A Better Philosophy

Fr. John Joe Lakers, my close friend who died in 2011, got his philosophical education at Oxford in England. That education was sometimes called “analytic” philosophy, and focused on language. As “JJ’ went though the last decades of the 1900s, he began to relate this approach to what was coming to be called “postmodernism.”

I come at postmodernism through sociology, and specifically, sociological theory. I taught a course with that title for several years. The readings that were appearing in the theory textbooks were by strange new authors: Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. When JJ talked about postmodernism, he related it also to Rene Descartes, Emmanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche especially was toxic for believers. He was famous for his statement that “God is dead.”

But our Franciscan approach to philosophy was grounded in the principle that no one is so toxic that we cannot dialogue with that person, and that sometimes ideas that appear toxic at first have some merit to them. The education that we received in Our Lady of Angels Seminary in Cleveland in the 1950s was heavily influenced by two Franciscan friars, Philotheus Boehner and Allan Wolter. Boehner, a German emigre who was widely known in European Catholic philosophical circles, had become a specialist in William of Ockham, another toxic author. Ockham got into trouble with Pope John XXII, and Thomistic authors accused him of being a precursor to the Reformation. Wolter was a specialist in the writings of John Duns Scotus, but was sufficiently competent in scientific cosmology that he was able to teach alternate semesters at Princeton.

The Franciscan philosophical tradition, therefore, never accepted Pope Leo XIII’s 1897 decree that all Catholic philosophy and theology should be based on the writings of Thomas Aquinas. In JJ’s view, that position froze Catholic thinking into the thirteenth century and made it impossible for Catholic scholars to deal honestly with anything more recent.

Back to postmodernism. JJ was determined to mine the thinking of Nietzsche and the postmodernists for nuggets of insight that might contribute to a life of faith in our world.

My reading in the aforementioned postmodernist authors convinced me that their position could be boiled down to one statement. (I have always held that anything can be boiled down to one statement.) That statement is: “Any time someone claims to be speaking the truth, that person is hiding an agenda of getting power over someone else.”

Postmodernists are rejected by many Catholic authors because their position can be rephrased as “There is no such thing as the truth.” That formulation is completely nihilistic, and can easily be rejected, even on philosophical grounds. It reminds me of the riddle that we discussed in philosophy: “All statements are false, including this one.” To claim that there is no such thing as the truth is to imply that the statement itself is true.

Back to Sociology

In the 1960s, a sociologist, Peter Berger, and a Lutheran theologian, Thomas Luckmann, wrote a small book with the title The Social Construction of Reality. The title says it all. What we call “reality” is a socially constructed thing, and as such is subject to the vagaries of the social groups that are constructing it.

Behind that definition of reality is an idea as old as sociology—W.I. Thomas’s 1917 principle of what we called “the definition of the situation”: “If a situation is defined as real, it is real in its consequences.”

Sociologists have accepted that principle over most of the last century and society has continued to exist. What we have is a tension between the fact that we humans tell stories about things that happen to us, and the fact that sometimes the stories we tell are not verified by others.

The best example of this is a court of law. Every trial is a competition between competing definitions of the situation—competing stories. The defendant claims that something happened, and tells the story in support of that claim. The prosecutor challenges the story with an alternate story about what happened. The jury’s role is to determine which the of the two stories is more likely to describe what actually happened.

Sometimes no one can determine what actually happened. The position of the postmodernists is that such a situation is in effect in most of the important issues in life. I think they argue that position because they see people using truth claims to support political domination. But they don’t, JJ claims, get past that. All they offer is what JJ calls “a hollow voice of protest.”

Thomas Aquinas and his more modern followers, including popes, talk about “natural law.” The term really means that there are some stories about reality that everyone accepts, and that if you don’t accept the story, you are mentally or morally deficient. That is a shaky basis for making decisions about life. For centuries people accepted the story that the sun goes around the earth. The Church has clung to stories about human sexuality that most of the rest of society has rejected--for example, that artificial means of contraception are bad. The only sense I can make out of that statement is that it means that bad things happen when you use artificial means of contraception. But whether bad things happen or not is a matter for observation. The last fifty years of observation give evidence that, while there are some bad outcomes of such use, as is true of almost anything in life, overall such use does not cause enough harm to forbid the practice.

