My new blog format

     Last fall the Quincy University Office of University Advancement helped me set up a website/blog on QU's computer site. They named it "friarzimm.org." You should be able to type in those letters, maybe with "www." preceding, and get the result. 

    The new site is my attempt to arrange some of the things I have written by topic rather than by date when I published them. My goal is to migrate more of the "ivyrosary" pieces to the new site as I get time to decide what is worth migrating.  

A Way Forward

John Joe Lakers, my friar friend and philosopher who died over ten years ago, spent a good part of his life proposing that we approach moral and ethical problems wrongly. “We” means us Christians, but potentially everybody else.

John Joe said that there are two ways—he calls them “metaphors”—that we think about morality. Both are rooted in our biblical tradition. One is what he called “judgment and power,” and the other he called “intimacy.”

Definitions:

Judgment is deciding whether something is good or bad.

Punishment is deliberately inflicting pain.

Power is the ability to punish.

Forgiveness is deciding not to punish.

Intimacy is being involved with other people respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully.

Both “judgment and power” and “intimacy” can be traced to our scriptures—and “our” means us Jews and Christians. Islam is another story. Islam grew out of Judaism and Christianity, so our thinking may fit Muslims too, but we should let the people of Islam speak for themselves.

The best illustrations of the metaphors of power and judgment are in stories of what happened to people when they disobeyed the commands of the Lord. For example, in chapter 16 of the book of Numbers, Korah, Dathan and Abiram had rebelled against Moses. Moses put the legitimacy of his leadership to a test:

Moses said, “This is how you shall know that the LORD sent me to do all I have done, and that it was not of my own devising: if these die an ordinary death, merely suffering the fate common to all humanity, the LORD has not sent me. But if the LORD makes a chasm, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them with all belonging to them, and they go down alive to Sheol, then you will know that these men have spurned the LORD.”

No sooner had he finished saying all this than the ground beneath them split open, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them and their families and all of Korah’s people with all their possessions.

The story is the composition of people describing how the Lord treats people. Imagine what kind of God would do such things. The story describes a God who judges that some of these people did wrong, and then punishes all of them by swallowing them up in the earth.

That’s judgment and power and punishment in action.

Judgment and punishment are the foundation of the public morality that is dominant in our country. The shelves of our lawyers are covered with law books.  The laws in those books describe judgments of what we consider bad behavior and how we promise to punish people who break the laws.

Our toolbox of punishments has steadily shrunk over the years. We moved from executing people, to exotic ways of causing pain, both physical and emotional (think of the torture rack and the scarlet letter) to our modern ways: fines and imprisonment. None of them prevent all bad behavior, but we keep at it. What else can we do?

But, says John Joe, beginning with the Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah and Hosea, a different approach to morality began to emerge, based on a metaphor of intimacy. Hosea compared God to a spouse, a forgiving spouse, who takes an unfaithful partner back again and again. That metaphor becomes the center of the story of Jesus, whose message centered on repentance and forgiveness. Jesus refused to punish a woman caught in the act of adultery, and promised paradise to a criminal on the verge of death. Jesus described God not so much as a judge as a parent.

I cannot find an instance in the gospels where Jesus himself personally punished someone.

Our public sense of morality has gone the same way. We have gone from “spare the rod and spoil the child” to charging teachers with battery if they so much as lay a hand on a child. We try to avoid causing physical pain, and even emotional pain. At least that is the way we like to think of ourselves.

Why can’t we have a similar sense of morality in our public affairs?

 

An application to the conflict in Gaza

The country of Israel grew out of the Shoah, the Holocaust, the genocide practiced by the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. That genocide had a long history of Christian antisemitism, with its segregation and pogroms. The Nazi ideology found fertile Christian soil in which it could grow.

Survivors of the Holocaust got the world community to legitimize a homeland for people of Jewish background, a place where they could be safe from persecution. But unfortunately, there were already people living on the land that the world community deeded to the Jewish people. Those people, the Palestinians, reacted furiously with judgment and punishment. But not all of them. Some Palestinians, and some of their new Jewish neighbors, lived by the principle that violence was not the only way to deal with the situation. Such people were in the minority. The Israeli governments felt obliged to segregate the Palestinians and treat them with distrust and disrespect. In recent years they even built a wall to separate the West Bank from Israel. They sealed off the tiny territory of Gaza. In return, Palestinian leaders kept alive the dream of getting back all the land they used to have, “from the river to the sea,” as Hamas puts it.

