After the Future

Fear and Desire; Grace and Freedom

Last week I quoted Jackson Lear's Nation article about how new atheists like Sam Harris aren't just reductionist in their rejection of religion, but their embrace of an aggressive ideological positivism can be just as dangerous as any fanaticism that comes from the right.  Right-wing ideologues are more in the news these days, but I think an argument can be made that the Harrises and Kurzweils of the world are wittingly or unwittingly working for an alternative, transhuman future that is more ominous than anything envisioned in the feverish imaginations on the Right.

Atheists get things mixed up when they blame religion when the real problem is an unbalanced ideology, whether secular or religious in its style. Religious wars were the cause of absurd levels of violence and destruction in 17th century Europe, but the most massively destructive violence in Europe's recent history has been motivated by secular ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's purges were not motivated by religious zeal. Religious attitudes and behaviors can be a  part of an ideology, but insofar as a religion has a genuine faith dimension to it, that part of it cannot be contained within any ideology, and it usually works at cross purposes with fanatical ideological agendas.

More Thoughts on "All Things Shining"

 

 

I’ve been thinking more about All Things Shining and why I am drawn to it and why I have problems with it. I think the easiest way for me explain my thinking about the book is by reference to the diagram above.  ATS is Quadrant 1 thinking, and it’s very interesting and helpful within that context, but the thinking in other quadrants is also useful, even if it is out of season. I’ll explain the seasonal logic of this diagram below, but first a word about my approach to the history of ideas in the West, which is really what ATS is all about.

My basic approach to the great thinkers in the history of the West is not to judge him as right or wrong, but to see their philosophy as a more or less successful attempt to articulate a fundamental insight or intuition that tells us something important. The problems arise when these thinkers or their followers get inflated notions about how their philosophy has some exclusive claim on the truth. None does—each is a limited perspective, but this kind of perspectivalism doesn’t mean that what comes into view within a particular perspective isn’t a significant truth. 

So it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with Descartes or Schopenhauer or Plato. The challenge is to look at their philosophies as poem-like texts that reveal or disclose aspects of Being that cumulatively tell us about what it means to be human in a world. It’s silly to say that one was wrong or that his mistake is at the root of some fundamental cultural malady. They are spokespersons or articulators of a particular perspective, and our task as their readers is to accept the validity of what comes into view within that perspective, and then to see it as best we can in relationship to other perspectives. The diagram above is a scheme I’ve been tinkering with over the years that attempts to understand the relationships between these perspectives.

History & Meaning

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
--Blaise Pascal 

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.  --Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

“If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.”--St. John of the Cross

Most people would say that their lives have meaning. It's not something they think a lot about. It just does, and it does because each of us has been socialized into a set of meanings about which we had no choice. Custom is, in this sense, our nature, and these meanings given by custom or tradition are in the background for all of us, even if we consciously reject some of them somewhere along the way. And while I do not want to suggest that I undervalue the importance of given meanings, it's also clear that in the modern world custom and tradition are not what they used to be. And clearly the pluralization of custom in a globalizing world has a fragilizing effect on human nature--neither are we humans what we used to be.  There are opportunities, but also risks that come with this changed context in which humans come to define who they are what they are capable of. 

It should be clear that there is something essential in the spirit of modernity, coupled with its capitalist economic engine, that destroys customs and traditions and replaces them with other practices that tend to have a soul-flattening effect.   Everywhere modernity has established itself traditions and customary practices have died. Islam is quite right to see modernity (or westernization or globalization) as a threat. It will destroy its traditions as it has destroyed the traditions of the West. And the hyper-cerebral logic of modernity is now turning on itself attacking even the traditions of rationality that have developed since the Enlightenment. 

And the result, of course, is social fragmentation and with it the slow destruction of any sense of robust 'given' collective meanings, and with that increased loneliness and alienation, loss of depth and texture in our experience, anomie and a growing sense that nothing is really important, and in the final analysis all that matters is our relative comfort or discomfort. It's in this sense that modernity has had a soul-flattening effect.

