RonRolheiser,OMI

Faith – Beyond the Head and the Heart

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C.S. Lewis, one of the great Christian apologists, didn’t become a Christian without resistance and struggle. He grew into adulthood nursing a certain skepticism and agnosticism. He wasn’t drawn naturally to faith or to Christ. But he was always radically honest in trying to listen to the deepest voices inside and at a certain point he came to the realization that Christ and his teaching were compelling in such a way that left him unfree. In conscience he had to become a Christian.

Many of us are familiar with the words he wrote on the night when he first knelt down and gave himself over to faith in Christ. Having just come back from a long walk and a religious discussion with J.R.R. Tolkien (who was his colleague at Oxford) he describes how he knelt down and committed himself to faith in Christ. But, by his own admission, this wasn’t an easy genuflection: I knelt down as the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom. Wow! Not exactly what we take for first fervor.

But he goes on to describe why, despite all his natural reluctance, he became a convert: Because I had come to realize that the harshness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and God’s compulsion is our liberation. What is God’s compulsion?

Here’s an example. There’s a famous incident in the Gospel of John where Peter, like C.S. Lewis, is also a reluctant convert. This is the story.

Jesus had just identified himself with the Bread of Life and ended that teaching by saying that unless we eat his body and drink his blood we cannot have life in us. Understandably this was both confusing and perplexing to his audience, so perplexing in fact that the Gospels tell us that the crowds all walked away, saying this is an intolerable teaching. Then, when the crowds had gone, Jesus turned to his disciples and asked them: Do want to walk away too? Peter was not exactly enthusiastic and affirmative in his answer. He responded by saying, “We have no other place to go.” However (and this is one of Peter’s shining moments in the Gospels) he then adds: We know that you have the words of everlasting life.

When you parse out Peter’s response, here’s its substance. Peter has just heard a teaching that he doesn’t understand and what he understands he doesn’t like. At that moment, Jesus looks like the opposite of truth and life. Peter’s head is resistant and so is his heart. But underneath both his head and his heart there is another part of Peter that knows that, irrespective of resistance of his head and his heart, this teaching will bring him life.

At that moment, like C.S. Lewis, Peter is a most reluctant Apostle. However, he still gives his life over to Christ, despite the resistance in his head and in his heart. Why? Because like C.S. Lewis, he had come to understand that God’s compulsion is our liberation.

I remember once seeing an interview with Daniel Berrigan. The host asked him, “Father, where does your faith lie? Is it in your head or in your heart?” Berrigan’s response was both colorful and insightful: “Faith is rarely where your head is at, and faith even less rarely where your heart is at. Faith is where your ass is at.” By way of commentary, he added: “Anyone who has ever been in a commitment over a long period of time knows that there will be times and seasons when your head isn’t in it, your heart isn’t in it, but you’re in it because you know that the path to life for you lies in staying inside that commitment.”

 What ultimately do we trust enough to give our lives over to? I believe we need to answer that question not with heads nor with our hearts. It’s not that our heads and our hearts are untrustworthy in themselves, it’s just as we know from experience, they don’t always speak for what’s deepest inside us. God’s compulsion sits below our thinking and our feeling. Our heads tell us what we think is wise to do. Our hearts tell us what we would like to do. But a deeper voice in us tells us what we have to do.

The deepest voice of God inside us isn’t always at ease with our head or our heart. That voice is God’s compulsion inside us and it can make us the most reluctant convert in the history of Christianity, it can have us standing before Jesus telling him that he looks the opposite of truth and life, it can have us looking with utter disillusion at the seemingly chronic infidelity of our churches, and still have us say, we have no other place to go. You have the words of everlasting life. Doubt, disillusionment, and lack of understanding aren’t virtues, but they can push us to a place where we have to decide before what ultimately we need to genuflect.

Paradox, Seeming Inconsistency, and Tension

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The thought of some of the greatest and most influential people in history seems at times riddled with inconsistencies. Jesus, Augustine, Socrates, Aristotle, among others, appear at times to be contradicting themselves. It’s not always easy to see how everything squares with everything else in their teachings.

That’s why the great religions and philosophies of the world are so prone to multiple interpretations. For example, given the depth and scope of Jesus’ teaching, Christianity in particular is open to different kinds of understanding. It’s no accident that there are hundreds of denominations within Christianity and every variety of spirituality and worship inside these. Jesus’ teaching is so rich that it would seem none of us can carry it like master. Rather we each pick our parts selectively, struggle to hold them in some consistency, and end up much narrower than the master.

Consistency, someone once quipped, is the product of a small mind, just as inconsistency is the mark of a great one. There’s a truth in that, though it must be carefully understood. For instance, sometimes we achieve a certain consistency, a view of things that seemingly has no internal contradictions, though at a high price, namely, we end up narrow, non-inclusive, one-sided, impoverished, and reductionistic. Whatever else might be said about them, racism, bigotry, fundamentalism, and unhealthy nationalism are consistent. However, their consistency is predicated on a synthesis that is so narrowly drawn that it ignores and denigrates important areas of life.

Conversely, sometimes what looks like inconsistency is really a person holding together a number of important truths in a higher synthesis. The person may look inconsistent, but what she is really doing is holding several truths in creative tension that are seemingly in opposition to each other but are not. The person who tries this juggling act will often find herself in great tension, but (metaphorically) she will also find that she has no blocked arteries and very resilient lungs, that blood flows freely to every part of her person and she is able draw life-giving oxygen from whatever kind of air within which she finds herself.