The violent are always more visible than the peaceful. Nonviolent movements succeed so seldom because people grow impatient and decide that only violence will achieve their objectives. The “First Intifada,” the first large-scale movement by Palestinians to oppose Israeli policies, began as a nonvokiolent movement, but it was overtaken by leaders choosing violence.

Both Israelis and Palestinians are governed by people determined to judge and punish. But still there are people on both sides who are open to approaching the other with respect, vulnerability and faithfulness.

Maybe people on both sides will find leaders with the courage to forgive the other—to let go of the right to punish.

In South Africa, everyone expected the black population would demand retribution for the years of apartheid that the white government had inflicted on them. Nelson Mandela was a leader of the black population who was able to lead the entire nation to avoid retribution.

Both sides need such leaders now.

 

 

 

What are we talking about?

A lot of my thinking involves trying to get working definitions of important things. 

Let me give you an example. Take the word "conflict." It's a very important word. Most people don't like what the word refers to, and some use it as an excuse for violence. Karl Marx even built a world-shaking theory out of it. Here is my definition:

Conflict is when one person takes a stand and another person takes an opposing stand.

That definition comes from my experience in a movement called "Worldwide Marriage Encounter," a weekend experience based on talks written out beforehand by married couples and a "team priest." I devoted important parts of my life to that movement for several years. Its goal was to improve the relationships between people committed to marriage, especially Christian marriage. One of the talks given as part of the program was titled "Rules for Fighting." Here is what they said:

Rule Number One: Fight!

The rule was not advocating physical violence. "Fighting" essentially meant that one party would take a stand that she or he knew the other party would not agree with. People can't live together without dealing with such situations, but not facing them in a constructive way is destructive to the relationship. So they wrote "rules for fighting."

In sociology courses I found a definition of violence that I found persuasive. It was developed by a scholar (whose name I have forgotten) who was widely cited on the topic of violence. His definition was: "Violence is the intent to hurt someone physically."

The friar I mentioned earlier, Al Merz, spent years of his life offering workshops on conflict resolution, and he disagreed with the word "physically." He argued that attempts to hurt someone in any way should be labeled "violence." In my mind, an attempt to hurt someone in any way is aggression. Violence, the intent to hurt someone physically, is a subcategory of aggression.

As I walk around doing things like the laundry, I like to think about issues like "conflict" and "violence," and keep thinking about how well my definitions hold up. Definitions should be brief enough that you can memorize them and think about them in idle moments. What good is a definition that tries cover every possible situation, even if it looks nice in a textbook? Nobody can use it.

And we need to use definitions, because if we want to talk about important things, we have to know what our words mean.

The first thing we need to talk about is "truth."

 

Truth

The world of social media has shown us how powerful untruth can be. But we need to have a definition of truth. Here is my definition: Truth is the story as God would tell it.

You don't have believe in God (or gods) to use that definition. The definition simply asserts that there is, "out there somewhere," a story about what happened that accurately describes what happened. The definition is not very precise because stories are not precise. Every experience we have can be expressed in a story, but we cannot even describe our own experiences exactly. Each time we try to describe what we have seen or felt, we tell the story in slightly different ways. The situation gets even more complicated when two people try to tell a story about what happened. Nobody can say exactly what happened. But something happened, and it should be possible for someone better equipped than we human beings to reach that level of exactitude. Such a mythical person is God.

Speaking of God.

I am a member of a Catholic religious order, so naturally I have an interest in God more than most people. Or at least I should have such an interest.

Mother Teresa said that she went years without a rewarding experience of God. Many of us religious people could say the same thing. God never seems to say much. In fact, God never seems to say anything. That does not make for a very satisfactory relationship, and is probably the reason why so many people have found other things on which to center their lives.

Years ago I found myself wondering if this whole God-thing is just a projection of my own thinking. I remember telling a close woman friend of mine, "I'm not even sure God exists, but I just know God doesn't want me to marry you." She went on to marry someone else, and the marriage has so far lasted fifty years.

We religious use the psalms a lot. The psalms are poems or songs given to us by Jewish composers several hundred years before the time of Jesus Christ. I said to myself, "Well, I don't know if there is a God out there, but maybe I can just hitch a ride on words that all kinds of people have used for hundreds of years."

So I have been hitching a ride--sometimes I use the term "piggy-backing"--for years and years. Strange thing. I was in religious life for forty or fifty years when the thought occurred to me that I am really addressing Someone when I pray. I started paying attention to when a psalm was speaking directly to God and when it was speaking to other people.

That's enough God-talk for now. I'm a sociologist who specializes in studying religion. I am convinced that whatever future there is for religion in our modern societies, there won't be any future unless people try to know God. The story of Jesus Christ doesn't mean much unless we have some sense of what God is like.