If things continue on their present course, we will have soon enough a globalized world in which all collective social meanings except commercial/consumerist meanings will have withered away. Other meanings, insofar as one can find them, will be a matter for individuals and small groups, who will live as islands surrounded by an ocean dominated by a globalcommercial culture that will produce, already is producing, crude Donald-Trump-type culture heroes, elites committed to their own aggrandizement--and thought well of for it, because, according to the new collective values emerging, they are embraced as life's winners. Who are  the winners and who the losers, who the master, who the slaves?--that's the only thing that matters in such collective values constellation. And it's a world in which the masses will be increasingly anesthetized by hi-tech bread and circuses, or preoccupied in passively observing elites as they play their power and sex games with one another on tabloid tv and computer screens and iPhones.

In the meanwhile the older traditions continue to provide something of a meaning backdrop, but do so without much, if any, vitality. There are exceptions in pockets here and there, but they are moribund. These dying traditions still provide a certain kind of order, but they no longer have any real life; they no longer have any eros. They are like dead trees that maintain the shape given to them by the life force that once suffused them, but which now are sapless and brittle. So "higher" meaning in the modern age has withered into boring, eros-less abstractions, and its sapless cultural forms have become what African-Americans call “whitebread”--bland, textureless, soulless. Sure, there is a superstructure of meaning, and most people find a way to live a life within it, but it won’t take much to blow it away. And a storm, she's a brewin'.

***

Quote of the Day: Cormac McCarthy

Black: “What would you do if Jesus was to speak to you?”

White: “Do you imagine that he might?”

Black: “No, I don’t. But, but, I’own know.”

White: “I’m not virtuous enough.”

Black: “No, professor, it ain’t nothing like that. You ain’t got to be virtuous. You just got to be quiet.”

Source: From his play, The Sunset Limited

As a side note It's interesting that Berkeley Heideggerian Bert Dreyfus's and his former student and now chair of Harvard Philosopy Sean Kelly's "All Things Shining" is making something of a splash in the zeitgeist. It's Heidegger for "masses", which is about attunement to Being through receptivity and gratitude. Jesus isn't the hero of their story, though--Homer and Melville are.

I'll have more to say about that book when I have more time. 

The Judaeo-Christian Cosmogonic Myth

I think that one of the biggest problems with the contemporary West lies in its inability to  feel the sacred. And this lack of feeling makes it almost impossible to frame a plausible cosmology open to transcendence. We look at the starry sky above us and we feel something that science simply is inadequate to explain, and yet moderns feel silly if they discuss seriously ideas about the cosmos on terms different than those that Carl Sagan would approve of. And yet when we read about the cosmogonies of the ancients, we sense they were onto something that we have lost the capacity to appreciate. We want to retrieve it, but we are shy about it; we study these texts and other artifacts of premodern consciousness and talk about them in a kind of scholarly way so as not to let on that we think that maybe they knew something that we don't. But we dare not seriously their stories--safer to assume they are fanciful fictions.

Modern consciousness has squeezed out the mystery in things that naive premodern consciousness took for granted, and so, echoing Paul Ricoeur, I'd argue that we need to develop a new mindset that embraces a 'second naivete' that would once again be capable of experiencing what premoderns experienced and then tried to represent in their myths. The gospel tells us that unless we become like children, we cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. It does not mean to regress into childishness, but to open up the parts of the soul that we have closed down, the parts that are open to  the enchantment in Being, to be adults but to also the recover something lost. That's what I understand second naivete to be.

In what I write here I assume that human consciousness as it is currently structured cognizes in its ordinary states only a small fraction of the full spectrum of Being. Second naivete, therefore, is open to the idea of a supersensible, supra-rational realm that is wrapped around us and interpenetrates what we experience in ordinary sense-centered consciousness.  A second naivete is open to the idea that people in every generation have experiences in which clues, indicators, epiphanies are given concerning the existence of this supersensible, supra-rational realm. The difference between moderns and premoderns lies in that moderns think these people are crazy and premoderns thought they were shamans, initiates, or saints.

I think that the postmodern cultural paradigm that will arise in the coming decades will draw deeply from what the premoderns understood but which was rejected as incompatible with modern Enlightenment rationality. As we move further along into a globalizing world there is going to be enormous pressure for cultural fusion. One effect will be that as traditional societies absorb modern consciousness, modern societies will start once again to absorb elements of premodern consciousness. To take a fairly trivial example--look at how the martial arts of traditional Asia have come to dominate the action-movie genre. Some of this is nostalgia, but it doesn't have to be. Nostalgia is the desire to go native in the past, and that's not what I see going on there. It's rather that things moderns have filtered out are beginning to leak back in.  A very interesting book that  documents how this is happening all over the place is Erik Davis's Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.