What does all this mean?

The endpoint of this line of reasoning is that the Catholic intellectual community, especially those who claim to speak authoritatively in the name of the Church, is out of touch with the major philosophical currents of the day. That is one of the roots of the widespread abandonment of religious affiliation. There are other sources of such abandonment, most notably the huge tendency toward individualistic isolation in our societies, but when we have no credible answer to the questions that people put to us, we lose them.

This gap between official Church teaching and the wider philosophical environment is one of the sources of lack of applicants for leadership in the Church—i.e. priesthood. Who wants to be locked into presenting things as true when the individual is not convinced they are true. Even worse, who wants to be locked into a situation where you cannot even discuss the issues?

The clergy problem is not limited to the Catholic community. Protestant groups also face a slowdown in clergy recruitment. I suggest that those groups face a similar problem. Their spiritualities—the practices and stories that they use to structure the lives of believers—are too often out of touch with the realities that most people have constructed for themselves. Protestant congregations have their own versions of orthodoxy, and their own punishments for people who say things outside the orthodoxy.

In short, part of our problem is intellectual, and its solution has to be to grapple on a wider level with the intellectual issues. That was JJ’s position, and it is mine.

Control

The Church has lost control. The churches have lost control.

I grew up with the idea that it was the job of the Church to control people so they would not get hurt. The worst hurt, of course, was hell.

We of the Roman Catholic Church have lost control. We cannot keep our young people from straying off into what used to be forbidden pastures. Or from straying off into no pastures at all. The so-called "mainline" Protestant denominations are in the same situation. Some "evangelical" churches are growing, but their spirituality is not for me.

Why not for me?

The most fundamental thing we should be doing in religion is coaching people about God. Coaching ourselves and, as God calls us, other people.

I have thought a lot about coaching, ever since I reflected that I never had good coaching in the field of athletics. I didn't have it in several other areas of life either, but the term "coach" gets used mostly about athletic sports.

Now that I've seen good coaching, I have learned that coaching skill requires the coach to approach the "coachee" with empathy and encouragement. The coach's job is not to weed out the inferior players. It is to help the inferior players to get better, at least better enough to enjoy the game.

Now the first thing about God is that God is pretty mysterious, so mysterious that no human being has a lock on how to deal with God. At least, no human being besides Jesus Christ. I mention him because I am a Christian, and I believe that Jesus gave us our best approaches to God.

But there are people who do not see Jesus the way I do. Yet I believe they are trying to live out what they think is their best approach to God. Can I learn from them?

We Catholics are in a tradition that sees bishops and priests, and especially the pope, as being in control of how people should approach God. There was a time in my youth (the 1950s, for example) that it looked as though we were doing a pretty good job of it. Then we lost control.

Losing control was the best thing that ever happened to us.

It takes some boldness to suggest that almost two thousand years of Christian tradition were somewhat off track, but that is what I think has happened. Somewhere in those early centuries of Church tradition--some people blame Augustine--we took control of things. That has caused us all kinds of trouble.

The first troubles had to do with Church people trying to tell secular leaders what to do. That peaked somewhere around the year 1300, but then we gave up on it, mostly because we had no choice. The secular leaders quit paying attention to our orders.

The Second Vatican Council, whose ending 50 years ago we are celebrating these days, put the Church on record as saying that the Church does not have to control how people approach God. Having said that, they gave away the store.

Which was good, because we should not have had the store in the first place.

This line of thought came to me as I was reading someone describing Catholic religion in Latin America. Latin or "Hispanic" Catholics do not approach God quite the same way I do. My first reaction is to figure out a way to get them to do it right--my way. I must present my beliefs in such an attractive way that they will see the light.

Then I reflected. I am, at least for the time being, at peace with my ways of approaching God. I have two approaches. One is to sit in my rocking chair, look out the window, and pray a psalm aloud. As I do that I reflect on why people used the words in the psalm to approach God. I end every psalm with the prayer that begins "Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit," which makes me remember the basic belief of my Christianity. My second way to approach God is to listen to the prophets God sends into my life, beginning with one very close friend.