And, to repeat how I started, Truth is the story as God would tell it.

 

Science

Science is two things: 1. It is a combination of research and theory. 2. It is a community of people criticizing one another's research and theories.

What is research?

Research is observing something carefully, and if possible, counting something.

Observing means using one or more of our five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and feeling (which means feeling something physically, like feeling a rough surface).

The goal of research is to observe correlations. A correlation means that when one thing happens, another thing usually happens. For example, where there is a poor neighborhood, there is a lot of crime. That is a correlation.

In science we can never observe a correlation such that where when one thing happens, another thing always happens. We can never say "always" because even though we have observed something happening 10,000 times, on the 100,001st time, the second thing may not happen. There are some poor neighborhoods where there is not a lot of crime.

Nevertheless, when we look for observations, we are looking for causes, and a cause is when one thing happens another thing always happens. Since we can never be sure that a correlation actually is a cause, to say tht one thing causes another is fiction.

 

Theory

Science is a combination of research and theory. That is half of my definition of science. I will treat the second half in a few paragraphs.

Theory is a story about causes.

Since we can never say one thing causes another thing for sure, every theory is just as much a fiction as the idea of "cause" is a fiction. This is where the second part of the definition of science comes in, the community of people criticizing one another's research and one another's theories or stories about causes.

Here's a classic example of how science works.

Back in the 1800s there was an epidemic of cholera in England. As we have learned from our experience with Covid-19, it takes time for us to develop an understanding of what is causing the disease.

A doctor named Snow made a street map of London and put an X on places where there had been a case of cholera. He noticed that the X's clustered in a particular neighborhood. He had observed a correlation. He went to the neighborhood and noticed that there was a pump in the center of the neighborhood from which the residents got their drinking water. On a hunch he removed the handle from the pump so that people couldn't get water from it. The epidemic stopped. Another correlation: handle on pump, cholera. No handle on pump, no cholera.

But why did the epidemic stop? Eventually he and others developed a story (theory) about why it stopped. The story went like this:

There is a bug in the water that causes cholera. When people quit using the pump, the bug can't get to the people and the epidemic stops.

That story is a fiction, a narrative developed from observing a correlation. That's how theory operates.

 

Peer Review

Here is the second part of my definition of science Science is a community of people sharing one another's research and evaluating one another's theories. Scientists share their observations and theories with other scientists in "journals," which are scientific magazines. There are thousands of journals. Each journal contains "articles," which are descriptions of individual research projects and the theories that the scientists create from their observations.

A typical journal might contain ten or fifteen articles. Scientists are grouped into communities who do work similar to one another--the members of each community are observing the same kinds of things (for example, a particular species of plant). When they describe their research, there are other people in that community who do the same kinds of research and are considered good judges of how well the scientist did his or her work. When scientists finish a research project, they write up what they did and what they found and what they think their findings mean, and send their work in an article to a journal that their fellow scientists are likely to read. If their fellow scientists think they have done a good job, those scientists are likely to name the research article in their own work, which is published in a similar journal. The more other scientists refer to your work (we say they "cite" your work), the better your reputation and the more likely that your work is considered good science and not fake science.

The whole process is called "peer review." A peer is a partner doing the same work you are doing. Eventually one of your peers will do research on the same thing you have described. We call that "replication." When your work is replicated, the work becomes good testimony.

If somebody cites credible evidence that you have cheated on the descriptions of what you observed, you may get a reputation as a poor scientist. That is what should happen, but, like the rest of us, scientists can sin, and they sometimes do the less ethical thing, which messes up science.

 

Meta-analysis

There are thousands of journals and tens of thousands of articles, so there are now computer programs that can sift through all the articles dealing with your kind of research and say how many agree with you and how many disagree. We call this "meta-analysis." If there are fifteen articles that agree with you and only two or three that disagree, your work is likely to be considered good science.

You can find a few articles describing research that agrees with you on almost any topic, so it is easy to claim that your idea is “proved by research” and that people who disagree with you are using fake science. Tobacco companies were able to cite studies for thirty or forty years "proving" that smoking does not cause cancer. The studies they cited were far outnumbered by other studies that showed that smoking does cause cancer. Eventually almost all scientists agreed with the theory that smoking causes cancer.

An example closer to our time is climate change. No one can claim with absolute certitude that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change, but when thousands of studies point to the conclusion that they do have that effect, the scientific community concludes that there is cause and effect there.

But they can never be absolutely sure.

There is no such thing as absolute certitude in science.