I am very interested to watch developments within Tibetan Buddhism, because theirs is a living tradition has maintained a very powerful and vital link to the premodern while not seeming to be particularly threatened by the modern. Tibetan Buddhists know who they are, and they are interested to integrate what the West knows with what they know, and so it will be interesting to see if they become absorbed into modernity as Protestant Christianity has done, or whether they will absorb modernity and use what they absorb to further develop their tradition.

***

The Mythos of Redemptive Violence vs. the Christian Chiastic Mythos

Myth provides the framework for any comprehension we have about moral truth--that's the way it was for the ancients, and that's the way it is for us. Mythos operates at a level deeper than what we call "belief systems", because belief systems are too rational, too open to comparison in a market of competing belief systems. Belief systems are profane ideologies even if they are religious, like Christian or Islamic fundamentalism. Myth, like poetry, uses language to represent what is incomprehensible in terms of our ordinary states of consciousness. It establishes some common ground with the familiar, but draws us into unfamiliar depths.

Myth thrives, therefore, only where there is the possibility to experience depth upon depth of sacred meaning, and fundamentalism and rationalism are terrified of depths because they lose control there. Mythos withers in the fluorescent glare of a hypertrophied rationality, and it suffocates in the oxygenless chambers of fundamentalism and dogmatism. For mythos to be mythos it has to deliver a sense of the sacred, a sense of the near presence of the gods, of angels, of the ancestors, of the beloved dead, and that we are all part of a cosmic web of relationships which is there for us to discover if we have any desire to understand what the meaning of our lives is. If we have any desire to understand what it means to live a good life, that is, to have some understanding about why what we do or fail to do matters, why our life adds up to something or fails to.

What we know is dwarfed by what we do not know. And yet whatever part of that ocean we have explored and have gotten to know is connected to the vastness that lies beyond it. And we can deduce some things about what the ocean is like elsewhere based on what we have learned about it locally, but such deductions are provisional at best. How the ocean works near the surface is quite different from how it works in its deepest depths, and what might be true about its laws here could be very different from its laws there. And yet there is a continuum that connects there with here.

Rest in Peace, Bob Smith

I've just returned from the funeral of Bob Smith, one of my oldest and dearest friends.

He was undergoing cancer treatment, but his prognosis was good.  I spoke to him a week or so before he died and he sounded great.  One person who spoke to him the day before he died said he sounded great, very upbeat and eager to get back to work at Cornell where he was Catholic Chaplain for the last eight years. Last Tuesday morning, while in the hospital for treatment, he developed  a stomach hemorrhage very suddenly and essentially he bled to death. He was 78.

Some Thoughts on Christian Liberty

Whatever the nature of my politics, it should be clear that I am by no means a theological liberal. I acknowledge that in order to develop a high level of spiritual maturity, it is necessary to restrain one's open-ended freedom in order to submit to one kind or another of spiritual discipline, just as it is necessary for a musician to submit to the discipline of his or her instrument. You can noodle away on your fiddle, or you can find a teacher and really work at it. It's the same with any kind of spiritual development; most people are noodlers, and it comes down to a fundamental resistance to submit to a basic discipline. But the goal of restricting one's freedom in the short run has the longer term goal to be trained to become more free.  The highly trained, disciplined musician is freer because he can play things that are impossible for the noodler. The goal of submitting to a discipline is to obtain a higher level of freedom and capability--not endless submission.

The Post-Secularist Age

I've believed for some time that the religious right is fighting an enemy in secularism that is now a paper tiger. The culture war between the religious right and the secular left has more to do with the past than the future--it was a modern battle, and we are no longer moderns. It seems to be a fight that people who undertake it enjoy because it makes them feel as though they stand for something, but it's as pointless as standing for monarchy or the Confederacy. You can make all the eloquent arguments you want about this position or that, but it's all hot air unless it has some grounding in the spirit of the times. The Age of Reason is as dead as the Age of Faith. We're entering a new era now, and it's not clear what it will be like, but we have a few indicators to work with.  I think it can be described in a preliminary way as "post-secularist."

