Hard teachings

I read a column this week in a local Catholic paper about the need for the Church to return to the Gospel - but that then focussed entirely on issues of human sexuality, something that I argue is not the moral core of the Gospel.  These teachings should be "black and white," no nuance, says the author. But the moral core of the Gospel is direct, it is black and white, it's just not focussed solely on these issues: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul and your mind. And your neighbor as yourself. Whatever you do for another in need, you do unto me. 

The author notes that young people feel that the Church has nothing to offer them, and that if only we offered clarity they would come. I think they might, but I think the clarity they desire is focussed outward, onto what we have been missioned to do. Who are we to be for the world? How can we do the hard work of loving our neighbor in a culture that considers human dignity to be a luxury?  These questions take us far beyond the issues of human sexuality.

The Sunday readings might seem as if they lend themselves to black and white and "hard teachings," but in a reflection for Give Us This Day a few years ago I wondered if we had missed the hardest teaching of all.  That perhaps God's interest in marriage and fidelity and human love isn't primarily about individual needs and wants or marriage and divorce law, but is pushing for something far deeper. Something that applies to all of us, married or not, divorced or not.  It makes me wonder if young people sense our superficiality when we focus only on the "black and white."

I wrote this:

“Are you trying to tell me that my husband is dead?” I asked the surgeon. “Yes.” In that harrowing moment of my first marriage’s dissolution, I  finally grasped in my bones the reality of these words:  they are no longer two but one flesh. Half of me had been torn off, and what remained was pouring out onto the floor in a pool of tears. 

It is tempting to hear these readings from Genesis and Mark as mere marriage instruction, demanding husbands and wives to cleave to each other no matter the cost. I see in them instead potent images of what it feels like to be one body, not just in marriage but as the People of God: you are bone of my bone, flesh of my  flesh. We proclaim in the Communion Antiphon for this Sunday that we are one body (1 Cor 10:17). But do we feel in our bones that we are one flesh, mingled with Christ in our communion, as the water and wine mingle in the cup we share? One. Inseparable. 

These readings point us to realities beyond marriage, challenging us to deepen our  fidelity to one another and to Christ as members of his One Body.  This indeed is a hard teaching for all of us, not just those struggling with marriage. Are we torn open by the sufferings of our brothers and sisters? Do we weep for each other as we would weep for a beloved spouse? We are no longer two, but one flesh. One Body. Inseparable. Christ.

Column: Doubt is one element of faith

My first husband, Thomas.

The line about doubt comes from the second volume of Tillich's Systematic Theology, and one that has pushed me to think about faith in the resurrection two thousand years out from the event.  But I find his comment about the relationship between faith and reason to push me even further:  "Faith transcends reason, reaching ecstatically beyond itself."  Passion is one thing, even for a scientist.  Ecstasy is quite another.

This column appeared at CatholicPhilly.com on 15 Apr 2015.

---

Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe. — John 20:25b

I recently wrote a short reflection which opened with a two-line sketch of the night my first husband died. A friend who read a draft at first thought I was writing about a bad dream, then when I assured her I was recounting a real event, still could not bring herself to believe I had been a widow. It seemed impossible to her, looking at my life now, that anything so terrible could have happened.

It made me think of Thomas in John’s Gospel. He, too, can’t believe what he is told by the others, despite all that he saw and experienced in Jesus’ company. He saw Lazarus raised from the dead, yet when he is told Jesus has returned, he still cannot grasp the reality. He doubted, so much so that two thousand years later he can’t shake the name, “Doubting Thomas.”

We don’t doubt, or at least we say we believe. Each Sunday we profess our faith, stating firmly that we believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was crucified, died and was buried, only to rise again on the third day. But I wonder if I shouldn’t doubt a bit more.

Has my faith in this extraordinary event become ordinary? Can I put myself in the place of the disciples after the resurrection, marveling at the impossibility of this, that someone could die on a cross, lie in a tomb for two nights, then appear to share a meal with me? Do I really grasp the enormity of the Resurrection? The reality of Christ’s presence, here and now?

“Doubt,” said theologian Paul Tillich, “is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.” We risk something essential when we put our faith in it. Not the risk of mistaking a fact — that Jesus, God and man, rose from the dead — but the risk that we might mistake who we are, who we are called to be. We risk ourselves.

