace it and let it teach a sort of common humility.
Asking whose fault it is that common life suffers imperfections is as pointless as asking who killed Jesus Christ. As one of my teachers says, "The only reasonable answer to that question is you and me."
October 11, 2011
Grieving the Soon-To-Be Old Translation
Now that we are allowed to have copies of the new translation here in the United States, I've been looking through it. For the most part, I like it. I think that a lot has been improved. I like very much the restoration of and with your spirit. I like that the bees got back into the Easter Proclamation. It's going to be a challenging transition, though, especially for priests.
So far I have but one complaint with the translation, the little prayer the priest says quietly before consuming the Body and Blood of Christ. "May the Body/Blood of Christ keep me safe for eternal life," to me doesn't capture the richness of Corpus/Sanguis Christi custodiat me in vitam aeternam. I'm not in love with the current, outgoing translation either, "May the body/blood of Christ bring me to everlasting life," but I like it better than the new one. Not that it probably matters to me in the end; I usually say this prayer in Latin anyway.
That's a little thing. Here's another, maybe more important: One of the first priests I ever knew was the pastor of the parish where I was baptized, Fr. Leo Sutula at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Quaker Hill, Connecticut. May he rest in peace. He gave me my first Holy Communion and also (six days later) heard my first confession. He had a gentleness that gave glory to God. He also had a funny habit, at least at daily Mass, of saying all of the secret prayers out loud. So, until I learned the Mass well myself several years later, his Mass always seemed to have more prayers in it. I remember being especially struck by the private preparation prayer before Communion, which he would say out loud:
"Lord Jesus Christ, with faith in your love and mercy I eat your body and drink your blood. Let it not bring me condemnation but health in mind and body."
When I use this option myself, I always think of Fr. Sutula. Until I came to be a priest myself, he was my only experience of this prayer. As I pray the words myself, I'm aware of my connection to the man and his ministry in the economies of grace in my own journey. The prayer is a glimpse for me of the communion of saints.
So there's a little grief in my heart at the thought of losing that little prayer at the end of next month. The new version is quite different, and I'll probably just start saying the other option, the Domine, Iesu Christi... in Latin.
It's not a big thing, but in thinking about it I started to guess that there are probably many such things for all kinds of people, connections and devout memory associated with the particular words of the outgoing translation. I bet that a lot of folks have certain parts of the Mass that serve to remind them of specific blessings and graces, or of struggles with which God's help was saving.
I'll grieve the loss of Fr. Sutula's little prayer, but I'll remember that the gift of the new translation serves our devotion and love for the same Eucharist he celebrated for me on that day of my first Holy Communion, and thus is no betrayal but rather a movement of love. As we approach and engage this new moment in our eucharistic lives, I'll also be praying for everyone else who grieves some particular thing soon to become liturgical history.
So far I have but one complaint with the translation, the little prayer the priest says quietly before consuming the Body and Blood of Christ. "May the Body/Blood of Christ keep me safe for eternal life," to me doesn't capture the richness of Corpus/Sanguis Christi custodiat me in vitam aeternam. I'm not in love with the current, outgoing translation either, "May the body/blood of Christ bring me to everlasting life," but I like it better than the new one. Not that it probably matters to me in the end; I usually say this prayer in Latin anyway.
That's a little thing. Here's another, maybe more important: One of the first priests I ever knew was the pastor of the parish where I was baptized, Fr. Leo Sutula at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Quaker Hill, Connecticut. May he rest in peace. He gave me my first Holy Communion and also (six days later) heard my first confession. He had a gentleness that gave glory to God. He also had a funny habit, at least at daily Mass, of saying all of the secret prayers out loud. So, until I learned the Mass well myself several years later, his Mass always seemed to have more prayers in it. I remember being especially struck by the private preparation prayer before Communion, which he would say out loud:
"Lord Jesus Christ, with faith in your love and mercy I eat your body and drink your blood. Let it not bring me condemnation but health in mind and body."
When I use this option myself, I always think of Fr. Sutula. Until I came to be a priest myself, he was my only experience of this prayer. As I pray the words myself, I'm aware of my connection to the man and his ministry in the economies of grace in my own journey. The prayer is a glimpse for me of the communion of saints.