The "Lost" Sensibility

Heather Havrileski at Salon doesn't have it:

Damn you, "Lost"! We went and jumped on your bandwagon way back in the first season, got sucked into your endless jungley maze and suspenseful chords, and waited breathlessly for the next shoe to drop, over and over again. Remember when that was still fun? Remember? Henry Gale's googly-eyed provocations? Michael shooting Ana Lucia in the gut? The impenetrable, nostalgia-inducing mysteries of the Dharma Initiative? Thanks to the brilliant character studies of the first season (we ignored the dumb monsters), thanks to the genius twists and turns of the second and third seasons, we're doomed to do our penance as the whole tale unravels in a messy heap. . . .

Back then, like teenagers at a Baptist retreat, we thought the big, bad world would add up to something, that every confusing twist was laden with hidden meaning. Now we know better. Now we get up in the morning and put on our Sunday best and trudge off to church on the off-chance that the Lord Himself will appear and shine His glory on us in person. Now we watch because we were once "Lost" fans, and here it is the final season, and there are only a handful of episodes left. Even though the long-awaited answers we're looking for are offered in such blunt, unimaginative language that we feel like we're reading first drafts: "I'm a smoke monster." "You're going to have to kill the devil." "It's all meaningless if I have to force them to do anything." And if we wanted to waste six years in a Judeo-Christian allegory, we would've just followed a Jehovah's Witness home a long time ago. At least their Armageddon should be a little bit gripping and suspenseful. (5/8)

Neither does Laura Miller at Salon after watching the finale, and there are many others who felt the show was a "long con". But needless to say I disagree, and I think the difference lies in there being two fundamentally different postmodern sensibilities. Havrileski and Miller represent one, and the Lost writers represent the other. The first is one that with its arms folded and foot tapping, suspicious about everything, fears to be hoodwinked. The second is arms open with second naivete ready to embrace everything that has the slightest scent of truth. Count me in with the second group.

Lost was remarkable for its ability to be both complex and multilayered and yet to end with a theme that was simple, clear, resonant, and deeply human. It was a show that was full of ideas but was never just a head trip. In the end it was about the characters and their relationships, and it was about why those relationships matter and with meanings that might be described as having cosmic import.

Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

Why was he a Catholic?  Because he believed that the Church's teachings are true; and because the Church, in his view, stood above and apart from the present age, which he called the age of the "theorist-consumer."  In his view, the present age has no use for anything that cannot be bought and sold or theorized about.  So the present age has no use for Christian faith.  But the believer, he thought, should count this as an advantage, and see the present age as preferable to "Christendom," when the churches prospered. "In the old Christendom," he explained, "everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it.  But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony: which is to say, open to signs."  From Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, p. 460.

That encapsulates the point of my "Cultural Identity" posts (here and here). Catholicism in the U.S., like the conservative strains of Judaism, had been until recently countercultural, i.e., countercultural to the mainstream culture defined by the tension in values between Calvinistic moralism on one hand and rationalist modernism on the other--both swimming in a sea of materialist consumerism. The Catholic world I grew up in was in most respects the one that Percy entered into in the 1940s when he became a Catholic. That Catholic world had very little consonance with and to a large degree stood in contradiction to Calvinism, rationalist modernism, and materialism--but that Catholic world no longer exists. After the Second Vatican Council, Catholics stopped living in their own countercultural world and started living in Calvinist/Modernist/Consumerist America.

Ideas Matter II

I embrace the idea that we humans never know the truth in any direct way, and that all we have is provisional "interpretations". But some interpretations are better than others because there is a Good that those interpretations bear a closer or more distant relationship to. I know that this is not how moderns think, but I'm trying to make the case that we are no longer moderns and that our thinking remains modern merely by force of habit, because something better has not yet been proposed. I see the breakdown in modern habits of mind as an opportunity to recover important elements of Western thinking that have been forgotten or mistakenly rejected because of the materialist or uber-rationalist biases of modern habits of thought.

