An Unfinished Universe

 (based on a homily preached on the fifth Sunday of Easter, 2010)

            The word “new” comes up five times in the readings for this Sunday, especially Revelation 21:1-5a. New heavens, new earth, new Jerusalem, I make all things new, new commandment. 

            The new is generally better than the old, but we sometimes get hurt trying out the new. Example: the motor vehicle. It is good for a lot of people, but 33,000 people were killed last year in motor vehicle accidents. That is a lot fewer than thirty years ago, which suggests that we may someday reduce the number to zero. We’re doing better, but we haven’t learned enough yet. 

            The same thing is true of capitalism. It is a wonderful invention, but it kills people just like the motor vehicle does. We haven’t learned to do it well.

            The story of Adam and Eve is not about obedience, it is about the human tendency to push the limits, to try new things. God could have inserted a gene into Adam and Eve that would have made the tree unattractive to them. God knew they were likely to eat of the fruit of that tree. Their being driven from paradise was not a punishment, but a description of how you can get hurt when you try something new. Did God say “Go for it”? The story does not put those words into God’s mouth, but it could have.

            Instead of inserting the gene, God inserted himself into the human story, in Jesus Christ. God became vulnerable. Love is vulnerable, faithful involvement. When you are vulnerable, you get hurt. Love is more important than not getting hurt. God got hurt.

            The new commandment will lead to the new heavens, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem. The new commandment is “love one another as I have loved you." 

            The old commandments are the famous ten: thou shalt not (kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness). They are part of the old heavens and the old earth. The One on the throne says “Behold, I make all things new.” He makes all things new by showing us what happens when we live vulnerably and faithfully with one another. 

            We may be facing the greatest environmental disaster in history—not the Gulf oil spill, but that and a whole list of related things: global warming, poisoning of our waters by the thousands of chemicals we invent, nuclear war. The disaster, if it comes, will have been caused by our pushing the limits. We invented all these new things and they can kill us. We need a theology that can cope with even the ultimate disaster. A theology based on obedience will not do the job. 

            Of course, each of us as individuals face disasters as terrible to us as the end of the world would be to all of us. Marital failure, cancer, Alzheimer's.

            The theology that can do the job is a theology that sees creation as unfinished. God is constantly creating, and letting humans play with creation. God creates thousands of species and eliminates thousands of species. Not all environmental disasters are “man-made.” God created a creature that could share in this process of creation and destruction, because that creature could also love, and love is the most important thing ever created. Love will survive any disaster. That is the lesson of Jesus’ death and resurrection. 

            The deniers of global warming are not evil people. They may, like all of us, be partly motivated by self-interest—they may be making money off the present system and don’t want to see it changed. But fundamentally they are part of a human race that has not yet learned how to do technology without killing itself. Maybe we’ll learn in time, maybe not. Regardless of whether we do or don’t learn, we can love. 

            We thought that smoking was cool, but it gave us lung cancer. We thought we knew how to make a marriage work, but it didn't. Those things don't stop us from loving.

            Love will offer us a more promising path toward dealing with, or even preventing, the disasters than will politics and brute force. 

            Traditional theology says that humans cannot find salvation without grace. The special kind of grace that we call “sanctifying” (holy-making) is really the Spirit of God, God's breath blowing on the coals of our hearts to make them white hot with love. Without that wind, we cool off. 

            We believe that the wind is there, that God is present in our midst in Christ Jesus, and that we can love, regardless of how wounded we are, as individuals or as nations. 

            The Book of Revelation was written to give hope to people who were faced with obstacles and dangers. The image of a new heavens and a new earth is meant to give hope in the midst of very unfinished old heavens and old earth. Only when we have hope can we open ourselves to love.

           

Soul-friendly capitalism

Steve Strieker urged me to put this on my blog. It was first published as a letter in the Quincy Herald-Whig on February 10, 2004.

     Capitalism as we now practice it is soul-less.

      

     Soul is story. My soul is my story, with its sorrows and its joys. Soul-less capitalism has no concern for the stories of individual human beings.