Welcoming doubt into my faith lets me experience again the magnitude of Christ’s gift, invites me to say again and again, “My Lord, and my God,” and demands that I risk it all again, allowing myself to be made over in the image of Christ. This is my faith, one that transcends cold reason, a faith that is not just about knowing, but about being. I believe that Jesus rose, but I am a dwelling place for God in the spirit, a part of his resurrected body.

---

Breathe Easter now; you serged fellowships, 

You vigil-keepers with low flames decreased,
God shall o'er-brim the measures you have spent

With oil of gladness, for sackcloth and frieze

And the ever-fretting shirt of punishment

Give myrrhy-threaded golden folds of ease. 

Your scarce-sheathed bones are weary of being bent: 

Lo, God shall strengthen all the feeble knees.

— From Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. “Easter Communion”

Help me prepare to talk at the intersection of science and religion

Tomorrow night, I'm giving a public lecture at the Franklin Institute here in Philadelphia (yes, that Franklin...Benjamin, though he is not the founder), exploring the tensions and harmonies between science and religion. (If you are local and want to go, details are here.) It's one thing to profess my faith each Sunday with my parish community, quite another to stand up in front of a crowd that I do not know and do so. But I will. The start of my talk:

"Credo in unum Deum. I believe in God. I also believe in evolution, quantum mechanics, particle physics, anthropogenic climate change and the Big Bang Theory. I don't see these stances as incompatible, perhaps because I'm a quantum mechanic, which requires me to keep multiple realities in mind. Photons behave as particles and as waves. So do electrons, and even things as large as helium nuclei. God created human beings. Human beings are primates, and evolved from older primate species....

Faith cannot overrule science, and the popular view of Galileo notwithstanding, the Roman Catholic Church has not taught otherwise. "The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false." (St. Thomas Aquinas) Just because Genesis says that God told Noah to bring pairs of each animal, male and female, does not mean that each species necessarily has two sexes (worms...creatures that crawl on the ground...do not)..."

Part of the program is Q&A with the audience — if you were in the audience, what would you ask me about the intersections between science and religion?

Good luck with the raisins!

Good luck with the raisins!

The funeral for Uncle Norb was yesterday at the Mission (San Miguel Arcangel - founded in 1797, still in use as a parish church). The liturgy was well celebrated. We came back to the house to eat and talk. Between sandwiches and dessert my brother the Irreverent Reverend (brother #3) excuses himself from the table and his wife responds, "Good luck with the raisins!"

It's the punch line to a story about The Artistes (brother #2 and wife) where they take their leave from a breakfast table. The story, of course, must be now be retold for the benefit of the young ones, and newcomers. Once begun, the stories flow...old ones and new.

The newest is on me. I had asked my sister to read the Prayers of the Faithful and at dinner on Thursday (29 of us?!) had given her a copy. I did remember to mark up the copies for the first and second readings (Isaiah and Romans). However, I forgot to (1) mark the Prayer of the Faithful in the Rite, and therfore, failed to show my sister its location in said book and (far more critical) (2) did not mark up her practice copy. The set of intentions I selected included options for bishops/priests, religious, and laypersons. The text for the presider was also there (and not marked as such, you just gotta know, which I do, but my sainted sister does not).

At the proper time, Sainted Sister gets up, and I suddenly remember items (1) and (2). I'm trying to gesture to her to wait for the presider (who was wonderful about gently cuing everyone involved). She gets that I'm trying to tell her something, but not what, so decides she will just plunge ahead. She does. The presider lets her go. She reads the brief introduction. All is well, intention follows intention. Suddenly I hear her say, "for our brother Norbert, bishop and priest...." Oh. No.

You can hear a pin drop in the place, but we are well trained. She says, "we pray to the Lord." We respond, "Lord, hear our prayer." I'm wincing, waiting for her to go on to the one about religious, but the presider smoothly retrieves the strands and launches into the concluding prayer.

I apologize at the end of Mass, but by now my brothers have hold of the tale (and my tail) and are lovingly describing (and embellishing) the expressions that swept across my face as this whole thing goes down.

Lord, hear my prayer.