Those biases are gradually losing their hold on the mainstream culture, and the crisis in political Liberalism is closely related to the diminishing influence of those biases in our common imaginary.  Right wing sub-rationality is having a field day because there is no robust opposition to it. I think that right-wing sub-rationalism is attractive to even thoughtful moderates because the stench of the decaying corpse of Liberalism is repugnant, and average Americans will naturally choose the  alternative that has vitality. At least the Right has a pulse. It may or may not have its facts straight, but who cares? Liberals stand for no deeply grounded principles one can care deeply about. They seem to be all about expediency, and because there is nothing they will go to the mat for, the so-called reasonableness of Liberalism doesn't stand a chance against the passionate intensity of the right. Ideas matter, but they are useless unless they touch the heart, stimulate the imagination, and motivate action.

So my argument here is that Liberalism is dangerous, not because of what it affirms, which within its limitations is unobjectionable, but because of what it cannot affirm--a plausible, philosophy of history or an ontological narrative of history grounded in supra-rational ideals that would inspire and give direction to progressive action. Liberalism as a mindset has no sense of its future possibility. It is dangerous because it creates a vacuum that is otherwise filled by more primitive passions. The bourgeois Enlightenment progressive narrative embraced and shaped to a large degree by a guy like Benjamin Franklin no longer inspires; neither does revolutionary fervor excited by Marxist eschatology. Because there is no inspiring alternative narrative to motivate the Left, the Right has an open field in which to run. The passionate intensity of the Right remains ascendant until it is countered by an alternative that is emotionally and spiritually robust enough to challenge it.

That's enough on this for now, but I want to explore this theme in some depth. I'm hoping that there are others out there who are like me who want to think about this, too--people who support Liberalism in the political sphere even though they reject it in the cultural sphere, the sphere of thought and of deeply felt value. We support it as a bulwark against the dark sub-rationalism of the Right in the hopes of buying time until a compelling supra-rational imagination of future possibility might take hold. The heroes of supra-rational inspiration to which I would point are Gandhi, King, Mandela.  Nothing short of that kind of inspiration will get us out of this mess. I certainly don't have definitive answers or an alternative vision that would even begin to be widely embraced, but I do have some ideas that I would like to use this blog to think out loud about.  In coming weeks, I'll be writing posts entitled "Ideas Matter III, IV, etc. 

The Zeitgeist of Unbelief

[Ed. note: I'll be revisiting several older posts with the idea of trying to regain my footing concerning the cultural-sphere themes that have always been the primary concern of ATF. Several of the key posts in this area are found in the "Don't Miss" section on the left side of the page. But I feel the need to bring other posts out of hiding if for no other reason than to remind myself of what I was once thinking about these themes before being distracted by the slow-motion train wreck in the political sphere. I'm hoping for the best but prepared for the worst in the political sphere, but in the meantime, I hope at least some ATF readers will re-engage with some of these ideas regarding whither the culture. This post comes from 11/4/07.]

From Taylor's A Secular Age:

We saw how for Providential Deism the principal claim to God's benevolence is precisely the nature of his unchanging order in creation. . . For those who take this view, the noblest, highest truth must have this general form.  Personal interventions, even those of a God, would introduce something arbitrary, some element of subjective desire, into the picture, and the highest truths about reality must be beyond this element.  From this standpoint, a faith in a personal God belongs to a less mature standpoint, where one still needs the sense of a personal relation to things; one is not yet ready to face the ultimate truth.  A line of thinking of the nature, steadily gathering strength, runs through modern thought and culture, from Spinoza, through Goethe, to our present time.

Now I think that an important part of the force which drove many people to see science and religion as incompatible, and to opt for the former, comes from this crucial difference in form. In other words, the success of science built on and helped to entrench in them the sense that the Christian religion they were familiar with belonged to an earlier, more primitive or less mature form of understanding.

Now this bent to impersonality was greatly reinforced by the new cosmic imaginary.  The vast universe, in which one could easily feel no sense of a personal God or benign purpose, seemed to be impersonal in the most forbidding sense, blind and indifferent to our fate.  An account in terms of impersonal causal law seemed called for by the new depth sense of reality in the universe.

This inference was the stronger in that the stance of disengaged reason, construing the world as it does a devoid of human meaning, fits better with the impersonal picture.  But this stance is part of the modern identity of the buffered self, which thus finds a natural affinity for the impersonal order. . . .

