Conversion and the Paschal Mystery

In my previous post, I suggested that Alasdair MacIntyre's insights on conversion (what he might prefer to call 'resolution of an epistemological crisis), based on the writings of Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos, have interesting implications for the Christian life. This is not surprising, given M's clear self-identification as a Catholic (he begins The Tasks of Philosophy with reflections on Pope John Paul II's encylcical Fides et Ratio, "Faith and Reason").

In a previous series of posts I developed a distinction between the modern ideal of autonomy, which prizes self-determination, and Christian freedom, which emphasizes the ability to choose good over evil. One of the great difficulties of living a genuine Christian life today is that we must constantly be converted from 'autonomy' to a fuller understanding of Christian freedom. That sounds easy; but in fact it produces in us a never-ending series of 'epistemological crises', if we truly believe that our goal is God and that God is infinitely greater than we are. We should expect, in other words, to be confounded regularly by our encounter with God and His invitation to discipleship.

So far, I doubt most Christians would have qualms with that. On the other hand, practically speaking, this is far more difficult than most people would like to admit, especially living as we Americans do in relative security and wealth. Let us demonstrate with an example from Monday's gospel, Mark 10: 17-27. A rich man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to be saved. It is a funny question, really. The fellow, judging by the fact that 'from his youth' has followed all of the commandments, seems already to have a pretty clear idea of what is required for salvation. At first, the Lord seems to affirm his present worldview.

And then Jesus throws this in (because he 'loved him'?), "You lack one thing...[only one! this shouldn't be too bad!]...go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me."

"At that saying his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions."

It turns out that the fellow had a completely opposite worldview, as did the apostles. They too were shocked by Jesus' teaching. For heavens' sake, if the rich can't be saved, who can? Here is an epistemological crisis. Will we be converted to a totally new view of righteousness, or will we reject it?

All of us who wish to follow Christ will be called upon to make these conversions. As I suggested above, we are never through with them. The Bible is full of commandments and teachings that, if taken seriously, force us to confront our limited provisional and personal view of the world with God's Truth.

At times, this will feel 'all wrong'; let me give an example now from the pope. During his visit to the United States, he said this of 'individualism' as a destructive American trend:

"In a society which values freedom and autonomy, it is easy to lose sight of our dependence on others as well as the responsibilities that we bear towards them. This emphasis on individualism has even affected the Church, giving rise to a form of piety which sometimes emphasizes our private relationship with God at the expense of our calling to be members of a redeemed community....If we are truly to gaze upon him who is the source of our joy, we need to do so as members of the people of God. If this seems countercultural, that is simply further evidence of the urgent need for a renewed evangelization of culture."

How often does our personal piety shield us from conversion instead of contribute to it? The pope basically says in the last sentence (as I read), "If changing your personal piety doesn't feel good, that's no excuse!" If the culture makes a sense of communio difficult, well, get out there at convert the culture! And Pope Benedict XVI is not someone we can credibly claim to be saying this with a hidden agenda for the Kumbaya Mass!

Now let us return, very briefly, to MacIntyre. Part of his argument is that for a new worldview to be personally credible and intellectually coherent, it needs to be continuous with our previous worldview and help explain why we previously thought differently. This fundamental continuity is, in my humble opinion, another idea requiring conversion. Many today tend to see conversions as things requiring a loss of narrative, a total revolution and negation of what went before. What follows from this, if I am right, is of weighty import:

We fear conversion because we fear losing our selves and we fear losing our selves because we believe they are bound up with autonomy, which deludes us into thinking, "I am who I say I am, and not who God says I am."

When God calls us to conversion, what we lose is what Fr Thomas Keating calls the 'false self', the one we have autonomously constructed with our very limited knowledge of how things really are. While it may feel like annihilation, with God we can be confident that it is actually 'resurrection': a re-constitution of our true selves, rid of previous imperfections. We will not annihilate or negate our memories even: they will be purified so as not to cause us to sin out of old hurts. Jesus' resurrected body bears the same wounds as His dead body, but now they are sources of life and healing.