Jesus was like that. He held important truths together in creative tension and as a consequence was misunderstood by just about everyone and scandalized people on both sides of the religious and ideological spectrum. His teachings are more “both/and” than “either/or”. We struggle with that. It’s easier to carry a select few truths than try to carry them all.

What are some of the seeming contradictory truths that Jesus held together and carried in a creative tension? Here are ten of them, chosen because a healthy spirituality must always carry both sides of these.

1) A strong sense of individuality, a focus on private integrity and private prayer, but coupled with an equally strong commitment to community, family, civic and ecclesial involvement, and social justice.

2) A healthy capacity to drink in life and enjoy it without guilt, even as one befriends an equally healthy capacity for asceticism and renunciation.

3) A self-confidence and healthy self-assertion in using the particular gifts that God has given us but held always in tension with a healthy humility and a habitual self-effacement.

4) An eye for the prophetic, a sympathy for what lies outside the center, for what is marginalized, a challenging voice for the excluded, even as one recognizes the importance of the institutional, defends against anarchy, and helps nurture what’s sacred within family, church, and tradition.

5) A perpetual openness to what’s new, what’s strange, what causes discomfort, to what’s liberal, even as one works to ground oneself in what conserves, in the familiar, in routine, in what gives rhythm and makes for stability.

6) An eye for the sacred, for God, for the eternal horizon, but always coupled with an unabashed love for this world, for its joys, for its achievements, its present moment.

7) A passion for sexuality and a defense of its goodness and earthiness, coupled with an equal defense of chastity and reverence.

8) An eye for world community, for stretching the boundaries we were born into, for an ever more inclusive embrace of the foreigner and the stranger, even as one remains deeply loyal to family, personal roots, and hospitality at home.

9) A hope and an idealism that defies the facts, that relies on God’s promises rather than on the evening news, that will not let the truth of the resurrection be silenced by the accidents of history, but is still held together with a realism that is pragmatic, programmatic, and is committed to doing its share of the work.

10) A focus on the next life, on life after death, on the fact that this is not our final home, even as we focus on the reality and goodness of life here on earth.

Jesus held all of these together in one synthesis and he paid the price – misunderstanding. Are we willing to pay that price to give fuller expression to Christ?

A Needed Reminder

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A Benedictine monk shared this story with me. During his early years in religious life, he had been resentful because he was required to ask permission from his Abbott if he wanted anything: “I thought it was silly, me, a grown man, an adult, having to ask a superior if I wanted a new shirt. I felt like a child.”

But as he aged his perspective changed: “I’m not sure of all the reasons, though I’m sure they have to do with grace, but one day I came to realize that there was some deep wisdom in having to ask permission for everything. We don’t own anything; nothing comes to us by right. Everything is gift.  So ideally everything should be asked for and not taken as if it were ours by right. We need to be grateful to God and the universe for everything that’s been given us. Now, when I need something and need to ask permission from the Abbott, I no longer feel like a child. Rather, I feel that I’m more properly in tune with the way things should be in a gift-oriented universe within which nobody has a right to ultimately claim anything.”

What this monk came to understand is a principle which undergirds all spirituality, all morality, and every one of the commandments, namely, that everything comes to us as gift, nothing can be claimed as if owed to us. We should be grateful to God and to the universe for giving us what we have and careful not to claim, as by right, anything more.

But this goes against much in our instinctual selves and within our culture. Within both, there are strong voices which tell us that if you cannot take what you want then you’re a weak person, weak in a double way. First, you’re a weak personality, too timid to fully claim life. Second, you’ve been weakened by religious and moral scruples and are unable to properly seize the day and be fully alive. These voices tell us that we need to grow up because there is much in us that’s fearful and infantile, a child held captive by superstitious forces.

It’s precisely because of these voices that today, in a culture that professes to be Christian and moral, leading political and social figures can in all sincerity believe and say that empathy is a human weakness.

We need an important reminder.

The voice of Jesus is radically antithetical to these voices. Empathy is the penultimate human virtue, the antithesis of weakness. Jesus would look on so much that is assertive, aggressive, and accumulative within our society and, notwithstanding the admiration it receives, tell us clearly that this is not what it means to come to the banquet which lies at the heart of God’s kingdom. He would not share our admiration of the rich and famous who too often claim, as by right, their excessive wealth and status. When Jesus states that it is harder for a rich person to go to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he might have qualified this by adding: “Unless, of course, the rich person, childlike, asks permission from the universe, from the community, and from God, for every new shirt!”

When I was a religious novice, our novice master tried to impress upon us the meaning of religious poverty by making us write inside every book that was given to us the Latin words: ad usum. Literally: for your use. The idea was that, although this book was given to you for your personal use, you didn’t own it. It was only for your use; real ownership lay elsewhere. We were then told that this was true as well of everything else given to us for our personal use, from our toothbrushes to the shirts on our backs. They were not really ours, merely given to us for our use.

One of the young men in that novitiate group who left the order is today a medical doctor. He remains a close friend and he once shared with me how today, as a doctor, he still writes those words ad usum in every one of his books. His rational is this: “I don’t belong to a religious order. I don’t have a vow of poverty, but the principle our novice master taught us is just as valid for me in the world as it is for a religious novice. We don’t own anything. Those books aren’t really mine. They’ve been given to me, temporarily, for my use. Nothing ultimately belongs to anybody and it’s best never to forget that.” No matter how rich, strong, and grown-up we are, there’s something healthy in having to ask permission to buy a new shirt. It keeps us attuned to the fact that the universe belongs to everyone, to God ultimately. Everything comes to us as gift and so we may never take anything for granted, but only as granted!