So there's a little grief in my heart at the thought of losing that little prayer at the end of next month. The new version is quite different, and I'll probably just start saying the other option, the Domine, Iesu Christi... in Latin.
It's not a big thing, but in thinking about it I started to guess that there are probably many such things for all kinds of people, connections and devout memory associated with the particular words of the outgoing translation. I bet that a lot of folks have certain parts of the Mass that serve to remind them of specific blessings and graces, or of struggles with which God's help was saving.
I'll grieve the loss of Fr. Sutula's little prayer, but I'll remember that the gift of the new translation serves our devotion and love for the same Eucharist he celebrated for me on that day of my first Holy Communion, and thus is no betrayal but rather a movement of love. As we approach and engage this new moment in our eucharistic lives, I'll also be praying for everyone else who grieves some particular thing soon to become liturgical history.
October 10, 2011
My News and Coming Transitions
Within the last few weeks, new developments in my life have brought me into a new time of transition and reorientation. In a post a couple of weeks back I asked your prayers for the situation, and I have been grateful for the strength of that encouragement.
So here's the news: I have been asked to join the ministry of the Order's general secretariat at our general curia in Rome as an English-language secretary. This news came as a complete surprise. As I calmed down inside, however, and was able to start to think and pray about it, I became grateful and happy about this new possibility and direction in my religious life. My spiritual director confirmed these senses for me.
I don't, however, have to move until spring, towards the end of the school year.
As happy as I am about this new assignment, it left me in an awkward condition in my current assignment as a student at Boston College. I'm still in the beginning stages of the STD program there, and so this new assignment necessarily interrupts my studies in some way or other. Exactly how to craft this interruption into shape has been occupying my thoughts and reflection ever since I first got the call about the new assignment three weeks ago. After thinking various things through as best as I could: my own academic situation, the possibilities of the current moment before I move, my relationships with my teachers, and especially the whole history of my successes and--I confess--failures in obedience since I was first asked to apply to BC two years ago, it has been decided that I will take a leave of absence from the BC School of Theology & Ministry. The new assignment seems to have a probationary period of a year or so; applying for leave now could preserve the possibility of returning to BC if I don't work out.
With the time that will open up as I begin my leave and until I am supposed to move to Rome, I will seek further priestly work here in Boston.
Thank you for your prayers as I continue to try to be faithful in these transitions.
So here's the news: I have been asked to join the ministry of the Order's general secretariat at our general curia in Rome as an English-language secretary. This news came as a complete surprise. As I calmed down inside, however, and was able to start to think and pray about it, I became grateful and happy about this new possibility and direction in my religious life. My spiritual director confirmed these senses for me.
I don't, however, have to move until spring, towards the end of the school year.
As happy as I am about this new assignment, it left me in an awkward condition in my current assignment as a student at Boston College. I'm still in the beginning stages of the STD program there, and so this new assignment necessarily interrupts my studies in some way or other. Exactly how to craft this interruption into shape has been occupying my thoughts and reflection ever since I first got the call about the new assignment three weeks ago. After thinking various things through as best as I could: my own academic situation, the possibilities of the current moment before I move, my relationships with my teachers, and especially the whole history of my successes and--I confess--failures in obedience since I was first asked to apply to BC two years ago, it has been decided that I will take a leave of absence from the BC School of Theology & Ministry. The new assignment seems to have a probationary period of a year or so; applying for leave now could preserve the possibility of returning to BC if I don't work out.
With the time that will open up as I begin my leave and until I am supposed to move to Rome, I will seek further priestly work here in Boston.
Thank you for your prayers as I continue to try to be faithful in these transitions.
October 7, 2011
A Timely Word From Alvarus Pelagius
An email from Boston College alerts me that something called an 'unresolved balance' could impede my registration for the spring semester.
"[The students] contract debts and sometimes withdraw from the university without paying them, on which account they are excommunicated and do not care..."
(Alvarus Pelagius (ca. 1275-1349), De Planctu Ecclesiae, quoted from Brian Tierney, ed. Sources of Medieval History, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), 297.)
"[The students] contract debts and sometimes withdraw from the university without paying them, on which account they are excommunicated and do not care..."
(Alvarus Pelagius (ca. 1275-1349), De Planctu Ecclesiae, quoted from Brian Tierney, ed. Sources of Medieval History, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), 297.)
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