Now I know that to try to get other people to pray psalms is a doomed enterprise. For one thing, I was once forced to endure six years of Latin and four years of Greek, which allows me to pray the psalms in Latin and Greek. There is no way that most people are going to endure that kind of language preparation before they can deal with God in their own way. My way is my way.

We can all use my second way of approaching God: listen to the prophets God sends us. But your prophets are not my prophets.

Therefore I need to appreciate your ways more. What I need to do is to learn from you how you approach God, really, every day, in good times and in bad. What do you do, physically? How do you use language, if you use language? Do you use music, or dance? Do you bow down toward Mecca with your face on the ground? How does praying the Qur'an help you approach God?

The first requirement for me to begin such a conversation with you is to get rid of any hope, or expectation, or dream, or long-term goal, of controlling how you approach God. I'm listening to you to learn, pure and simple.

Pope Francis has used two images that stick with me. One is that the Church is a field hospital for people wounded in battle. Field hospitals do not control much--they try to do good in the immediate present and let the long-term outcome up to someone else. The other image is that we shepherds should smell like our sheep. Both images, field hospital and smelling like sheep, do not go with controlling the situation.

So I reach the conclusion that our future as a Church lies in letting go of our tradition of trying to control people and spend our time listening to them and talking with them, and in the meantime, try to find out some good ways that we ourselves can approach God. But not with the goal of getting other people to do it the same way.

That idea causes me to breathe a great big sigh of relief. Somehow I think this is the way Jesus wants me to do it.

Cosmology

The latest issue of Astronomy magazine is labeled “Special Issue: The Immensity of the Cosmos.”

The Greek word “kosmos” means “order,” “good order.” When applied to people it can mean “decorated” (think “cosmetics”). When applied to astronomy, it means “the biggest space we know about.”

In September 2014, the issue says, astronomers defined the “Laniakea Supercluster.” (“Laniakea” is the Hawaiian word for “immense heaven.”) The Milky Way is our own galaxy, 400 billion stars, among which our sun is one. The Laniakea Supercluster has 100,000 galaxies and is 520 million light years across.

I’m thinking about this as I pray morning prayer today. I am using words that people have used for over two thousand years to express their relation to “God.” I am a religious person.

My religion tells me that God made the universe, and that this God is triune, three Persons, whom we call Father, Son, and Spirit, or, feminists would say, “Creator, the Christ, and Spirit (Sophia).” It tells me that this triune God is personally involved with me, and that I can speak to this God and be heard.

A close friend of mine has rejected religion because he says it has done nothing but cause suffering around the world. Think ISIS. Closer to home, he is thinking of the Religious Right, which he blames for leading politicians to reject concern for the poor, in the name of the Invisible Hand.

We have two world views, science and religion. For the past couple of hundred years, intellectuals have seen the two in conflict, struggle to the death. They predict that religion will lose and will die. They point to the increasing number of people who say they have no religion. I think of the increasing number of young Catholics who drift away from the Church. Some of them drift into other denominations, but many of them drift into the “None” category. When the survey asks “Which of the following options describes your religion?” they answer “None.”

During my years of studying philosophy in the seminary, we had a course with the title “Cosmology.” Therefore I found it striking that astronomers are using that word these days. How can they take this fine religious word and use it for scientific purposes?

Stories about the Cosmos

The Laniakea Supercluster is a story about the cosmos. The story says that the cosmos came into being 13.82 billion light years ago, from the Big Bang, an explosion from an infinitesimally small source.

My faith’s story about the cosmos does not deny the Big Bang. But it says that a spiritual source was behind the Big Bang, and continues to guide its evolution. That source, which we call God, focused on one point of time and space and became human in the person of Jesus Christ.

Two stories. Both are collections of words, language used to describe things that no one has ever actually seen. The astonomer is basing the Big Bang on observing tiny spots of light or other radiation through a telescope or microscope, trying to explain why those spots of light behave the way they do. My story is based on a tradition of words passed on in many languages down through several centuries, and shaped into writings which we call the Bible.