     

     The problem of soul-less capitalism is not only greed. Its greatest problem is idolatry. Soul-less capitalism says that an abstraction, a number on a bottom line, is more important than beauty, more important then love, more important than health, more important than worship. If the bottom line drives beauty and love and health and worship from the lives of billions of people, that is okay. In the long run and in some places things are better. The problem is that billions of people do not live in the long run or in the right places. “The long run” story is an abstraction. It is idolatry.

     We need soul-friendly capitalism.

    

     Soul-friendly capitalism takes account of the stories of each man and woman and child on the face of the earth. It says that competition is good, so long as competition does not kill. It says that incentives for effort are good, but that earning twenty or thirty times what the lowest paid worker in your company earns is good enough to motivate effort. Earning hundreds of times what that worker earns is feeding a beast with limitless hunger. The beast is an idol.

    

     Soul-less capitalism creates a train rushing to environmental destruction, whose engineers are powerless to slow it down. Soul-friendly capitalism slows down the train so the riders can enjoy the scenery, and so there will be scenery to enjoy. Soul-friendly capitalism says that moments of contemplation are good, and that every human being should be able to enjoy such moments, not just those who worship the beast.

     Soul-less capitalism creates fundamentalists, who correctly perceive that such capitalism is idolatrous. The violence needed to sustain soul-less capitalism breeds violence in reaction to it. Soul-less capitalism rests on a foundation of violence. It requires the biggest weapons in the world to sustain itself. Billions of people face those weapons and curse us for them.

     

     We need soul-friendly capitalism, that will put down the weapons and be content with the minimum force needed to keep order in a world community whose members can live lives of beauty and love and health and worship.

     Soul-friendly capitalism is the better model that we need.

Psalms

          The death of my very close friend, John Joe Lakers, last month, has made me reflect on my style of prayer.

          JJ told me, not long before his death, "You and I are very different." One way we were different was in our prayer preferences. I love the psalms. He could not endure them. He never attended our community prayer when it involved praying the psalms. He welcomed spontaneous prayer with others. He was partly responsible for an attempt by our community to introduce a period of spontaneous prayer in common before dinner. He even asked that we pray the Angelus then, because it recalls Jesus' becoming incarnate, which was his favorite theological theme.

          Months ago I was reflecting on the Muslim practice of praying by bowing to the floor five times a day in the direction of Mecca. That very physical action (which I could not possibly do with my knees being the way they are), led me to my own physical way of praying. I began singing the psalms out loud, privately, in my room. This became so important for me that I developed the practice of singing all the psalms in the course of a month, which means using the psalms for the Office of Readings and for Midday Prayer.

          Why do I find this prayerful?

          I think of my childhood, when everybody used "prayer books." Maybe using "prefabricated" prayers was something that uneducated people liked. But educated people can benefit too. I first began praying the psalms in earnest in the 1960s, when the post-Vatican II turmoil had caused us to abandon the old Latin breviary and we had not yet developed something to take its place. I was struggling with my own relationship to God, and said to myself, "I need to piggy-back on these prayers that people have used for over two thousand years."

          I am a child of two parents who never attended high school. I had the benefit of a fine graduate school education. I have often thought that my experience is probably shared by every person who has jumped from a "pre-modern" culture into U.S. university culture. At heart I am a 1950 parochial grade school kid. I think of Jacques Maritain's autobiography, The Peasant of the Garonne. I never read it, but its title suggests that maybe Maritain, one of the most famous Catholic intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, was having similar reflections in his old age.

          As I sing the psalms, using the antiphons provided by the breviary—I love the Advent season and its antiphons—I stop to think of all the people around the world who are praying the same psalms this very day, maybe at this very moment. The majority of Catholics, and of new entrants into religious life, are today in the southern hemisphere. I think of the friars in Vietnam, where my confrere Ken Capalbo is now living and teaching. Surely, like everyone else, these men (and possibly women—do women find the psalms as prayerful as men do?) have their distractions and times of mechanical recitation. I find that I need to pray slowly, stopping to look out the window and reflect on the trees and the sky, a sky that every person in the world also sees. I think of all the monks and friars in the middle ages who prayed the psalms in Latin, using a Latin translation that often makes no sense. (Carroll Stuhlmiller, in his introduction to the ICEL version of the psalms, says that some verses are like objects you find in an attic. Nobody knows what they mean, and the elders could tell us, if only they could speak to us. Yet the mysterious objects and verses are part of what has been handed down to us.) The psalms have their rough, raw edges, reflecting periods when people's understanding of God was more primitive than the understanding preached by Jesus. The ICEL translation of Psalm 3 prays "Break their evil jaws! Smash their teeth!" This is not Jesus. But it reminds me that my ancestors in the faith had a ways to go in their understanding of what God is like. So do I.