So conversion is a call to resurrection. Resurrection requires death, but, ironically, does not break the narrative of our lives. We continue to be the same person, as Jesus was after rising. The 'epistemological crises' brought on by the gospel can be embraced in faith.

How can we be sure that these crises are leading to God and not away? I will take this up with some thoughts on the spiritual sense of Scripture next time.

The More Things Change

I found this quote from Rousseau (along with Nietzsche, my favorite intellectual to admire and blame for modernity) in Peter Gay's history of the Enlightenment:

"All the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt for a moment the immortality of the soul or a beneficent Providence. I feel it, I believe it, I want it, I hope for it, and I shall defend it to my last breath."

If you could translate this from the proto-Romantic idiom into today's 'spiritual, not religious' idiom, this echoes the sentiments of many of our contemporaries. The immortality of the soul and other propositions are proven not by appeal to reason or fact, but to the strength with which one holds the conviction. "I feel it!" This could have been the name of a pop song (and probably has been) over the past thirty years. But what of fabled Enlightenment Reason?

What piques my interest in this sort of non-argument is two-fold: 1) While Rousseau was often less that up-front about his actual thoughts, in my opinion, he stands out as an Enlightenment figure to me precisely for his willingness to admit that humankind possesses an affective, yea, religious side. Reason only gets us so far, and he is one of the few Aufklarung philosophes to write as if this were true. 2) When I was in high school, I thought this way. I even wrote a song once in which I claimed to have the power to be whatever I wanted after death simply by believing it and wanting it (this based on a warped interpretation of Fr. Tito Sammut, O. Carm's teaching on the Last Judgment, which was orthodox, so far as I recall it). Perhaps inevitably, this kind of metaphysical optimism withered when exposed to the Enlightenment atmosphere of the U of Chicago. Then, someone convinced me, by appeal to reason and human nature, that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. Ah! The immortality of the soul is not a mere postulate, but something that can be asserted by eyewitness testimony! This both appealed to my reason and my religious side, and I was on my way back into the Church.

But this seems to be a rare sort of story today.

Ash Wednesday

[the following is my prepared text for today's homily]

Pope John Paul II frequently warned our culture in the West not to cooperate with the Culture of Death, and with reason. I forget how many murders the average teenager sees in a week on television, but suffice it to say that we do not follow the precept of the prophet Isaiah that would have us turn our eyes lest we look on evil. Television shows extolling torture as a good and movies reveling in gore are at the top of the charts.

And yet, for all of that, we are squeamish when it comes to dealing with death in real life, as it were. The Culture of Death does not even like the word ‘abortion’, an ugly word that clearly connotes the aborting of life. Hazy existential terms like ‘choice’ and pseudo-scientific terms like “pregnancy termination” are preferred. Funeral directors put fake grass over graves lest we be tempted to contemplate that our own bodies will someday end up in just such a hole in the ground, and then they shoe us away from the grave, so we don’t see the body of a loved one descend into the dust from which it was taken.

It would seem odd that the Church, promoting the Culture of Life, would have us today meditate on death. And yet this seems to bring us full circle. If the Culture of Death is wrapped up in a denial of the realities of bloodshed and decay, preferring instead to sample them in titillating vicarious ways, we Christians are the realists, judging by faith that truth, even hard truth, will set us free. And so we monks today put into action the teaching of St. Benedict to ‘keep death daily before our eyes’. Why do we do this? Are we aiming to be morbid kill-joys?

Far from it: we are in fact preparing ourselves for the holiest of days, the day upon which Christ triumphed over death by acknowledging the reality of death by dying Himself. Afterward, He rose again, and returned to offer us reconciliation by the life of the Holy Spirit. Over the course of the year, our appreciation for this stunning affirmation of the greatness of life and the power of God tends to wane under the burden of many pressures and distractions. Today, we recommit ourselves to reality in order to prepare for the celebration of that Day of Days once more. We do this not by perfecting ourselves. Our penances are not a self-improvement program. Rather, we do this by fearlessly facing the truth of our need for God’s grace and pardon. We do this by recognizing that we don’t have eternity to choose life and choose God, that merely going about business as usual leaves us at the mercy of death and decay.