Both stories are based in communities, the community of scientists and the community of Christians or members of other religions. Both communities need faith to tell their stories to others. They believe that the story they tell is true, that it reflects reality the way it really is. Neither community can ultimately prove that its story is true. Scientists know that the story they tell today may not be the story that they will tell a hundred years from now. Religious people know that the story they tell today has been shaped by many human factors, and that parts of the story may have to be revised in the light of what we learn as we make this journey through history.

But both communities believe that their stories are important and valuable, valuable enough for people to devote their lives to studying the stories and passing them on to others.

But what about ISIS and the Religious Right? Don’t religious stories cause more harm than good?

I have to admit that religion can cause a great deal of harm. Karl Marx claimed that religion was an opium that deadened people to their oppression so that they would not do anything to make things better. Sigmund Freud claimed that religion is a human response to a desire to go back to the womb, a comfortable place where there is no challenge. ISIS is clearly a bad thing. One can argue that it is really more of a political movement than a religious one, but it seems to appeal to young people who have the same hopes and dreams that young religious people have.

I am not equating the Religious Right with ISIS in the level of physical evil it causes, but the Religious Right is destroying our political system by creating an atmosphere of intolerance and rejection of compromise. The “Founding Fathers” were hoping to avoid that kind of intolerance in this land, because they had experienced enough of it in Europe. Intolerance freezes the political process into inaction and will ultimately bring it down. It could lead to civil war, which is what happens when two irreconcilable political forces collide. It is certainly leading to environmental disaster.

But.

Science too can cause a great deal of harm. Alfred Nobel, who gave us the Nobel prizes, invented dynamite, thinking that its invention would bring wars to an end. What dynamite has done is make possible destruction on a scale unimaginable in earlier times. Atomic science raised that destruction level to such a height that we face the real danger that we could make our planet uninhabitable. Our science, allying itself with the Invisible Hand, allows people to pursue their individual interests to the point of destroying the environment, another way of making the planet uninhabitable.

Both religion and science can result in great harm, but on balance I think science can do the greater harm. Does that mean we should stop doing science?

No.

It means that science and religion both have to be used in life-giving ways.

There are plenty of people both in science and in religion that already spend their lives hoping to give life to others. We need to encourage such people, and quit rewarding only the ones who make the most money.

All human activity has to be motivated by passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of human beings with each other. Of course it won’t be, because we are not perfect. But we can work to bring about that kind of involvement on the individual level, where we all live our individual lives, and on the political level, where we need to write our rules so that such behavior is rewarded.

Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Laudato Si, is one example of the kind of approach that we will need if we are to pass on a livable world to coming generations. But there are many other people, with many other writings, who are working toward the same goal.

I believe in the statement: “I am not optimistic, but I am hopeful.” Optimism predicts good things. Hope says that God is good for us.

Predictions of the future of our planet do not look good.

But I believe that God is good, and that God is good for us.

"God"

I recently subscribed to the magazine Astronomy. The first issue I got has a picture, taken by the Hubble telescope (the one on a satellite), of a region of the universe never before observed. In the picture are hundreds of galaxies floating out there, some angled up, some down, some at right angles to us. In other words, the farther out we look, the more things we see. 

The universe—the place we live in—is huge.

I accept the theory that we human beings evolved from earlier life forms, which in turn evolved from a mass of atoms that gave birth to the Big Bang

The obvious question, one that no scientist I know has answered, is “where did that original mass of atoms come from?”

Some of the ancients thought that the earth was at the center of a set of spheres—one sphere held the sun, another held the moon, and still others held the planets and stars. Just beyond that set of spheres was God. The term “God” in this context is a metaphor referring to “some kind of force that created the spheres.”

Today the term “God” refers to “some kind of force that created the original mass of atoms and set the process of evolution in motion.”

I don’t see where today’s metaphor is any more or any less satisfactory than the one the ancients used. Our metaphor just pushes the boundaries further out.

The term “God,” as a metaphor, is based on two human experiences. One is that when something happens, we look for a cause. The other is that when something extraordinary happens, we look for an intelligent agent behind the event. When archaeologists find a piece of rock that gives evidence of “intelligent” work, they conclude that the piece of rock is a “tool,” and the maker of the tool had to be intelligent. The creation of a set of galaxies structured so as to allow the emergence of intelligent life (on our planet) is surely something extraordinary.