          The negative tone of so many of the psalms (the "lament" psalms) used to turn me off. I judged them as out of touch with the great advances humanity has made in solving our problems. Now, as I pray them I reflect on how my vision of the world has been too optimistic, too pollyannish. There is evil in the world. People are suffering greatly because of it. Maybe the future will hold more suffering than I have seen in my day, especially as people around the world continue to struggle for increasingly scarce resources of energy and water. I pray soberly, trying to place myself in the shoes of those who are suffering even now from the injustice of the way we do things.

          I don't bow down to Mecca five times a day. I sing aloud these ancient prayers. I feel close to those Muslims who bow down, and thank God for their example.

Fr. John Joe Lakers has died.

Fr. JJ, whose writings I have linked to this blog, died on Friday, November 4, 2011 here in Holy Cross Friary.

We plan to continue to maintain a website of his writings, www.qufriary.org/Lakers. In addition, some of his former students hope to edit his work. Before he died he entrusted copies of that work to them.

Reflections on a Meeting of Priests

          Last week I spent three days meeting with the priests and bishop of the diocese of Springfield, Illinois. The theme of the meetings was "Catholics in the Public Square." The planners of the meetings had decided to devote Monday evening and Tuesday morning to "right to life" issues, Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning and evening to race relations issues, and Thursday morning to immigration issues. The afternoons were free.

          The opening address on Monday night was given by George Weigel, a writer best known for his two biographies of Pope John Paul II, and closely associated with the journal First Things. He based his address on John Courtney Murray's 1960 book, We Hold These Truths. He observed that Murray's thought was central to the declaration on religious freedom of the Second Vatican Council. He drew from Murray's book four themes, supporting Pope Benedict's claim that our world is threatened by moral relativism.

          What surprised me was that he made no mention of the one thing that stays in my mind from my own reading and study of the book 50 years ago: the concept of "articles of peace." Murray maintained that the genius of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is that it is a pair of "articles of peace." The framers of the Amendment realized that the citizens of this new nation might never agree on ideas, but that the law could provide a framework in which they would at least not be at war with one another. This is what religious liberty means. I may not agree at all with what you say, but I will not use force to get you to agree with my thinking.

          That line of thought, of course, is central to Murray's contribution to the Council. It is not a statement of moral relativism. It is a statement that, given the conflicted nature of most political life today, the best policy is for the state not to try to enforce or support a particular set of religious beliefs. Murray's statement is itself an example of what traditional theologians would call natural law.

          Without the text of Weigel's address in hand, it is difficult for me to evaluate the address in detail, but it seems to me that part of his approach was an attack on "postmodern" thinking. Pope Benedict seems to have that thinking in mind when he talks about moral relativism.

          The term "postmodern" has a certain public relations aura--one who uses it can claim an advantage over someone who is merely "modern." My understanding of the term comes from a selection of postmodern authors I have read for my course in sociological theory. I see the term as having two claims, one intellectual and one emotional. The intellectual claim is that all human knowledge is mediated by the cultural context of language. This is not a new idea to sociology--it was expressed already in the 1960s by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's book The Social Construction of Reality. The emotional claim is based on a critique of oppressive trends in so much of modern history. That claim says that any statement that something is true conceals a hidden desire for domination on the part of the speaker. The critique sounds very much like a denial of all truth, and as such can certainly be criticized as moral relativism. I don't see it as moral relativism. I see it as a clumsy way of saying "people who use truth-claims as a means of oppression are morally guilty." To grab the attention of readers, the overly-dramatic sentence is added, "Therefore truth should not and does not exist." The writer goes overboard.

          Weigel, I presume, was using a statement that we are moving toward moral relativism as the foundation of his position on how society should deal with abortion. He would say that people who argue against a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion are guilty of moral relativism.

