Hubris in the Democratic party

Who are the people supporting Donald Trump for a second term as president?

Theory Number One, which I have tended to accept, is that they are people who have been left behind in today’s culture, a culture that has turned a useful human invention, the market, into a demonic force. The divinized market has been immensely successful in allocating to itself an unfair share of the products of labor, and in the process has robbed a growing segment of the population of resources needed for a life of dignity and reasonable security. Theory Number One is that this latter segment, the “left behind” folks, the rust-belt casualties residing in mid-America, is rebelling against the system that is robbing them. Trump is their hero because Trump will blow up the system.

Theory Number Two is that there is another segment of our society that is not at all a casualty of the system. This segment is not disadvantaged. It is people who have done everything right—are blessed with stable marriages, are members of a faith community, have a decent education and a job that provides a dignified living—these people are also leaning towards Mr. Trump. Many of these people—most of the ones I know are Catholic—are speaking favorably about Mr. Trump for a different reason. 

People of faith accept as true the statement that human affairs are not totally under human control. There is something beyond human capability that needs to be taken account of, especially as we face unprecedented environmental disasters. People of faith take a higher power seriously. People of faith take God seriously.

Theory Number Two says that people of faith look favorably at Mr. Trump because his Democratic opponents look down on people of faith, mostly by ignoring them.

The Democratic leadership, and probably a lot of what middle America calls the “coasts,” suffer from a disability that keeps them from appreciating how most people in the world see the world. The sense that we are all responsible to some kind of “higher power” is common to men and women with religious roots in every part of the world.

The theory labeled “secularization” says that as a society becomes more industrialized or “modernized,” religious faith disappears. But as Ryan Burge asks, from his study of survey data about religion, why is it that the poor in our country are the least churched and most secularized among us? And that it is people who have done everything right, “checked all the boxes,” that are more likely to be members of a religious community?

Shaun Casey was appointed to a post in the Obama State Department, a post charged with making government officials aware of how religion can affect political behavior around the world. Mr. Casey, in his book Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom, quotes Madeleine Albright, in a book she published five years after her term as Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, a book titled The Mighty and the Almighty, regarding the role of religion in political affairs:

Drawing on her experience, she noted that while religion had played important roles in varied locations, including Vietnam, the Balkans, Iran, Poland, Uganda, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, the State Department in her tenure had no experts for her to draw on.

 

Secularization theory has not fared well in explaining and predicting trends in modern history. A theory more accurately telling the story of modernity might be called “hubris theory.” As people become politically and economically successful, they move in circles that reward success, both real and imagined. They feel less responsibility to anything or anyone beyond themselves—they are self-made men and women. It is that attitude, “we can solve any problem,” that religions challenge.

Hubris causes people to think that they are the wave of the future, that the important people are all like them, that their opinions are self-evident. They do not realize that their world is limited in space and time. Not everyone is as self-made as they are.

It is that attitude that is infecting the Democratic leadership. They are discarding important segments of the voting public, segments that accept the idea that there is something or someone beyond themselves to which they are responsible. When those segments feel disenfranchised, they react by throwing bombs—casting their vote for Mr. Trump.

Some observers claim that the Catholic vote will be critical in November’s election. Many Catholics I know are turned off by the confident secularity of Democratic leaders, especially by their full-throated acceptance of abortion. They are influenced by an American Catholic hierarchy that has been cultivated too successfully by Republican leadership.

Abortion is evil. The term “pro-choice” used to mean that a decision about abortion should be made by the woman carrying a child, with or without the support of a physician. A Catholic can accept that as a morally legitimate position, because not all moral evils should be dealt with by governments and their laws. Democratic strategists have discarded choice and replaced it with a claim that abortion is a positive good. That is something that many Catholics see as morally repugnant. It enough to turn them into Trump supporters.

The Catholic vote is not the only such vote, though it is the largest in numbers. There is a huge ex-Catholic population that may be as religious as the Catholic faithful who are still committed to the church, and those two populations, ex-Catholic and Catholic, make up a significant voting bloc, more significant even than evangelical voters.  Democrats should not discard this important group that traditionally voted Democratic, and includes a growing Hispanic segment that, Catholic or ex-Catholic, takes the existence of God seriously.

Christians should not seek to control, but they do wish to be respected and taken seriously.  Few things anger human beings more powerfully than when people disrespect them.

A revised rosary

We call them “mysteries” of the rosary. I’d rename them “stories.” They are stories about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

I have grown up with three sets of five stories each: the joyful stories, the sorrowful stories, and the glorious stories.

The idea seems to be that you should think about those stories as you vocalize the prayers, one Our Father and ten Hail Marys for each story. I grew up thinking that the idea was to forget about the words of the prayers and just think about the stories. I discovered later in life that there is merit to thinking about the prayers and let the stories sort of float in the background.