It is possible that the emergence of life is the result of random occurrences over billions of years. But if I conclude that the shape of a piece of rock gives evidence of an intelligent cause, surely the emergence of intelligence itself should be worth something as evidence. Does randomness explain the complex structure of our universe, from the largest galaxies down to the subatomic level? The theory of randomness, they say, could explain a monkey typing randomly and eventually producing all the plays of Shakespeare. Is fourteen billion years (the accepted age of our universe) long enough for either of those events (the evolution of our universe, including intelligent life, or the monkey's typing)? Many scientists think so. To me, to say that those things occurred randomly requires an act of faith. But maybe I just don't understand how long fourteen billion years really is. 

One variant of the Big Bang theory, one that I am not able to refute, is that our Big Bang is only one among a huge number of Big Bangs—perhaps an infinite number of Big Bangs—and the whole business has taken place without any intelligent force. That just seems to me to push the issue one step further back.

Could there be an infinite number of Big Bangs? There is a philosophical principle that an infinite number of actually existing objects is impossible. No matter how many there are, there can always be one more, ad infinitum. There must be a stop somewhere.

That leaves us right back where we started. Our beliefs in causality and in the idea that intelligent objects require an intelligent maker are untouched.

I used the term “beliefs.” These are truly beliefs. We cannot prove that events need causes, nor that intelligent events need intelligent causes. Both the term “cause” and the term “intelligence” are metaphors for experiences we get from everyday life. I can say that events need causes, and you can say that they don’t, and no one can prove either of us right.

This is what “faith” is all about.

I sit in my room and look out the window at the sky. If it were night, I could see out to the edges of our universe, granted that I would need a telescope to see objects very far out. I choose to affirm the principles that events need causes, and that intelligent events need intelligent causes. So, somewhere out there, is the cause, and indeed the intelligent cause, of my universe.

This is a modest affirmation. I am not claiming to understand all the principles of nuclear physics. But I recall that Einstein derived even the principles of relativity from a rather simple metaphor of two trains moving along a track. Is my belief that something intelligent made this stuff any more simplistic? 

So, next question. What is that intelligent cause like?

Ah, now we get to the real issue. This is the issue that generations of human cultures have struggled over, even to the point of violence and death.

I am a Christian. That means that I see myself as part of a story of several million people going back a couple of thousand years, to the event of the person Jesus Christ.

Now why should I accept the belief that the intelligent cause of my universe chose to become human in one single human being at one specific place and time?

Well, I accept that belief because of those several million people before me. Specifically, because of the relatively few human beings who gave birth to me and taught me stuff while I was growing up.

Of course, every single Muslim or Hindu or Sikh can say the same thing. Each of them accepts a set of beliefs about “God” (or “Allah” or perhaps other metaphorical terms) because each of them is part of the story of their millions of ancestors, and specifically, because of the relatively few human beings who gave birth to them and taught them stuff while they were growing up.

I accept my belief about Jesus Christ because I choose to do so. That is what faith means. I can’t prove that my belief is any better than my Muslim neighbor’s. I don’t even want to try to prove that. I have better things to do, as surely he or she also has better things to do.

Maybe at some time in the future, either of us will have re-configured our story of faith in a way that is compatible with the other person’s story of faith. That’s not my business right now.

My business right now is to answer the question: If indeed the creator of my universe chose to become human in the person of Jesus Christ, my immediate concern is two-fold. 1) How should I behave in the presence of “God,” and of this person Jesus? 2) How should I behave in relation to my fellow human beings? The first question is liturgical; the second is ethical.

My religious community, Christians—more specifically, Catholics—gives me answers to both questions. I am presented with a set of rituals and a set of moral precepts.

Now both sets, rituals and moral principles, are subject to revision. We human beings seem to get better over time at understanding our situation. In the Catholic Church, at the Second Vatican Council, we changed the way we did the “Mass,” and we are even now struggling over how we should behave in the presence of our fellow Catholics who have divorced and remarried, or who are gay.