 

Faith and testimony

Faith is when I act on an idea that I am not sure is true. For example, there is a possibility that the cereal in the box from which I get my breakfast is poisoned. I can't be sure it isn't poisoned, but I go ahead and eat the cereal anyway.

Faith depends on testimony. Testimony is when someone tells me that  a story is true. Scientists accept one another's theories because they trust that other scientists, their peers, are telling the truth. Every so often a scientist says that he observed a correlation that he did not observe. It can take a while, but eventually other people will make observations similar to the ones he made (we say they "replicate" his work) and get results that lead to a different story. His reputation should be ruined, and he should be exiled from the community of peers. Sometimes that doesn’t happen, which is an indication that every human being is affected by political considerations.

Most of the things we accept in everyday life are based on the testimony of others. In our age, many people get their information from "siloes," media that use testimony only from people they agree with. The users of such media are getting tainted testimony. The only way to remedy the situation is for people to try to get their information from a wider set of inputs, especially from media in a silo different from theirs, information likely to disagree with the stories told in their silo.

This is not a new problem. Jesus defended his teaching and actions on the basis of testimony, and his critics used other sources of testimony. It can be very hard to determine the truth when there are conflicting testimonies. Until the day of his death Pope St. John Paul II accepted testimony that Marcel Maciel was a holy man. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, accepted testimony that Marcel had fathered several children by different women and banned him from leadership in the Catholic Church.

We have conflicting testimonies about climate change, and about who won the 2020 presidential election in our country. We all have to evaluate the credibility of the witnesses who are giving us testimony about their stories. We have a name for that kind of evaluation. We call it critical thinking. Critical thinking is looking for testimony from people who do not agree with a story you like.

I titled this essay "Don't interrupt me, I'm thinking." What I am doing when I am thinking is doing thought experiments about stories I want to tell. I am looking for evidence against what I want to say. I prefer to find that evidence myself. It's more comfortable that way. But I do keep snooping around, looking for people who disagree with me. I'd just rather not meet them face to face. That gives me time to tweak the story I want to tell.

 

Love

Love is the most used and least defined word in our language. For years I looked for a definition of love. Everybody talked about it, but nobody said what love is. Without a definition I can't find correlations, and if I want to think about love in a scientific way, I need correlations. When there is love, X tends to follow.  

Finally I got a definition I was satisfied with, from one of my fellow Franciscans. He wrote a book with the title Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy. He never claimed to define "intimacy," but he talked about it so often in the book that a phrase he used became a definition of intimacy. Intimacy is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement.

That became the definition of love that I had been looking for. Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement.

A word about "passionate." Passion is something that we do not produce on demand. It is not under our control. It comes when it is ready. It is a gift.

So I drop the word from my working definition of love. Love is something that we want to practice every day, and we can't get passionate every day about everyone. Marriage Encounter insisted on the principle: Love is a decision. We make decisions on demand. We decide to be respectful, to be vulnerable, and to be faithful. There's no mystery here.

Dorothy Day liked to quote Dostoevsky: "Love is a harsh and dreadful thing." When we welcome people off the street and are involved with every such person, as she was, we welcome a lot of pain. Some of the people who walk in off the street are not nice people. Dorothy treated them with respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness. Especially vulnerability. The reason we do not welcome people off the street is that we do not want to be that vulnerable.

Science goes best when the people doing it treat one another with respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness. There are stories of scientists who live their lives in bitterness about things other scientists have done to them. Bitterness messes up the peer community that we need in order to have our work evaluated critically, but also graciously.

 

 

 

 

 

What is God like?

People in our country seem to be abandoning religion. Or at least they are abandoning churches.

Is this a bad thing?

It’s not a new thing. As I read the Old Testament book of Chronicles, I am struck by how much of the history of the Jewish people was a history of abandoning the religion of Abraham and Moses. Often the abandonment was the people’s turning to other gods. But I suspect that a lot of their abandonment was a simple tossing aside of the faith handed on to them—busy with other stuff.

Then a prophet would arise and call the king back to true worship. The king was always central to the story.

 

Coercion

Kings coerce. They order and punish. Is that what is needed in order for religion to flourish?

When it comes to religious issues, we have quit ordering people around and punishing them when they deviate. We have decided that God doesn’t want that. So what does God want?

God wants people who relate to God freely, and lovingly. Churches exist to help people do that.

Here is how we should be helping them.

 

People of the Book

They say that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are religions of the Book. All three faiths take writings seriously. The reason they do that is because they believe that writings, stories and all the things that grow out of stories, are our best tools for learning about what God is like.