Let us then make time this Lent to meditate on our sins, on the ways in which we have cooperated with the Culture of Death, and acknowledge this, each of us personally, so that we can turn to the God of Life for healing. And let us always do so with an eye on the prize: the celebration of Life’s triumph on the Cross at Easter.

He Is Risen Indeed!

Alleluia!

"On the third day, He rose again, in fulfillment of the Scriptures."

The Resurrection is a singular event, not unlike the creation of the universe itself. It is virtually impossible to theorize on the Resurrection because it is the free act of a free and Sovereign God. To theorize, one would need to abstract upon what is, by definition, an action of God outside the normal laws He insituted in the material world. There are no previous instances of Resurrection into which we can insert the Resurrection of Jesus as one instance of a genus or species, so as to compare and analyze it. When Saint Paul presented the idea of the Resurrection to the philosophes of Athens, he was mocked.

Rather, the Resurrection is proved by the bodily appearance of Christ to the Apostles and is corroborated by a love of God, born of a life in relationship with God "according to the Scriptures." Those familiar with the travails of God's chosen people, and especially of David, the exemplar of the Christ/Messiah, come to an understanding of God's 'personality' (to use that term very loosely). The notion of resurrection as a category existed in the time of Jesus precisely among the Jews who knew God. The idea of resurrection was consistent with God's previous actions in history. The chosen people awaited this, and in Jesus Christ, God delivered.

It would seem that from this perspective, the Jews would be the first group to accept the 'new Way' of discipleship of the Messiah, Jesus, the Son of God. The Scriptural witness at times seems at odds with this: Saint Luke, an apologist for the Gentiles, portrays Jews as mainly hostile toward the Gospel, at least as Acts is traditionally interpreted by the (largely Gentile) Church.

This traditional image of the Jews as staunchly opposed is understandable if we read 'Jews' as meaning 'those Jews who did not accept the Resurrection'. For just as surely as 'the Jews' called for Jesus' crucifixion, the Twelve, to whom (with the faithful women) we owe our faith, were Jews. In our chapel, I enjoy pointing out the fact that, with the exception of one window showing Pope Pius IX and his curia and another showing the Magi, every person depicted in our stained glass windows is Jewish. Recent archaeology and biblical criticism has also suggested that diasporic Jews were rather more open to the gospel than certain readings of Acts and St. Paul would suggest. As an example, the population of Jews in the eastern portion of the Roman empire declined sharply in the fourth and fifth centuries, the most likely reason being that most Jews at the time received the Gospel and became part of the Church. I recognize that this historical datum, even if fact, is open to cynical interpretations. However, I still stand by my main point, that is that the Gospel only makes sense in reference to 'the Scriptures', and those familiar with them are more likely to believe in the Resurrection than those who are not.

Robert Louis Wilken, in his Bernardin Lecture of several years ago, made the point that the Early Church needed the Jews because faithful Jews were evidence of God's consistency in character and therefore, indirectly gave witness to the plausibility of the Gospel. In his lecture, he focused mainly on the importance given to antiquity in the time of St. John Chrysostom (late 4th century). Christian faith was doubted by serious pagans for being something new-fangled, and one important response to this doubt was to point to the Jews and to Moses. On this evidence, Christianity was not something new, but the culmination of the ancient faith of Abraham. Jesus rose, not without prediction or intelligibility, but 'according to the Scriptures'.

Today, the reality of the Resurrection is denied, even by many who retain the title of 'Christian'. Some say that it is not a necessary part of the faith, others out of embarassment in light of Jewish and pagan denials of the possibility of resurrection, want to explain it away in psychological or existential terms (see: Schillebeeckx, Crossan). Perhaps if we were more familiar with the Scriptures, we would more readily defend the truth of the Resurrection. Before I end, I must again point out that an objective knowledge of the Scriptures among the Jews gives support to the notion of the Resurrection of the Dead. Thus, I highly recommed the latest from noted Scripture scholar Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life.

Now back to celebrating!