It took us several centuries, but we Catholics seem to be pretty much in consensus that it is not good to try to use violence to make other people believe as we do and behave as we do. I can hope that other faith communities will come to a similar conclusion. Do I think they will?

The history of humanity is not promising in that regard. A hundred years ago we in the “western” world were pretty excited about the idea of “progress” or “evolution.” Things would get better and better as we learned to use our intelligence to decide what is good to do. Then came the First World War and Hitler and Vietnam and ISIS, and we have pretty much scrapped that naïve hope.

Yet I can still hope. My main reason for hope is the Grand Metaphor of Christianity, the belief that God brings life out of the worst human disaster. This person that we believe was God made human was condemned and executed as a criminal. We believe that he was restored to life. So even if we humans were to destroy our entire species—a possibility not entirely remote, given the number of nuclear weapons floating around and the damage that we continue to inflict on the very environment that makes our life possible—even if we were to destroy our species, God would somehow bring life out of that disaster.

But I don’t want to dwell on that apocalyptic possibility. I want to know how I should do things right here and right now.

One principle that seems to be wired into us humans is the principle that we need other human beings in order to thrive. The sad thing is that our gadgets (smart phones, etc.) keep isolating us from one another. We will not be able to keep isolating ourselves without serious effects. (This is a belief, an item of faith, on my part, but I suspect it is a belief that most social scientists share.)

To me it is comforting to realize that my story—the story of my life—is part of a larger story that involves people all around the world today, and in all the centuries back through history, back to Jesus Christ, and before him, to Abraham. I can sit in my room and pray one of the Hebrew psalms and realize that there are men and women all around the world who are praying these same words today (granted that the words are in various translations). Furthermore, as I pray that psalm in Latin (one of the gifts of having been subjected to six years of Latin study in my seminary days), I can think about all the people down through the centuries who have prayed these exact words. What did those words mean to those people in the past? What do they mean to my fellow believers today?

As I pray those words, I think of all the stories in the Hebrew scriptures that give color to my story, and of all the stories in my Christian history that give color, both light and dark, to my story. It is sad that so many of my fellow Catholics do not know these stories. I could construct an entire curriculum for religious study, from kindergarden through graduate school, based on these stories. As we get older, we accept more adult nourishment. I can accept that popes had mistresses and children. I can even accept the statement of Garry Wills that the great sin of the modern papacy is lack of truthfulness, a serious charge given that we stated, in 1870, that the pope is infallible.

Mature stories can be controversial and can have serious political effects. Garry Wills, a layman, can make the charge that the great sin of the modern papacy is lack of truthfulness, but were I to make it, I would be out of the priesthood faster than you can, as they used to say, shake a fist.

Intellectual freedom does not exist in the Catholic Church for priests, and even less for bishops. Power is the ability to punish, and the Church hierarchy uses power very effectively.

But, as they say, I digress. My point in this piece of writing is to describe how I deal with some of the important scientific findings of our day. We used to call such an enterprise “apologetics,” but that word has the connotation of defeating one’s opponents intellectually. My purpose is not to defeat anyone. I want to show, as St. Paul says, the reason for my faith, so that other people do not think I am hopelessly out of touch with reason.

My Franciscan tradition says that the most important function of rational discourse is to “edify,” to “build up”—to build up the ability of my neighbors to relate to God and to one another with love. As Jesus agreed (when a questioner put the issue in those words), there is no greater commandment than those two.

Guardian angels

Have you ever used the expression: “I don’t know what got into me!”?

We say that when we do something that surprises even ourselves.

That expression describes perfectly where the idea of angels and demons came from. We humans find ourselves doing things that we did not plan to do, we did not expect to do, we could not even imagine ourselves doing.

I would put the experience in different words: we human beings find ourselves following an unexpected script.

All of our behavior follows familiar patterns. We could call each pattern a script. We get a script in our head and we play the role. This is so common that in sociology the concept of role is one of the most central concepts. The term “role” is a term taken from drama, from the stage. One of the most famous sociologists in the not too distant past, Erving Goffman, made his reputation by exploring the extent to which our behavior is like the behavior of actors on a stage.