          I have been critical of the term "natural law," because in social science it is considered a copout. "Nature" is the opposite of "nurture," and one should not pre-judge whether something is "natural" or is the result of learning. However, the term "natural" can be just another term for what Emile Durkheim called "social fact." There are some things in society that will hit you in the face regardless of what you think about them. If you try to go out of your house without clothes on, things will happen to you. This is an example of a social fact.

          The real issue is not whether or not there is such a thing as natural law. The issue is: "how do you know something is 'natural?'"

          Weigel stressed Murray's use of the term "self-evident." "We hold these truths to be self-evident." The social scientist asks, "how do you know a truth is self-evident?"

          Let me use abortion as an example. Is it self-evident that abortion is against natural law?

          Weigel cited the Hippocratic Oath as evidence that abortion has always been seen as evil. "Always having been seen as evil" is perhaps the most compelling argument that something is against natural law. Notice that this is at bottom an argument based on public opinion. Another argument used against abortion is that it not only kills the infant but harms the mother. But an argument that something is harmful seems to me to be an argument based on utilitarian criteria.

          Tell me if I am philosophically naive. It seems to me that all statements that something is against natural law are grounded either in a claim that people have always considered it bad or that bad things happen when you do it. There may be other understandings, based on things like Plato's cave, but those understandings are for the philosophically sophisticated. Natural law should not require a degree in philosophy before one understands it.

          Weigel could have developed the point that most people are not actively pro-abortion. His statement about the Hippocratic Oath implies such a point. He could find poll data to support that assertion. He did not develop the point, I assume, because then he would have to account for the fact that most people also think that abortion should be legal under certain circumstances.

          Most people see abortion as an evil. The political issue is, what should society do about it? The pro-choice position is not, as some pro-life activists argue, a euphemism for pro-abortion. It is a sincere claim that it is better to let the choice of whether or not to have an abortion up to the woman rather than to the state.

          Is it natural law that the state should make abortion illegal? That is far less "self-evident" than the statement that abortion itself is evil. When 80% of the population, including 80% of the Catholic population, say that a woman should be able to have a legal abortion under certain circumstances, it certainly does not seem self-evident that allowing legal abortion is against natural law.

          Public opinion should not determine morality. It should not, but it does.

          Some pro-life proponents appeal to slavery and abolitionism as a parallel to the abortion debate today. Pro-life defenders are the modern abolitionists. But this argument cuts both ways. If slavery were against natural law, how is it that Archbishop England of Charleston, South Carolina could write a series of letters to the U.S. Secretary of State in 1840 stating that "no Catholic Church authority has ever condemned slavery"? Archbishop England was wrong, but no U.S. bishop, North or South, challenged his statement at the time. Public opinion at his time determined the morality of slavery.

          Is racism against natural law? If it is, how is it that the Church has been so slow to condemn it?

Project Rachel

          A second address dealing with right-to-life issues featured Vicki Thorn, the woman who began "Project Rachel," a program to support women and men who have been involved in procuring abortions. Part of her address focused on physiological effects of each pregnancy that a woman and her partner experience, even though the effects are so subtle that neither partner may be aware of them. As a result, the experience of abortion has lasting effects on both the woman and the man involved, and continues in the children born to either.

          Her address raised again for me a question that bothered me in the early 1990s. How is it that "secular" science and the claims of women such as this woman are in such disagreement? Just a few weeks ago I read that another set of scientific studies had definitively proved that abortion has no negative effects on women who have abortions.

          The disagreement between the claim that abortion is not harmful and the witness of people involved in Project Rachel is very troubling. It should trouble anyone concerned about the truth claims of scientific statements. It calls into question the entire scientific enterprise. The social science community needs to get to the bottom of it.

          The strength of social science research is that it listens to the voices of representative samples of people. The weakness of such research is that questions on a survey are often not able to probe some of the deeper complexities of the way people experience their lives. Furthermore, studies that follow people over long periods of time are expensive and rare, and yet, in dealing with an issue like the effects of abortion, such studies are necessary. There is still a lot of work to be done before we can definitively say what happens to the men, women, and children affected by abortion decisions.

I am a racist

I am a racist.

I am a racist because I have lived for years--all my life in fact--in a racist culture.

