What happens, metaphysically, I mean, when you go to church and the topic of the sermon is Central America based on Luke 4? Or, like my friend Jim Kline, you are handed at the Mission Church in Santa Clara, a Pax Christi Pledge, while you work for the real peace movement, Lockheed? How are you supposed to react when the high point of the Mass turns out to be shaking hands with a stranger, believer though he be, or hugging the old lady in the next aisle?
What happens is that you begin to wonder if this is all there is to religion, if there is any way out of a totally man-constructed world. Can anything, as Plato said of human love, crash in on us from our outside, anything not defined by the current ideologies? If you ever had such wonderments, this corner of Catholicism-in-Crisis is for you.
You thought you had read in Aristotle that true friendship takes a long time, right? Now you are suddenly encouraged to embrace the person in the next chair — pews now being out and found mostly in antique auctions in Watsonville, California. St. Louis pubs, I noticed, were full of stained glass and R. C. church trappings.
What ever happened also to grace and reason? Are the political philosophers the only ones talking about them? Well, if you are younger, you never heard tell of grace or reason. If you are older, you are informed that process theology or liberation theology or feminist theology, or some such, has made them obsolete, even though John Paul II, “in his quaint Polish way,” (that is how you brush him off if you don’t like what he says), keeps talking about Thomas Aquinas, as if he had something to tell us.
Let me warn you, however, there are folks out there watching all this jazz, folks who had “hoped,” folks curious to see if the churches in fact have anything left to say that cannot be found in the ideological handbooks, now replete with Christian terminology. We can hope, Gerard Frost wrote from London, that
the churches will rediscover their traditional role of administering to spiritual needs rather than providing ersatz religion and abandoning religion for secular views. For while it is true that the peace movement resembles a secular religion, churches have come to resemble the peace movement. (Wall Street Journal, October 26, 1983)
Our society is full of “rights-talk”, which, on examination, turns out to imply that someone else, that is, the government, owes me everything I need for my well-being and total ontological satisfaction. Even though such talks produces mainly envy and discontent, its own spiritual life becomes exhausted in “causes” — the poor, the plight of sea otters in Monterey Bay, prisoners in Lorton, nuclear war, overpopulation in Kansas, the disappearance of zinc in the soil in the South Island of New Zealand. Nothing is left, absolutely nothing, including the causes.
With not a few oldsters slow enough to suspect that the heady enthusiasms of recent decades were headed off into the clouds, we have, I think, a fairly large younger generation, who have spent all their lives in CCD or Sunday School or in the colleges, the latter perhaps our least “liberal” institution, who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the “rights movement” and the “causes,” but who suspect that this is not all there is, even to achieve the rights and the causes.
So is there some way out? Surely, we ought to build a better mousetrap and stuff? Well, of course, but I am tired of being told that mousetraps, nuclear and otherwise, are what human life is about. I am also tired of people who cannot even build mousetraps blaming all the world’s problems on those who can.
The great need is to rediscover the transcendent reality at the core of our being. Religion has been telling us very little about this of late. Each human person, including those in wombs about to be chopped up, is created as a gift, unique, with a destiny to be with God, not a movement. God’s love does not obviously avoid our neighbors as if somehow our mother and our father’s love were unrelated to our coming to be. But our mothers and our fathers are also finite beings, like ourselves. We are each created to everlastingness, however long we might last trying to figure it all out. This is what we are, and this is what our walkings and talkings, sit-tings and yellings, are all about.
Transcendent beings can pass through life without noticing anything but abstractions and collectivities. How sad this is. The classic function of religion was to save us from such preachments. It still is, if we can believe the Pope, who just happens to make more sense than anyone else these days.
So the first thing I have to say is this: each of us has a transcendent destiny, which is the reality of our lives. When we discover it in us, we can be friends, or sometimes it works the other way around. Starting here, we can look at this world, not be consumed by it, not miss its beauty, not think it unimportant, only not the most important thing there is.