When Love doesn't look like rescue

A friend lost her adult son this week, suddenly, wrenchingly. When I spoke to her, I had no platitudes, she said she had no words. What remains is presence — the promise that whatever road we have to walk, or be sent careening down, out of control, whatever we end up carrying, whatever wounds are ours to bear, we will not be alone. Robin's post at Metanoia today points to two reflections that speak to this eloquently: read what Ryan Duns SJ and Karen Gerstenberger have to say about God, faith and suffering.

"What can we do to help?" wondered so many people today. There are things to be done, to be sure. But from my experience, there is nothing we can do to help. But we can be. Be with her. That is Love.

What I didn't say to her? I can't imagine what you are going through.

Column: My eyes stream with tears

My sister was married in this church, my mother buried from the parish. It's taken years to repair the damage in town. The last stone in the rebuilt middle school was set just a few week back; the mission church opened for Christmas. There is still a steaming sulfurous hold in the parking lot next to the town library. You can smell it from the highway.

What it will take to repair Haiti, and how long, I suspect we truly don't comprehend.

This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 21 January 2010.


Let my eyes stream with tears day and night, without rest, over the great destruction which overwhelms the virgin daughter of my people, over her incurable wound. — Jer. 14:17

The strange thing about earthquakes is how swiftly the change comes. There is no warning. No darkening sky, no rising waters. Suddenly, the earth shifts, shakes and moans. It’s over almost before you can grasp what is happening. But there is no mistaking what it leaves behind. Death and destruction.

Seven years ago, just before Christmas, the phone rang. A quake a third as strong as the one that leveled Port-au-Prince, Haiti, had struck; its epicenter just 20 miles away from my parents’ house. A friend was killed along with a co-worker when the building where she worked collapsed. My parents’ parish church was so badly damaged that a year later my mother’s funeral Mass would be held in the Franciscan novices’ recreation room, people and flowers spilling into the courtyard. Death and destruction, but on a scale I could comprehend, even as I grieved the losses.

The death and destruction in Port-au-Prince are incomprehensible. The bits that I read this morning spoke of a city paralyzed, of darkness, of unalloyed suffering. I could hardly bear to contemplate this reality; my eyes literally streamed with tears. Yet, at the very end of one article, I saw a sudden flicker of light in the midst of the excruciating pain. As darkness fell, the reporter wrote he could hear a single line in Creole sung over and over in the courtyard of the hospital and outside in the streets. “Beni Swa Leternel.” Blessed be the name of the Lord.

This is a faith that is as incomprehensible as the destruction. I am reminded of Jesuit Dean Brackley’s amazement at the fearless faith of the women of El Salvador, even as war raged around them. “Miré!” one woman told him — “Look! When you’ve hunted for your children among piles of corpses, you are no longer afraid. They can’t do anything to you anymore.”

If I ever fail to see that faith is God’s gift and cannot be destroyed by anything of this earth, nor achieved on our own, these words and the hymns sung in the streets of Port-au-Prince are humbling reminders.

Alfred Delp, S.J., himself awaiting execution by the Nazis, wondered how anyone could freely love God when disaster descends: “When life itself transfixes a person, tying him hand and foot, shutting him up in a prison with no possible outlet, of what use then are all decisions to live abundantly?” He goes on to answer himself, “The love of God, and the patient loving hands of those whose lives have not been afflicted…will help us.”

The people of Haiti are imprisoned in the rubble of their city, stripped of everything, in deep need of the loving hands of those of us who have not been afflicted. But from their poverty and pain, they offer us a rich gift and a challenge. They make manifest the words of Paul to the Romans: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life…neither the present nor the future, neither height nor depth nor any other creature, will be able to separate us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus.” And they challenge us to desire that same unshakeable faith.

In return, we can offer our help, not just now, but during the long process of rebuilding; not just the practical, but our prayers, that the faith of those in Haiti may be sustained through these dark days and difficult years ahead. A group of us from around the world, having exhausted for the moment what little we can on the practical front, are stopping on the hour to pray for our brothers and sisters in Haiti. I invite you to join us. We have faith that it will help.

---

The photos is of the interior of the church at Mission San Miguel Arcangel. Taken in 1934 by Roger Sturtevant of the National Park Service.