“Racist” is a fighting word. I can use it to describe myself, and I can use it to describe my culture, but I will never use it to refer to another human being. Using that word shuts down the conversation.

I am not a racist because I want to hurt people who do not look like me. I go to the opposite extreme: I am so afraid that I might hurt such a person that I am tempted to keep my distance from him or her. I might say the wrong thing. It is easier just to avoid such people.

This is Effect Number One of Living in a Racist Society: because I am afraid of offending someone, it is more comfortable to stay away from the other group.

What are some other ways that living in a racist society affect me? Let me describe a racist society.

A racist society is a society where one group of people have treated another group of people unfairly for a long time. In order to justify to itself why it is permissible to treat other people unfairly, the dominant group had to invent theories. They could never treat people unfairly if those people were just like them. The other people must have been different. They must have done something wrong, or God must have punished them (“the mark of Cain”), or they must be “less developed” than the dominant group.

Charles Darwin gave the dominant group the perfect theory. Human beings evolved from lesser beings, and some human beings are more evolved than others. The dominant group is the more evolved group. They know this because they can make the other group do whatever they want. (We ignore the fact that the dominant group had the bigger guns.)

Slavery had existed for centuries, but the slaves were usually people who had lost a war. Everybody knew that the time might come when the slaves would win the war and then the tables would be turned. When the theory says that the slave group will never catch up because that’s the way evolution works, the perfect system was invented. The slaves were forever less developed, and therefore they could be forever dominated. Anybody who said otherwise was unenlightened and unscientific. They were also a public menace.

They were a public menace because when slavery married capitalism, slavery became very big business. To be against slavery was to be anti-business. When people stand to lose serious money if the system is changed, they bring in all the resources at their disposal to defend the system, beginning with the military.

The Civil War was fought because southern planters were convinced that Abraham Lincoln would destroy the system that had made them rich. After the Civil War, the southern planters used all the violence at their disposal to put the old system back into place as much as they could. We call their work “Jim Crow.”

Slavery was built on violence, and has left our country with a tradition of solving problems with violence.

Today

Nobody today will defend the theory that people of color are less developed than people without color. But we all float in a sea of the effects of the old system. We dominant folks have been trained for so long to see others as less human that we experience a psychological jolt every time we see something that doesn’t fit that theory.

I will never forget the shock I got when I first saw a mannequin with dark skin in a store window. I was in Boston, walking along Summer Street. My first reaction was, “They shouldn’t do that. Something is wrong with this picture.”

My life has been a series of such shocks. I am startled when I see black people who do not look like the way I think black people should look. When black people get old some of them surprise me with how they look. (I am 76 years old myself, but I am sure that I do not surprise people with how I look. I check this every day in the mirror.)

So, Effect Number Two of Living in a Racist Society: because I am often startled when I associate with people different from me, it is more comfortable to stay away from the other group.

Effects Number One and Two are why housing segregation is still such an important feature of American life today.

Those effects are bad enough, and help to explain why I have to struggle to welcome black people into my living spaces. But there is a more powerful factor than those two that affects me: fear. I am afraid of what my white neighbors will think if they see me associating with black people.

For those of us who are sensitive to what the neighbors will think, this is a serious problem. I may be completely convinced intellectually that my black neighbor is my equal, but I just know that my white neighbor is not as enlightened, and I have to live with my white neighbor more than with my black neighbor, because my black neighbor is not as close a neighbor to me as my white neighbor. So I can visit with my black neighbor in the workplace, or play on a team with him, but dare not invite him to have a hot dog with my family in our back yard. I can just see my neighbors glaring over their fences or from behind their curtains. “Who does he think he is? What is he trying to do?”

The sad thing is that it is quite possible that in reality my white neighbors may think exactly as I do. They may think that I will be bothered if they eat hot dogs in their back yards with black people. We all think the other guy is more racist than we are, because the media are always telling us that white people are racist. We never talk about this with our white neighbors because we think those neighbors are racist and will get mad if we bring it up.

Effect Number Three of Living in a Racist Society: we all think other people are more racist than we are.