And that is the fundamental question, at least for these three faiths: what is God like? Our religions are schools of what God is like, and to explore the question we use a book.

What is God like?

Perhaps there are some people for whom that question is not important. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, some of the people think about God all of the time, and (almost) all of the people think about God some of the time, but all of the people don’t think about God all of the time. And maybe some of the people never think about God at all.

All of the people think about God some of the time. I think of children, who ask questions like “Why is there anything?” Or of people facing death, who can wonder about what God thinks of the way they have treated others. Certainly people who suffer seem to be drawn to religion.

And conversely, people who do not suffer can forget all about religion. Jesus said it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to know what God is like. We of the western world are rich. We suffer, but we suffer alone. We want the camera to see us smiling. And as long as we are smiling, we are embarrassed to let others see us being concerned about what God is like.

 

Let’s start with the essentials

First of all, none of us knows much about what God is like.

Start with the question of whether there is a God in the first place. We can’t prove that there is. It seems reasonable to assume that if something happens, there must be a cause for the something (one of Aquinas’s arguments, I believe). But just because it is reasonable doesn’t make it certain.

On the other hand, nobody can prove either that God doesn’t exist. The issue is not amenable to empirical proof. Which means it is an issue of faith.

That shouldn’t bother us. We operate on faith 99% of the time in our lives. If I had to be sure about everything, I would be afraid to step out of the door in the morning. Maybe the earth in front of the door wouldn’t really be solid the next time around.

Okay, so we can’t be sure that there is a God, any more than a husband can be sure that his wife really loves him. Still, things go better if the husband can believe that his wife really loves him. Sometimes husbands are deceived, but not always, and it is reasonable for them to trust in that belief.

Once we’ve gotten past that hurdle, the next question is, what is God like?

Here is where religion steps in. Our religions, at least our Book religions, are schools of what God is like. If they are not that, they are nothing. Perhaps one of the reasons people these days toss religions aside is because their religion does not seem to be helping them to know more about what God is like.

Religions are not in the business of entertaining us on the sabbath, or making the world better, or helping us live happier, or even of making death easier to face. They can do all of those things—Jesus did a lot of those things—but that is not why religions exist. They exist to help us know God better. Knowing God better can lead us to live better lives, but we shouldn’t confuse the effect with the cause.

The Book religions present us with a life project of knowing God better each day, no matter how many days we have. They do that by starting with the Book, and then using the Book to draw us to one another and then to do things with those others—actual physical behaviors—that are the results of our reading the Book. Some of those physical behaviors are “worship”—because what the Book teaches us about God suggests that if God is who the Book says God is, we ought to respond with courtesy and grace, and join with others in our response.

That is how we become religious people. We learn about what God is like, we respond with courtesy, and we do this with other people because that is what the Book suggests and doing it with others makes the experience come alive. To paraphrase an old sociologist, Emile Durkheim, doing religion with others can add zest to our lives.

 

Our Books are dangerous

The sacred texts of these religions of the Book are creations of people who did not know God very well. They knew God better than any of us do when we are starting out, but some of the ideas presented in the books are ideas that we no longer think are good. For example, “spare the rod and spoil the child.”

That should not surprise us. Jesus taught things that earlier sacred books did not teach. He said that he didn’t come to abolish those books but to bring them to perfection. He brought them to perfection by teaching us things about God that the sacred books before him did not teach, like the idea that God is more like a parent than like a dictator.

We people of the Book get into trouble when we think we have to use every word of our Books as a guide to how we should relate to God and one another today. We Christians believe that the earlier Book people did not see God as three persons—admittedly a hard pill to swallow—but the story of Jesus seemed to leave us no other choice. This makes us part ways with Jews and Muslims, but we believe that Jesus did not tell us to make Jews and Muslims into Christians. He told us to make “disciples,” and a disciple is someone who is learning (the Latin root of the word means “to learn”). We are to invite others to share in the project of learning what God is like. And we know that others can teach us a thing or two about that—things not necessarily in our Books.

That means that we should be going through the world like fellow learners, with the hope that anybody we meet might teach us something about God.

We Christians believe that when Jesus said that the two greatest commandments were that we should love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength, and love our neighbors as ourselves—and that every person on the face of the earth is our neighbor—Jesus perfected a lot of the older moral norms.

Love is a difficult thing to define, which is probably why it is hard to find a definition of it. It is also probably why we can say we love our neighbors and then go out and kill them.

 

Love

Here is a working definition of love that has served me for the last thirty years or so. There are surely better definitions, but this one is the best I’ve found so far.

Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement with others, including God.

For practical purposes, when I am sharing this definition, I leave out the word “passionate,” because passion is not under our control. We can’t produce it on demand. It’s a gift. And since it is a gift, for practical purposes, if we want to talk about love, we can bracket “passion” and hope that respect and vulnerability and faithfulness will gift us with it.

“Respect.” The first characteristic of love. Respect is just courtesy, and most cultures have customs of courtesy. Striking someone physically seems to us, at least in our culture, disrespectful. We say it violates a person’s physical integrity. That’s why we don’t use the rod in spite of the warning that we might spoil the child. We’ve gotten past that.

Our culture seems to see the gun as essential to safe living. If striking someone is disrespectful, how can shooting someone be respectful? Not to mention entering people’s neighborhoods with tanks, throwing exploding munitions at them from mikes away, and annihilating them with atomic weapons?

We do all these things not because we really want to be disrespectful, but because those things make money, and we too often put money ahead of more important things in life. Jesus said we cannot serve God and money.

But I’m getting away from my topic.

Love is also vulnerable. It is when another person “opens up” to us in genuine vulnerability that our hearts open up in love of that person.

And faithfulness. Faithfulness means that each involvement with another human being, even starting with the check-out clerk in the store, can be open to future involvements, to future interactions. Faithfulness keeps us from “using” people. We want to be able to greet them with warmth even weeks or months from now.

The four gospels are one of the Christian’s most important books. Surely the gospels show us a Jesus Christ who was respectful, vulnerable, and faithful. And because we believe that Jesus was God, we believe that God is respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in dealing with each human being. Which means that we can no longer fear God as one who might condemn us to an eternity of hell because of a moment’s behavior. 

Exploring the doctrine of hell would take me away from the main point I am trying to make here. But I can say one thing: the way we describe hell may be one of the reasons why so many people walk away from religion.

 

To sum up

We do religion because we see religion as a good way to learn about what God is like. Many of us may not worry much about what God is like, but many of us experience moments when we do want to think about the question. Churches exist to help people to learn what God is like. Jews and Christians and Muslims use a book as their main tool in learning. Then they surround the book with other ideas and rituals, and in the process they can experience life as more bearable and even more delightful.

That won’t fill huge churches, but it will fill small ones. When churches get too big, what God is like gets crowded out by keeping the lights on. We don’t need lights. We need our Books and one another.

Name change

     A few months ago the Quincy University Advancement Office helped me set up a blog on the University platform. I have friends who are Trump supporters, so I thought the blog title "Reflections from Magaland" would capture their attention. 

     Recent political events have convinced me that associating myself with the label "Maga" is not wise. I do not support Mr. Trump and never have, and think he is a dangerous demagogue. So I changed the title to "Reflections from Flyover Country." 

enthusiasm

           Emile Durkheim was an atheistic scholar who wrote some things that became very influential in the early days of the science of sociology. He did a study of suicide rates in France that was cited in sociology textbooks as a model of research. He wrote a very influential book with the title The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, published in 1911.

His book was a study of religious practices among aboriginal people in Australia. He never actually went to Australia, but he used written accounts by anthropologists of how aboriginal people lived. He came up with the following theory:

Aboriginal communities in Australia are held together by religious beliefs. Their beliefs and rituals are centered on totems, which are animals or people or objects that each group considers sacred to itself. For example, the group might consider the kangaroo sacred. The kangaroo is sacred only to that particular group. That group will not touch the animal, or harm it in any way. It will honor the animal symbolically. The group knows that other groups have different totems, and those groups  might kill and eat kangaroos, but that doesn't bother them. They are the people of the kangaroo, and for them the kangaroo is sacred.

Durkheim's theory was that the people are not really worshipping the kangaroo. They are symbolically acknowledging that something is greater than the individuals in the group. What Durkheim speculated was that what the people were worshipping was not the totem, but the group itself. It was the group that was superior to the individual, outside the individual, and demanding respect and deference. The totem could be anything. For each group of people, some object or person symbolized a force greater than the individuals in the group. Since the totem was greater than the individuals, the perception of the participants was that the totem is greater than the group itself.

What religion does for people is to provide them a symbolic way of expressing their dependence on something outside themselves. The religious attitude is "I am not master of my own universe. My universe has a master greater than me." The individualism of modern cultures teaches people to say "I am master of my own universe. There is nothing that can put limits on what I can or cannot do."

Note that in Durkheim's understanding, the individual cannot live by a religious attitude without the involvement of a group. I cannot be my own religion. I have to unite with other people, through ritual and other group activities, if I want to live with zest and enthusiasm.

