Bigger than us
“Bigger than us” I say.
As I reflect on the place religion
might play in this messy world, where so many people do not seem to have any
need to see and respond to God, I ask myself, what is the core of religious
response?
My answer: a sense that there is
something bigger than us.
Something, maybe someone, bigger
than us. Not just bigger than me, bigger than all of us.
Who are us?
Back in the ancient days of sociology, the
1950s, one of the more famous sociologists, Robert K. Merton, coined the term
“reference group.” He suggested that we fashion in our minds a group of people
with whom we identify. We may not belong to that group, and may have no
physical connection with them, but they shape who we are.
One of my reference groups is the
Roman Catholic church community. That community, in the very concrete form of
St. James parish in Decatur, Illinois, saved my parents from the effects of
what I believe were my two alcoholic grandfathers, one of whom committed
suicide. My parents were lower class—neither went to high school. They were
suddenly uprooted from their families in Springfield and sent to Decatur by the
Bell Telephone Company. There the church community, and especially its leader,
Fr. Francis Ostendorf, rescued them.
The Catholic community is
world-wide. It inspired my brother to live for nine years as a missionary on
the Brazilian Amazon, which led me to choose “Latin American social and
economic development” as one of the two topics I studied intensively for my
degree in sociology. My black seminary classmate, Fr. Bennet Spivey, who died
two years after his ordination of Lou Gehrig’s disease, motivated me to
identify with Black Catholics.
So for me, “us” is worldwide. And
now that my church has expanded its sense of who can experience the voice of
God, “us” for me is even wider than the Roman Catholic world.
So I say, when Jesus said “make
disciples of all nations,” I say: the word “disciple” means “learner.” Jesus
calls me to make learners of all nations, and then, maybe when some learners
want to affiliate in a deeper way with my church, we can baptize them. Too
often in history we baptized first and then made learners. Usually we never got
around to the learning and let the baptism (or lack of it) become an excuse for
exploitation. “If we baptize you, you can work for us without pay. If you refuse
baptism, we kill you.”
The troubles of our time
Our greatest problem as we muddle
our way through the environmental mess and the worldwide migrations our
behavior is causing, is that too many of us are drifting in a world where there
is nothing bigger than us. We are masters of our destiny, and our technology should
be able to dig us out of whatever hole we dig ourselves into. Without anything
bigger than us, self-interest tells us that restraints are not needed.
The regulators do not regulate
because there is no sense that there is something bigger than themselves. Why be
concerned about the feelings pf co-workers, or respectful of people who look
different?
Love
My friends kid me about my
fascination with definitions. But I insist that we need a working definition of
love. Otherwise the word can mean anything, even murder. My working definition
of love: respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of people with each
other. (And, if you are a believer, with God).
Why should I respect, be vulnerable
to, and be faithful to someone if there is nothing bigger than us?
But there is something bigger than
us. That something, who I believe is a someone, is God.
I believe that we should be
respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in our dealings with one another because that
is how God is involved with us.
God loves, which is the message
that Jesus took from his Jewish background, especially the psalms, and lived
out himself.