Solutions

We white people (and I am sure black people also) cannot ever change the racism of our culture until we associate day to day with people of the other group. Even then we will never quit being challenged. There are too many patterns in our heads that need to be replaced with new patterns. The patterns have to be replaced one by one, often with a little discomfort or even pain. We accept the discomfort or pain because we believe that God calls us to love one another. Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement with each other. Such love is the result of decision, not of feeling.

This is not all grim news. It is delightful to see people in new ways, to hear their stories, and to learn from them. If we hang in there, little by little we create a less racist culture. Maybe we will never see the kind of culture we hope for (especially if we are 76 years old), but it is more important to be on the way.

This is what Jesus meant by “the kingdom of God.”

Why a friar writes a sociology textbook

Fifteen years ago I decided to write my own introductory sociology textbook. I worked on it for a couple of years and then put it aside. Recently I decided to pick up the task again.

Why do it?

Sociology asks important questions about how we humans live together. The answers it gives are often incomplete. They are answers formulated without taking into consideration the Gospel. This is not surprising, since many of the people who created the field of sociology were not people of faith.

I am a person of faith. I think the Gospel has things to say about how we humans live together. A field of study that asks questions about that topic is impoverished if it does not take into account how the Gospel can shape human beliefs about the issue.

Sociology claims to be a science. Until a few years ago the word “science” was almost a god-term in western societies. Sociology had to defend itself against “hard” science, which argued that sociology could never be a science. Sociologists were attacked from both sides. Religious people were accusing them of being godless, and the “true” scientists were accusing them of not being scientific enough.

Today the term “science” has lost its godlike status. Postmodern authors have accused science of adding to human misery by using scientific language to cloak political oppression. This is a huge change from the days when science was seen as promising an end to all human misery.

So, sociology, never quite scientific enough, and always suspect of being godless, floats in academic limbo. Some universities, including my own, have abolished their departments of sociology, replacing them with departments of social work and criminal justice. Maybe sociology needs religion more than religion has needed sociology.

I say this because the questions raised in sociology are important questions in the world we live in. There is no problem with using both faith and human “reason” as the basis for discussions about the good life. The great medieval philosopher theologians like Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus did it all the time. They constantly asked, “what do we know from faith and what do we know without referring to our beliefs?” The one thing they lacked was the habit of using empirical observation when they discussed what we know without faith. Instead they used philosophical speculation, mostly based on ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, and Muslim philosophers like Ibn Rushd (Averroes)and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna).

Here are some of the questions raised in sociology, questions whose answers can be enriched by bringing in the Gospel. The questions are based on the topics treated in standard introductory sociology textbooks.

What good is science? How can it be misused? How do we know what “misuse” is?

What can we learn about ourselves from empirical observation? Does the Gospel have anything to say about how we do such observation?

What are values, and where do they come from? How do human beings differ around the world in their values? What should we do about those differences?

What do we know about how we humans are born, mature, and die? What influences do our groups have on our being born, maturing, and dying?

How should we react to people who hurt other people?

How do men differ from women and what should we do about the differences?

Why are some people rich and others poor? What should we do about the difference between rich and poor?

What is a good economy?

How does religion operate in human groups? What are some of its good effects and some of its bad effects?

How can we create more successful ways of governing ourselves?

What is a good education, and how can we help more people to get one?

What is good family life, and how important is it to promote it?

What is “health,” and how can we improve it among the people?

What happens when more people are born than die, or when people migrate from one place to another?

Why do people gather in cities? What are the advantages of that gathering, and what are the problems it creates?

What makes people revolt?

How have we humans changed over the centuries?

I have used the word “should” in several of those questions. It has been customary to rule such language out of scientific discussions--the job of science is to determine what is, not what should be.

Who says so? True, as soon as you use the word “should,” you get disagreement. But when you quit using the word, you make the discussion boring and irrelevant. People who refuse to use the word are operating on the basis of a belief that we can have certitudes that we can all agree on, and that by limiting ourselves to those certitudes, we reduce conflict.

It hasn’t worked. Our world has as much conflict as it ever has. When you have no conflict you have either irrelevance or oppression. The classroom is a place where conflict should be welcomed and harnessed for the good of the whole community.

The questions I listed above would have been answered by philosophy in earlier times. Academic philosophy in our day seems to have abandoned discussion of them. Sociology is a place where they can be discussed again.

Let us begin.