The zest and enthusiasm idea was central to Durkheim's theory. Religion does not just provide limits on people. It creates moments of excitement that take people out of themselves and gives them reason to live everyday life with some excitement. Religious rituals interrupt everyday life with moments of group enthusiasm. People need that.

Our society does seem to have a lot of people who lack enthusiasm for living. People seem vulnerable to all kinds of victimization--online bullying, rip-offs in everyday exchanges with other people, violence within forms of intimate contact. There is nothing greater than the individual which can put limits on how people should treat each other. We are all our own religion. We are limitless, free, and wandering in search of enthusiasm.

Wikipedia says "The word [enthusiasm] was originally used to refer to a person possessed by God, or someone who exhibited intense piety. It implies that something outside the individual has taken hold of a person."

There seem to be moments in our society when people experience such possession. Concerts by famous musicians come to my mind. But that kind of enthusiasm is not enough to sustain everyday living. People have to go back to their everyday environments, which no longer provide weekly, even though much less intense, moments of being taken out of themselves. Just gathering among other people on a regular basis can do a lot for people. What religious communities do is to systematize such gathering and make it predictable and controllable. That is reassuring to people.

But it is on the international, geopolitical level that the absence of a sense of "something outside oneself" is most felt. When a nation or warlord does not see itself limited by something outside itself, there are no limits on behavior. International law, the Geneva Conventions, or the rules of war are no longer relevant to the group's behavior.

Durkheim's theory originally shook my religious faith. If my worship is really only worship of the group of people that surround me, is my faith based on illusion? Perhaps I am just rationalizing my own prejudices. But I reason that the sense that we humans have of a need for something beyond ourselves could be written into our constitutions just as much as my body is sustained by mechanisms written into my biology. Maybe those functions originated out of evolution, but evolution itself could have been authored by a force or being characterized by wisdom and love.

I can't prove that it was authored that way, but no one else can prove that it wasn't. I choose to believe that it was. That is my faith. That is what faith means. But it sure helps when other people share that faith with me, and share it on a regular basis.

 

A collection of essays

 

For the past several months I have been completing a history of my Franciscan province. It will soon be self-published by "iUniverse" of Bloomington, Indiana and will be available with the title "Cura Animarum: The Sacred Heart Province of the Order of Friars Minor in North America: 1858-2023." During these months I have dashed off a few short essays, which I decided to share here.

 

 

Am I a fool?

 

This whole religion business still seems farfetched. Am I a fool for keeping on doing it?

This has to be one of the questions at the back of the mind of many believers these days. We are surrounded by people who seem to be doing just fine without religion. Maybe they are "spiritual but not religious." Maybe they are just plain atheist. Whatever they are, they must think people like me are fools. People like me must be deluded, willfully self-deceived, hopelessly benighted.

Are we?

I have grown up and lived my life cradled in a Roman Catholic world. When I am in that world, all is well. But I have to venture out of that world, partly because I feel called to do that.

"Called." Who is calling?

 

Prayer

One of the central behaviors of religious people is prayer. What is prayer?

Prayer is communicating with the divine, the sacred, the ineffable (a big word which means you can't talk about something). Like all other human communication, using language as a form of involvement with another person is to engage with a partly self-made image of that person. We do not know other people completely. We know only the stories that we create out of our experience with those people, or stories about them that have been given to us by other people.

There have been more than one individual who was perceived by people as saintly, but who turned out to be an emotional and sexual abuser. Marcial Maciel founded a religious order called the Legionaries of Christ, was praised and considered saintly by no less than Pope John Paul II, but was found to be a serial abuser of young men. Jean Vanier founded an ecumenical religious movement dedicated to living with and caring for people with disabilities called "L'Arche," but was found also to have sexually abused six women over the course of thirty-five years.

We do not know the complete story of the people closest to us. Are we deceived when we experience contact with God, however we perceive God?

Our critics fault us for being too willing to accept stories that may not be true. They may go further and claim that the stories we accept are not true. What is the evidence they provide for that claim?

I assume, without consulting such critics, that the evidence they give is that people can be deceived, just as the people around the two individuals I described were deceived. But, I reply, does the fact that some of us can be deceived by some people imply that billions of us are deceived about God?

Years ago I read a little of Sigmund Freud and about Sigmund Freud. His attitude toward religious believers seemed to me to be an accusation of infantilism. He was saying to religious people, "Grow up. We all have a tendency to want to go back to the womb, where everything was warm and comfortable. That is what you religious people want to do. Be a man. Face up to the hard, cold reality." (I don't imagine him saying "Be a woman." My own misogyny shows through here.)