We get our scripts from daily experience, beginning from our earliest childhood. We also learn scripts from hearing stories about other people. Some of the scripts are good, such as the stories of lives of the saints, and some are bad, such as stories of robbery and murder.

For some reason, we occasionally find ourselves playing scripts or one kind or the other without consciously choosing to play that script. It is as though some outside force has “gotten into us” and caused us to do things we never expected to do. The script could be good or it could be bad. We describe the experience by saying that an angel touched us, or that a demon touched us.

Christians and Jews have insisted that God is the source of good scripts in our lives. In the Old Testament, passages often talk about an angel in one verse and God in the next verse, so that you cannot distinguish God from an angel. The authors wanted to describe how closely God was involved in a situation, but then they were afraid of making God too human-like, so they switched over to the language of angels.

The language of guardian angels is another way of expressing our belief that God is involved with us in loving ways, guiding us from day to day. God is involved with each one of us in a loving way.

In some passages of scripture, each nation has a guardian angel. Nations do follow scripts. Some of the scripts are good and some are bad.

For example, what is happening in Syria these days can only be described as some demon taking control of the whole country. Syria’s leadership has been following an evil script, with the result that millions of people have been driven from their homes, thousands have been killed, and no one can see a way out of the situation.

We Americans believe that an angel must have been operating in the beginning years of our country, when the colonial leaders somehow came up with a political system that has resulted in immense good. Those men and women somehow followed a script that no one could have predicted, because no one in history had ever experienced such a script before.

So today, as we celebrate a feast entitled “Guardian Angels,” we are celebrating the closeness that God has to each human being. God’s love surrounds us, envelops us, sometimes keeps us from falling into dangers that also surround us.

My earliest experiences of prayer took place by my bedside, where there was a picture of a child crossing a wooden plank with a crack in it, so that the child was about to step into the crack. But an angel was behind the child, watching over the situation, guarding the child from that danger. That is how close God’s love is to us.

We know of course that we do not escape all dangers. We do fall through cracks and we do get hurt or even killed. Evil is a reality. The story of Jesus—the script of Jesus’ life and death that we Christians follow—has a loving ending even when the early parts of the script include suffering and defeat and death.

In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus said that he could have had thousands of angels coming to his rescue. But only one came, carrying a cup, which Jesus freely took and drank. That script is our script too. 

God loves us, each of us. We each have a guardian angel.

Spiritual but not religious

Surveys tell us that more and more people in the U.S. describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious." What does that mean?

Sociologists have observed for a long time that we are a very individualistic people. Being spiritual but not religious fits that characteristic perfectly. Being spiritual means that my story is just my own. I am not part of a larger sacred story. Being religious means that my story is part of the story of a larger community. The word "religion" comes from a Latin root meaning "tied together."

Being spiritual but not religious means that I am floating free of a story that ties me to others.

That seems fine when you are young, and when you are putting distance between yourself and the people who have "raised" you. But as we get older, I think we appreciate more the importance of being tied in to larger stories.

I join a small group of people every weekday for Mass. That ritual ties us together as a group. Most of those people are of retirement age, as I am. The ritual also ties us very much to the story of Jesus. We use bread and wine the way Jesus used it at the Last Supper, so that the bread and wine are the physical presence of the story of Jesus, just as Jesus' physical body was the presence of his story when he was among his disciples. (This is how I like to interpret the theological term "transsubstantiation.")

So the ritual of the Mass very much ties me to a whole range of stories. I know who I am, and I feel very comfortable knowing that.

As the spiritual but not religious people continue through their lives, I predict that they will begin to look for connections to some larger story that will tie them to other people and to God. I would think it would be a fearful thing to be in the presence of a living God all alone. If you think it is just fine, maybe you don't know God very well.

You will say, Jesus taught us that God is like a loving parent. But good parents set boundaries for children. A parent who sets no boundaries ends up with a child running all over the place not knowing who he or she is or what he or she might do well or do poorly. And a good parent reacts in a life-giving way when the child violates the boundaries, as we all do, as children and as adults. The most important boundary that this loving God sets for us is that we approach God with others, as people who love others and are involved with others, especially as those others are involved with God.

