Month: February 2011

Darkness or Light. Which will it be?

Steven Woolley4 Comments
A young man died a few days ago.  He took his own life.  I was his pastor for a brief time a few years ago, and then he returned to the denomination of his childhood.  There were many causes for what happened.  No one of them was beyond solution, but collectively they might have seemed impenetrable to him.  No one who has not been behind that dark curtain can understand what impenetrable really means.  However, at his funeral one thing was said that stood out as flash of insight.
It was said of him that he knew right from wrong, good from bad, that he was not confused by the grayness of moral uncertainty, that for him the world was black or white.  His friend who offered the eulogy tucked that observation in among the many characteristics of his personality that made him such a wonderful person.  
What struck me is this, a world view in black and white is brittle.  It might be able to withstand enormous tension as others try to pull it this way or that, but it can be too easily snapped.  There is little flexibility in such a world view.  Self examination in the light of such a world view is even less flexible.  How can one reconcile the certainty of a black and white world view with the moral ambiguity of one’s own life?  There are some ways: gentle illusions and delusions can work; self generated amnesia can work; blaming the devil or some other enemy can work.  Drugs and alcohol can dull the senses, help us forget and take us into other worlds, but they also add to the guilt when their effects wear off.  
I ran into another example of this not too many months ago in a meeting with another young man well known for his social and political views that have no room for moral ambiguity.  What is right is right.  Everything else is not just wrong, it bespeaks of evil with the devil’s hand in it.  Our conversation had to do with his discovery of moral ambiguity in the heroes of his life and his questions about whether anything can be believed or trusted.  
Odd, isn’t it, that we who proclaim the love of God in the light of Jesus Christ, the one who would not quench a smoldering wick or break a bruised reed, the one who partied with sinners and Pharisees alike, the one who forgave even on the cross, have not been able to make that power and that presence a reality in the lives of so many professing Christians. 
Remember how in Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis described the devil’s way of undermining the Church?  Merton says something similar in a brief essay on “The Moral Theology of the Devil.”  It begins with a theology that proclaims a God that demands punishment, even the punishment of “his son.”  Not love but punishment is the fulfillment of the Law.  Says Merton, “The theology of the devil is for those who, for one reason or another, whether because they are perfect, or because the have come to an agreement with the Law, no longer need any mercy.” “…[T]hey feel a certain sense of relief at the thought that all this punishment is prepared for practically everyone but themselves.”  Merton has more to say on the subject, but you get the idea.
The problems come when one wakes up from delusions and illusions such as those to discover the reality of the human condition that lives in one’s own heart, mind and soul.  To awaken and see nothing but darkness, or to awaken and see the light of God’s redeeming love; to what will one awaken?  We have a lot of work to do.

The Self, the Whole Self and Nothing but the Self

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Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation was published in 1961.  I first read it in 1996 and am rereading it now.  I’m finding more sentences to underline and more pages to mark so I can easily go back to the wisdom and insight they contain.  At the same time, I have found myself disagreeing with a portion of Merton’s introductory chapters just as I did fifteen years ago.  
It has to do with the idea that the self one portrays in daily life, the persona that one presents to the world, is somehow less authentic than the true and presumably good self buried deep inside.  Merton writes, in part, that “[t]here is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.  We must remember that this superficial ‘I’ is not our real self.”  Clearly he has more to say about that, but this sets the scene.  
That idea is not Merton’s alone; it is the bedrock of much psychological theory and therapy.  But I am not so sure of it.  Consider any other created thing, an apple for instance.  Is the superficial apple the skin but the real apple is the core? It seems to me that the external self, indeed the external selves, that we offer to the public and with which we identify, are as much an authentic part of who we are as anything buried deep inside.  With Jung, I have no doubt that there is more to the authentic self that is buried deep, and that we cannot know fully who we are until we know that deep part and the role it plays in our external part. 
Moreover, I’m not convinced that digging deep will uncover an especially good self buried under the illusions and delusions of our external self.  What lies deeply buried may be nasty and rotten.   We are, I think, both psychologically and spiritually, a whole that cannot be so easily subdivided.  That brings me to a final point.  I wrote above that the external self can be characterized by illusions and delusions.  In an odd way, those illusions and delusions are as much a part of who we really are as anything else.  The phony love, good will or happy faces one presents to others says much about who one really is, a person who is authentically a projector of phony love, good will and happy faces.  On the other hand, one might be an authentic projector of genuine love, good will and happiness, at least some of the time.
Having said that, I am equally convinced that there is in each of us that which is created in the image of God, and that we cannot fully know ourselves until that part infects every other part until the whole becomes holy.  Maybe that can’t happen in this life.  Maybe that can begin to happen in this life with the sacraments being the sure and certain sign of it. 

Plan A, Plan A and Plan B

Steven Woolley2 Comments
Like many others, I preached on the Beatitudes last Sunday.  I don’t know how seriously they are taken by most Christians, but it took me many years to come to an adequate understanding of them.  My memory of how they were taught and preached when I was young is rife with sugary sentimentality more suitable for display on cross-stitched samplers than anything else.  If Jesus said that the poor in spirit, mourners, peacemakers and others were blessed in some particular way, then he was describing people who were not me nor anyone I knew.  They were abstractions to be honored in an abstract way.
I’m not sure when it occurred to me that they were not descriptions but instructions, and two part instructions at that.
The first part has to do with being blessed.  How can anyone be blessed unless they receive a blessing, and how are they to receive that blessing unless through the presence of another bearing it in God’s name?  Who would that other be if not followers of Jesus continuing the work of Jesus as members of the body of Christ, his church?  
The poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the ones who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted for righteousness sake cannot be blessed unless the followers of Jesus recognize who they are and bring God’s blessing into their lives.  Doing that may not always be the safest thing to do, which is why Jesus offers his personal blessing to them when they are reviled for doing it.  Suddenly the Beatitudes began to look less sugary sentimental.  Not being an experienced bearer of God’s blessings, but being quite experienced at lazy Christianity, and not understanding what meek meant anyway (see Deirdre Good’s Jesus the Meek King), I wondered if there might be a plan B.  
There isn’t.  There is another plan A, and it’s more difficult that the first plan A.  It seems that Jesus not  only instructs us to be bearers of blessings into the lives of others, but he also instructs us to be among those who are humble in spirit and demeanor, to mourn for this fallen world and our part in it, to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to be merciful, to be pure in heart (whatever that means), to be peacemakers, to be willing to be persecuted for righteousness sake, to be persons of integrity.
With that there is not one drop of sentimentality left in the Beatitudes.   They are hard.  They demand commitment.  They are not suggestions, they are imperatives.  They are not about some abstract others, they are about us, individually and specifically.  Rats!  How did that happen?  I am marginally less lazy as a follower of Jesus than I was when I was young.  I still wonder now and then if there might be a plan B.