But other things too, tend to make us align materialism with adulthood.  A religious outlook may easily be painted as one which offers greater comfort, which shields us from the truth of an indifferent universe, which is now felt as a strong possibility with the modern cosmic imaginary.  Religion is afraid to face the fact that we are alone in the universe and without cosmic support.  As children, we do indeed, find this hard to face, but growing up is becoming ready to look reality in the face.

Of course this story will probably make little sense to someone who is deeply engaged in a life of prayer or meditation, or other serious spiritual discipline, because this involves in its own way growing beyond and letting go of more childish images of God.  But if our faith has remained at the stage of the immature images, then the story that materialism equals maturity can seem plausible.  And if in addition, one has been convinced that manliness is the key virtue, then the appeal to go over can appear irresistible. (pp. 362-64)

A couple of points:  First, the impersonal Deism of the eighteenth-century philosophes, after a few decades of Romantic protest, easily slid into the scientific materialism of the nineteenth century. This change in the social imaginary of the culture's elites had an enormous influence in shaping the Western zeitgeist and changed the imagination of reality wherever Western ideas were influential. While this is a story that many found compelling, many then and now for good reason did and do not. But the dominant social imaginary for even Christian fundamentalists changed dramatically. Whatever their beliefs may be, even religious believers live in an experientially disenchanted world. 

Ideas Matter

[Ed. note: I'm reposting this 2005 piece as a follow up to "The Communion of Saints" post I put up over the weekend.[

My goal in what I’ve written in the "Sinning Originally" pieces is not to argue for a position; it’s rather to describe the world as it appears from within the framework I have developed over the years. It contrasts dramatically with the framework of pagan naturalism, which has been the basic script governing the modern narrative.  It’s closer to, but also pretty different from, the framework within which most conventional Christians operate. 

I have said elsewhere that I’m a Catholic because I believe the whole thing--the fundamental doctrinal, sacramental, and liturgical package makes beautiful, profound sense to me. (The ecclesial power structure is pretty corrupting, but that’s to be expected because all power structures are corrupting.) And it’s important to say that it’s just not some rigid, doctrinally pure Catholicism that makes sense to me—much in Hinduism also makes sense to me, and I have also learned much from shamanic religions and from Kaballah, the Christian Hermetic tradition, and from the Orthodox Sophianic tradition.  And it all connects, and provides for me a framework that is always in the background of everything I write here. For me the word catholic is just right--all embracing,  broad, synthetic, more interested in connections than distinctions, but at the same time true to it's own Christocentric logic.

Ideas matter; they either imprison or liberate. One’s ethics follow from one’s metaphysics. One’s behavior in the world follows from one's beliefs, whether consciously chosen or unconsciously assimilated, about the fundamental principles that govern the way the world works.

But any belief system is just a complex delusional mental superstructure if it doesn’t make a practical difference in the way we live, and ultimately the difference test is 'by their fruits you will know them.' Most people’s behavior in the world is determined by unconscious instinctual impulses.  They may have a very noble ideational superstructure that makes them feel good, but their behavior in the world is just as unconscious and instinctual as the next guy's. For most people what they think is spiritual is just socialization to be well-behaved. Their lives are still mostly instinct driven, and their religious ideas are sterile. They effect no transformations in the soul.

For me the fruits test has more to do with how ideas affect the disposition of the soul to be open, supple, and fertile. Christianity is not about being well behaved. It’s about being subversively productive, bearing fruit.  This is a theme that comes up repeatedly in the gospels. The bottom line is not whether you minded your Ps and Qs, but whether you made a difference, whether you brought something new into the world, no matter how humble or innocuous.  In other words, has one been an infusion point in the world for the liberating grace that seeks always to penetrate the regime of delusion and to subvert it.   

The only measure for the success or failure of a human life that matters is the degree to which one was an effective infusion point.  It matters hardly at all what one’s conscious beliefs are if he has lived a fundamentally sterile or fruitful life. It doesn’t matter whether someone is Muslim, Christian, or atheist. What matters most is the disposition of the soul toward the ubiquitous, superabundant presence of grace, whether recognized as such or not. Are you open or are you closed? If you’re open and you act, you’re an infusion point, and the world is changed. And ideas matter to the degree that they open one up or close one off to the possibility of this 'more' breaking in from outside the system. If you believe you live in a closed system, then you think and behave like a prisoner.