I like the psalms because they remind me of all the people who have made those words part of their stories relating them to that living God. They remind me that I am part of a community that contains people who have done bad things and are still doing bad things. They remind me that I can do bad things and yet I can be forgiven.

It is good to come into God's presence with others. Being religious helps me do that. Being spiritual just doesn't cut it.

Postscript.

I know some people who might use the language "spiritual but not religious" as a cover for their anger at God. These people live lives of real love for others, real involvement with others in ways that we religious people might envy. There is an integrity in such people. I trust very much that God will not let them get lost.

As Psalm 103 says, God knows of what we are made. God knows that sometimes people react to evil done to them in ways that appear blasphemous. I think of Job telling God that the day of his birth should be a day of mourning, that he would have been better off if he had never been born. But at the end of the book, God defends Job as having a more true idea of God than his three friends, who kept trying to wrap Job's whole situation up in a neat philosophical framework. Job's anger did not bother God.

Who am I?

Who am I?

When I was in graduate school, back in the 1960s, there was great interest in what the psychologist Erik Erikson called "identity." Who am I? The term "identity crisis" was common--young people drifting around not knowing who they were.

My theory: my identity is my story. Or, more accurately, the stories of the groups of people who have influenced my life.

Catholics have been the center of my story, starting with the parish of St. James in Decatur, Illinois in the 1940s. The story of that group of people has been more important to me than, for example, the story of the residents of Decatur. Decatur was mostly Protestant. Decatur was not my story.

My race has not been part of my story. Being white has been to me like the water to the fish. There is no story involved. If I had been born black in this country, my black community, as black, would have been very important in my story. If I had been born into a black church family, that church family would have been important too. It might have been more important than the racial group; my Catholicism story was the story of a minority amid a majority Protestant city. Maybe a black child's church community would have been more important in that child's life than being black, because the church story would have shaped the experience of being black in a majority white society.

If I had been born to a single mother with few ties to a larger kinship group, my story would have been that mother's story. The story would have included the events that led to the mother's being isolated--perhaps she had gotten pregnant and been rejected by her family. Perhaps she was a nonconformist and was rejected for the same reason. Perhaps she herself had been raised by a single parent who did not have the time or experience or resources to groom her for entry into a school. So her story would have been a story of being left alone a lot, without relatives, going to a school where she was not doing well and where perhaps most of the other children were in the same situation she was in. Gradually their stories would have become her story.

A story gives you "scripts," plans for little scenes in life that you can follow. For example, how to relate to a teacher in school, or to a policeman. How to deal with a parent who is living with a partner who is not your biological parent. How to react to abuse by a parent-figure.

Examples of the scripts in my story: how to answer the sister who was teaching me in school. How to serve Mass in the parish church.

After eighth grade I entered the Franciscan seminary. The Franciscan community became part of my story. It eventually became the most significant part, even after I was ordained a priest.

The Catholic and Franciscan communities each had their own stories, and as I studied history, I became part of the stories of the Christian and Catholic community, and of the followers of Francis of Assisi.

I was also an American, and the stories of the founders of our country were important to me. The Second World War was in progress as I began grade school, so I lived the story of the heroes who gave their all to defeat evil enemies like the Germans and the Japanese. There was a book titled They Were Expendable, which I found inspiring. It told the stories of men who offered themselves to be chewed up by the enemy because the larger cause required that sacrifice.

If I had been born to a Native American family, what would my story have been? I would likely have been taken from my parents when I began school. The official policy was intended to prevent me from learning the story of my parents and their stories. I would have been story-less. Perhaps the teachers could have tried to help me relate to the stories of Christian saints, but when you do not know the stories of your own parents, I would think it would be hard to own another story.

As I sit here reflecting on all the people who have become part of my story, down through the centuries, a feeling of comfort comes over me. I know who I am. The people who shared those stories with me have given me a great gift.

Pope Francis talks a lot about "evangelization." The word has taken on a negative connotation in my society, as meaning "trying to get others to join your church." Perhaps it should simply mean "sharing stories of your church community with people who might be helped by those stories."

Being bathed in stories is being bathed in membership in communities that extend far beyond my immediate time and place. It means we know who we are. Being bathed in stories is a great gift.