The advice "Grow up" is a moral injunction. What is the grounding for such an injunction?

I suspect it is the experience of most of us that as we grow up, there are times when we would like to go back to days when we were cradled in some way. But we have learned from experience that it is not good for us to try to carry out such a desire. Freud's accusation is a move in a game of one-up-manship. He is more mature than we are. He can see the world as it is. We are infantile.

 

Community

Our U.S. culture says that it is better to stand alone than to go along with the crowd. Our culture assumes that the crowd is likely to be less enlightened than the individual. The result is that we move away from any involvement that would tie us closely to a particular group of people.

Religions, by definition (the word comes from a Latin word meaning "to bind"), begin with the statement that it is better to go along with a crowd than to stand alone. So it is not surprising that U.S. culture is not friendly to religion. Our critics say that it is because we are deceived and too anxious to go back to the womb that we practice religion. We can counter that it is because we accept the value that it is better to go along with others than to stand alone that we practice religion.

There is increasing evidence that, at all phases of the human life cycle, it is better to be in relationship with other people than to be alone.

So, to answer the question that I began this essay with, am I a fool? I answer: I am living in a counter-culture. I do not accept the culture's value that it is better to be alone than to be involved with other people. The empirical evidence of social science tells me that too much individualism is not healthy.

I still admit that I could be wrong. I can be deceived as much as the followers of Marcial Maciel and Jean Vanier were. But the presence of some deceivers does not prove that everyone is a deceiver.

Faith is to know something even when you cannot prove that the something is true. It is better to live with faith than to reject any story that you cannot prove true. We all depend on testimony--we trust some people to tell us the truth when we can't prove it by ourselves.

The prevalence of "fake news" made more visible by social media has highlighted the failure of our schools to help us think critically about the trustworthiness of our information sources. We have been sold the ideas that "STEM" courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) should replace traditional courses in history, literature, and philosophy, and that the primary goal of a college education is to get you a good job. 

If I believe somebody who tells me that I should study engineering instead of history, why is it foolish of me to believe somebody who tells me what God is like?

Probabilism and the transgender penitent

 

I studied moral theology in the early 1960s. At that time there was an interpretation of the sacrament of "confession" that saw the priest-confessor as a judge. I think the interpretation was based on John 20:23, where Jesus said, "Whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained." Your job as a confessor was to judge whether the penitent's sins should be forgiven or retained (not forgiven).

If the confessor was to be a judge, the confessor had to be educated to give sound judgments. Thus arose a system of reasoning called "probabilism."

The system depended on the availability of a set of moral theology authors, some of whom would say a particular behavior was permissible, and some would say it was sinful. That in itself strains credibility. How many confessors would have a shelf of moral textbooks? Confessors would not have such a shelf, but moral theology professors would, and moral theologians taught in seminaries.

When a penitent confessed that he had had a vasectomy, the confessor was to consult the shelf of authors who discussed vasectomy. If only one author said that vasectomy was forbidden, the confessor should refuse absolution. The probabilist would say that even if there are only a few authors who permit the surgery, while the majority forbade it, the confessor should still grant absolution. There would be at least some probability that vasectomy was not sinful.

Franciscan tradition favored probabilism. When in doubt, judge in favor of the penitent. That was the bottom line.

We simply do not know enough about transgenderism to make dogmatic statements about what is moral and what is not moral about it. What we do know is that there are more people who claim transgender experience than there used to be. There are people who were labeled male at birth but who experience the world from a very early age as a female would experience it. Those people tell us that they are not deliberately faking the experience, and they are not being deceived by medical people out to make a profit.

So what do we do with such people?

We wait while experience accumulates. Science moves slowly. To prove something is harmful requires much careful research done honestly. In time we will know what is harmful and what is not. But until then, we should err in favor of the person claiming to be transgender. We should honor their description of their experience. To do otherwise disrespects them. Disrespect is not loving.

To use the old language, there is a probability that accepting transgenderism is harmless, and so anyone in a position to pass judgment on it should err in favor of the transgender person. We could be wrong, but only time will tell.

Serious study of sexuality is not more than a century old. There is much that we do not know. An appeal to "natural law" is irrelevant when nature creates a condition. When that happens, our attitude should be, "Withhold judgment, wait for good research, and in the meantime do not accuse people of acting immorally."

To do otherwise makes us risk the Galileo error. The Church rushed to judgment and condemned Galileo, and it took centuries for popes to apologize. We shouldn't do that again.