The great saints in all cultures are those through whom this grace, this 'more' from outside the system, pours into the world in torrents. But for the rest of us it’s enough that we be cracks in the wall through which it trickles. I’m not talking about anything humanly spectacular here. The simplest acts of kindness, of loyalty, of speaking the truth, can be infusion points of grace into the world, and they may bear fruit in ways that we never know. It’s only important that we are open and that we act. “Think not of the harvest, says St. James in his epistle, “but only of proper sowing.”

While the obsession with doctrinal purity is to me absurd and often a sign of mental illness, nevertheless, the mental framework within which one lives, depending on its suppleness or rigidity, affects the disposition of the soul. What you believe and think makes a difference. What you believe can open up possibilities, and it can close them off. It can lead to cynicism or naïve idealism, to slavishness or proud resistance. The soul suffers significant consequences if the mind is seduced by cultish ideologies of the left or right. It is precisely from these mind prisons that so many people need to be liberated, and religious fanatics are among those in direst need. 

The Pharisees in the gospel stories are the paradigm for this kind of enslavement to religious ideology. The obsession with correct behavior and correct belief becomes a wall that closes one off from grace. I’ve called it elsewhere whited-sepulcher syndrome. By their stench you will know them.

Which leads me back to what I want say about Original Sin. I think it makes a difference if you live within a mental framework in which this concept plays a role.  I want to  explain how it has come to make  a difference to me.  But this is long enough for today.  More another day.  For Part IV, click here.

The Communion of Saints

There are so many more like them. There’s Father Mario Falconi, an Italian priest who refused to leave Rwanda during the genocide and bravely saved 3,000 people from being massacred. There’s Father Mario Benedetti, a 72-year-old Italian priest based in Congo who fled with his congregation when their town was attacked by a brutal militia. Now Father Mario lives side by side with his Congolese congregants in the squalor of a refugee camp in southern Sudan, struggling to get schooling for their children.

It’s because of brave souls like these that I honor the Catholic Church. I understand why many Americans disdain a church whose leaders are linked to cover-ups and antediluvian stances on women, gays and condoms — but the Catholic Church is far larger than the Vatican.

And unless we’re willing to endure beatings alongside Father Michael, unless we’re willing to stand up to warlords with Sister Cathy, we have no right to disparage them or their true church. (Source: Nicholas Kristof)

Indeed, the Catholic Church is far larger than the Vatican. It should be obvious, but I guess there are Kristoff types who need to be surprised from time to time by encounters with people who don't fit the stereotype.

I haven't been writing about all the stuff going on about Ratzinger and his involvement in the Catholic child rape scandals mainly because I have so little affection for him to begin with. Since the 80s I've seen him as representing pretty much everything that I see as wrong with the Church, and it would be too easy for me to pile on. Nevertheless, I suspect he's getting a raw deal when it comes to many of the accusations aimed at him. It's probably a lot more complicated. It almost always is.

But I think that what I wish people outside the church understood better is that there are two Church cultures. There is the corrupt, Byzantine culture of the Vatican, which St. Peter himself, if he were to show up, couldn't clean up. Individuals come and go, but that culture remains from century to century. It's a nauseating scene, and I just hope the whole faux-medieval construct part of it collapses from its own dead weight. Maybe something saner and more Christian would emerge from the rubble.  But the Vatican and the people who run it don't matter so much as they think and as most outsiders have been led to believe. It represents the public face, but not the church's deepest, inmost reality. 

"The Church," as St. Augustine said, "is a whore, but she's my mother." That tension in the life of faith has always been there and always will be. There is a second culture of people who have been deeply nourished by the deeper reality, and that culture is the Communion of Saints. The first culture, the unfortunate public face, is relatively unimportant for the life of the Church; the second culture lives from a kind of Mother love that sustains and justifies its existence, no matter what else might be true about it.

***

Yesterday I caught the last segment of "This American Life" (starting around minute 38) in which Dan Savage, the Seattle-based, gay, sex-advice columnist, was talking mockingly about his having been brought up a Catholic and movingly about his deceased mother and his mother's Catholicism. She sounded from his description of her like a great lady. He talked about how since his mother's death, despite his loathing just about everything the Church stands for, he finds himself sitting in a Catholic church several times a week.