I had one problem with the traditional three sets—they skip over all the events of what we call the “public life” of Jesus, the things he did as an adult in the years before he died. So I invented what I call the “public” mysteries or stories. Here are the five I created:

1. John the Baptist baptizes Jesus.

2. The devil tempts Jesus.

3. Jesus eats with sinners.

4. Jesus heals people.

5. Jesus teaches people.

Before I explain further why I chose those five, I should tell you that Pope John Paul II had the same idea, only I invented mine before he made his public. His five are:

1. John the Baptist baptizes Jesus

2. Jesus turns water into wine at Cana.

3. Jesus proclaims the kingdom of God.

4. Jesus appears to his apostles transfigured.

5. Jesus institutes the Eucharist at the Last Supper.

 

Why my five

Both John Paul and I chose the baptism of Jesus as the first story for reflection as we pray the rosary. It was a crucial event in Jesus’s life, with the voice of the Father and the Spirit appearing as a dove.

The temptations described in three of the gospels are surely a literary way of saying that Jesus continually faced three paths that would divert him from his mission. The first was to seek his own well-being (by avoiding hunger); the second was to focus on fame (through a dramatic descent from the height of the temple pinnacle); and the third was to bring about the kingdom through political power. That Jesus was tempted is a very important way in which he was “like us in all things except sin.”

Jesus’s eating with sinners was an important way in which he broke with people’s expectations. The Pharisees more than once complained about the way he ignored ritual rules about eating, and especially rules about eating with the wrong people. Table fellowship cements social friendships—look at how seldom interracial contact at work results in dinner invitations. The scripture scholar Robert Karris, who focused on the gospel of Luke during his career, said “Jesus was crucified because of the way he ate.” Karris meant that he was crucified because of who he ate with.

Surely Jesus’s healing was a significant part of his life in Galilee and Judea. “People kept coming to him,” says the gospel of Matthew, “bringing to him all those who were sick with various diseases and racked with pain, those who were possessed, lunatics, and paralytics, and he cured them.”

And finally, Jesus taught, especially through his parables about the kingdom of God.

 

Mystery revisions

I was fifteen years old when Pope Pius XII declared that Mary’s being taken up body and soul into heaven was a dogma of faith. At the time he said that her “assumption into heaven” was a reminder of a doctrine in the Apostles’ Creed, "the resurrection of the body."

The idea that we are to be resurrected in both soul and body led to much reflection on my part about the significance of the physical in our lives and deaths. So I replaced the term “assumption” with the phrase “resurrection of the body” for the fourth glorious mystery.

That was my first revision. Then my revisionism picked up steam.

The fifth glorious mystery or story, that Mary is crowned queen of heaven and earth, bothered me. First of all, there is no scriptural basis for this story. There is no scriptural basis for the story of Mary’s assumption either, but at least there is a more credible tradition of belief down through the centuries for that idea. Second, I have an American negative reaction to kings and queens.

So my first revision was to replace the coronation with the phrase “life everlasting,” based, like the “resurrection of the body,” on the last phrases of the Apostles’ Creed.

The Apostles’ Creed got me to think about re-doing the last three glorious mysteries or stories as follows:

Third glorious mystery: The Holy Spirit comes to the apostles at Pentecost, forming the holy Catholic church. (“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic church . . .”)

Fourth glorious mystery: the communion of saints, and the forgiveness of sins. (“. . . the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins . . .”)

Fifth mystery: the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. (“. . .the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.”)

 

The mysteries as doublets

Those last three glorious mysteries suggested ways of thinking about all the mysteries as doublets, two events each.

First glorious mystery: Jesus rises from the dead and appears to Mary Magdalene and others.

Second glorious mystery: Jesus commissions his followers to make disciples of all nations (the “Great Commission”) and ascends into heaven.

The Joyful Mysteries

1. The Angel Gabriel appears to Zachary,  and to Mary

2. After Mary visits Elizabeth, she prays her “Magnificat,” and Zachary prays his “Benedictus.”

3. Mary and Joseph cannot find lodging; Jesus is born in a stable.

4. The family is visited by shepherds; the family visits Simeon and Anna in the temple.

5. Magi visit Jesus; the teachers in the temple marvel at his wisdom.

The fourth mystery or story shows Jesus being acknowledged by less important people (shepherds and Simeon and Anna—Luke’s gospel does not say that Simeon was a priest).

The fifth mystery shows Jesus being acknowledged by important people: magi and teachers in the temple.

 

The public mysteries

1. Jesus gets in line with sinners for baptism; the Father and Spirit publicly acknowledge him as “beloved son.”

2. Jesus fasts; Jesus is tempted.

3. Jesus eats with ordinary tax collectors like Matthew; and with rich ones like Zacheus.

4. Jesus heals physical maladies; and possession by demons.

5. Jesus teaches using parables; and feeds thousands after his teaching.

 

The sorrowful mysteries

1. Jesus eats with his followers at the last supper , he suffers agony in the garden of Gethsemane.

2. Jesus is condemned to death by the Sanhedrin; and condemned by Pontius Pilate.

3. Jesus is spit upon; and crowned with thorns.

4. Jesus takes up the cross; and falls on the way to Calvary.

5. Jesus is nailed to the cross; and dies on it.

 

This revision of rosary mysteries is a work in progress. Most of the ideas have been road-tested, but I composed a few, especially the sorrowful ones, as I was writing this piece.

Anyone can change things about a private prayer like the rosary, in whatever way they find spiritually fruitful. Of course, when we pray together, any changes are a distraction for other people, and we shouldn't impose our innovations on them.

The spirit of prayerful adventure that allowed me to manhandle the rosary is something I got from Fr. Martin Wolter, a friar who invented a whole batch of ways to make prayer more meaningful for people.

A rule that I find useful for any prayer form, liturgical or otherwise, is one that I modify from the psychologist Erik Erikson. He was describing interactions between a mother and her infant, but the description fits prayer very well. His advice, modified for prayer: Prayer forms should be familiar enough that they don’t distract, and innovative enough that they’re not boring.

 

 

How free am I?

What does it mean to be free?

My Franciscan educators, back in the 1950s and 60s, contrasted their philosophy with the philosophy promoted by most of the rest of the Catholic academic world, philosophy shaped by Thomas Aquinas. Our Franciscan heroes were John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Those writers stressed freedom as an essential characteristic of the human condition. Through three years of study of that Franciscan version of Neo-Scholasticism, I came away with a sense of the beauty and wonder of freedom. But that freedom did not mean I could do anything I wanted to do. Freedom meant that I could do loving things and know that I was doing them freely because I wanted to do them. Nobody was forcing me to do them.

That became the basis of my thinking of love as a gift.

When I love someone, when I deliberately choose to treat that person with respect, with vulnerability, and with faithfulness, my love is a gift to that person. I don’t have to give it.

A gift implies freedom. A gift does not have to be given. A gift cannot be bought and sold. We have the wonderful custom that we do not allow price tags to be attached to a gift.  Cutting off the price tag removes the gift from the realm of measurement and strict reciprocity. It is true that a gift creates an expectation of a return gift, but the return cannot be in exact dollars and cents. It need not be immediate—the expectation can lie dormant for months and even years. “I owe you one” is a statement of solidarity between two people, not a statement of dependence. When the person receiving the gift feels oppressed by the dependence that a gift can create, the gift has gone off the rails.

In our Franciscan vision, everything is in some sense a gift from God. God did not have to give me life. I do not have to return that gift. When I do actions that I see as a return on the gift of life to me, I am acting freely. I do not have to do that. I do it because I want to. That gives me an intense dignity.

Every one of us has that kind of freedom, the freedom to respond to God’s gifts of life and love. From the earliest moments when a child is conscious of self, a child can give freely to God. That is one basis of the dignity of every child. Every child should know that they have that wonderful freedom and power—they can love God freely, just because they want to. My limited experience of children with disabilities tells me that even a child with serious mental disability is able to freely respond to love from others and from God.

How free am I?

In some ways, the story of my life can be seen as a story of “limited” possibilities. My family of origin had many limits, economic and psychological. When I decided in sixth grade that I wanted to be a Franciscan priest, was I free? The educational program that structured my joining the Franciscans took fourteen years. At any point during the first ten of those years I was free to walk away from the program. Then, at the end of ten years, I made a promise to “live the gospel” for the rest of my life. Was I free to do that?

There were factors that surely played into my decisions. In grade school I was generally not well accepted by my peers, mostly because I was fat and had almost no athletic skills. I looked forward to living in the seminary where I would not have to play softball. I was seriously mistaken, because the high school seminary program required every one of us to take part in every sport: softball and touch football in the fall, basketball and bowling in the winter, and baseball (“hard ball”) in the spring. We could ice skate when the seminary pond froze. I was good at none of those things. Why did I stay?

Surely I was rewarded in grade school by some of the Franciscan sisters who taught me. I got good grades, and was obedient. I do not recall comparable rewards at any later point in my seminary career, though certain teachers quietly recognized that I had certain abilities that other young men did not have. Was I free all along those years to continue pursuing the goal of living as both Franciscan and priest?

In some sense, I felt that I had to make that choice. I didn’t know why. Nobody was forcing me. Neither of my parents put any pressure on me. Even weeks before my ordination, my mother was saying “If you should be ordained . . .” Was I free?

I have concluded that freedom is a story that I tell about myself. I can tell the story that I was pressured to do something, and I can tell the opposite story that I did it freely and without pressure. When I tell my story as a story of freely doing things, I feel calm and joyful. I refuse to tell my story as a story that says I did something because someone else made me do it.

So maybe freedom is simply a choice between versions of the stories of my life.

Some people seem to go through life telling the story that they have no choice about important things in their lives. Are they mistaken? Is the story that they have no choice a demon from which only someone else can free them? Is the story that I have been free to make the important decisions in my life an angel?

The language of angels and demons reminds us that there are stories we tell about ourselves that are put on us somehow by others, and that those others can make our lives joyful or painful.

My Christian faith says that God wants every human person to tell their life story as a story of freedom and love, and that every one of us is called to try to free others if a demon of powerlessness seems to have taken over their story.

Maybe any one of us can be an exorcist, but we can’t practice exorcism without support from a loving God.

 

 

O