THE WAY a review of Christian spirituality published by the British Jesuits
January 2003 Volume 42, Number 1
I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go.
Editorial office Campion Hall, Oxford, OX1 1QS, UK Subscriptions office THE WAY, Turpin Distribution Services Ltd, Blackhorse Road, Letchworth, Hertfordshire, SG6 1HN, UK THE WAY January 2003
The Ignatian Spirituality of the Way 7 Philip Endean Ignatian sources bear witness to a spirituality of movement, of continual discovery, of ‘the way’. This converges strikingly with contemporary developments in the study of spirituality. It is from this convergence that The Way draws inspiration and energy.
On Receiving an Inheritance: Confessions of a Former 22 Marginaholic James Alison James Alison’s personal story reveals much about how the marginalised are prone to self-deception, but even more about how God’s love is untouched by such manipulative behaviour. Our inheritance is assured.
The Impact of Transition 34 Barbara Hendricks Whenever we try to communicate across cultural boundaries, we are ourselves drawn into a process of self-questioning, growth, and transformation. A distinguished Maryknoll missionary explores this experience.
Theological Trends: Jesuit Theologies of Mission 44 Michael Sievernich Michael Sievernich explains how the idea of ‘inculturation’ was developed in Jesuit circles around the time of Vatican II, and discusses its relationship with other key notions in the contemporary theology of mission such as justice and interreligious dialogue.
From the Ignatian Tradition: Guidelines for Pilgrims 58 Simão Rodrigues How early Jesuit recruits would live out the spirituality of the Exercises by going on a pilgrimage. THE WAY January 2003
The Early Jesuits and the Road 71 Mario Scaduto A vivid account of what it was like to travel on mission in Italy in the years following Ignatius’ death.
September11 and Christian Spirituality in the United States 85 Thomas Hughson Thomas Hughson reflects on how the events of September 11 2001 have drawn many US citizens into a more Christian form of civil spirituality.
Recent Books 98
Andrew Hamilton is unconvinced by Passionate Uncertainty, a provocative study of contemporary US Jesuits Brendan Callaghan on two recent books about psychology and Christianity Gerard J. Hughes on Stanley Hauerwas and natural theology Michael Barnes on a new collection of essays by Sarah Coakley Paul Nicholson on Theology and Sexuality, a set of readings both classic and contemporary Michael Kirwan on an anthology of Radical Christian Writings John Ashton on a fine new account of the Book of Revelation from Ian Boxall A. M. Allchin on two new studies of Celtic spiritual literature Damian Howard is sceptical about a new book on European religion John Pridmore on Quaker peace spirituality, and on the relationship between self-esteem and self-denial The Way is an international journal of contemporary Christian spirituality, published by the British Jesuits. Through writing informed by critical and creative scholarship, it aims to provide a forum in which thoughtful Christians, from different walks of life and different traditions, reflect on God’s continuing action in human experience.
Among particular concerns of The Way are: • the role of spirituality in the struggle for justice • the spiritual issues raised by intercultural and interreligious dialogue • the interactions between spirituality, politics and culture • the fostering and development of the Ignatian spiritual tradition
The Way warmly invites readers to submit articles with a view to publication. They should normally be about 4,000 words long, and be in keeping with the journal’s aims. The Editor is always ready to discuss possible ideas. Further details about how to submit an article can be found on The Way’s website, www.theway.org.uk. The Special Number for July 2004, marking the centenaries of a number of distinguished twentieth century Jesuit theologians, will explore the relationship between the Spiritual Exercises and contemporary theology; contributions on this theme would be especially welcome.
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Contact: THE WAY, Turpin Distribution Services Ltd, Blackhorse Road Letchworth, Hertfordshire, SG6 1HN, UK 44/0 1462 672555 ext 6050 (phone); 44/0 1462 480947 (fax) [email protected] FOREWORD
With this issue, The Way enters on a new phase in its life. Rest assured, however: the most valuable things about it will not change. The Way will remain a wide-ranging, exploratory journal of contemporary spirituality, drawing in a special way on the Ignatian tradition. The first article in this number, ‘The Ignatian Spirituality of the Way’, sets out one account of what that vision might mean. A number of the changes that have been made are administrative. The Way Supplement will no longer exist as a separate publication, but will continue as an annual Special Number of The Way, published in July of each year. As many of you have discovered, we have entered into agreement with an outside agency, Turpin Distribution Services, for the management of our subscriptions. Thanks to this change, and to computer technology, The Way is now happily accommodated in far smaller office space than it needed previously. Before long, we hope to have all our back numbers easily available in electronic form, through our website and on CD-ROM. We hope that the journal in its new form can be more interactive. This is a major reason why we have decided that three of the four issues each year will be varied in their themes—it is our hope that you, our readers, will feel inspired to send in the material which you want to write, rather than be constrained by the themes which we choose. The Way appears too infrequently for us to publish regular Letters to the Editor, but we hope that our website will soon include a Guest Book, where readers and authors can exchange views and opinions about what we publish. We are hoping, too, to extend still further the international character of The Way. First steps in this regard include the appointment of a wider range of Editorial Correspondents (the successors of the Associate Editors), including some from the continent of Europe; and the introduction of a discount rate subscription for readers in post-Communist and developing countries. Thank you for your support as we have been working on this re- launch. We hope that you will find The Way in its new form a source both of pleasure and of profit. Philip Endean SJ A stile near St Beuno’s Spiritual Exercises Centre, North Wales THE IGNATIAN SPIRITUALITY OF THE WAY
Philip Endean
HE INSTINCT TO DESCRIBE LIFE AS A ‘WAY’ or a ‘journey’ is, of course, Tuniversal. We find such expressions both within and beyond contexts we would readily identify as religious. Equally obviously, ‘the way’ has a special meaning for Christianity. The Fourth Gospel’s Jesus understood himself as ‘the way and the truth and the life’ (John 14:6), a formula enshrined in The Way’s logo; and the Acts of the Apostles refers to Jesus’ disciples as ‘followers of the Way’ (Acts 9:2). Yet there are also distinctive reasons why an Ignatian journal of contemporary spirituality should call itself The Way. When dealing with new converts, Ignatius was concerned ‘to set them better into the way of the Lord’.1 This way might have begun with the Exercises and with various forms of ascetical practice, but eventually it opens out into a way of unpredictable service, a way of ministry beyond conventional boundaries. The Way therefore needs to draw on resources of two kinds. It must explore the documents of the Ignatian tradition, but not simply for the own sake or in isolation. Rather, it must also follow the invitation the Exercises have always given to anyone who takes them seriously: an invitation to explore how the Spirit is at work in our changing culture and our changing selves.
Rules for Moving Forward Ignatius was well aware of the need for good order; his secretary, Juan Alfonso de Polanco, deserves an honoured place in any history of bureaucracy. At the outset of the Constitutions that he wrote for his Society, Ignatius tells us that laws and regulations are necessary: the
1 Examen, c. 4. n. 34 [91]: enderezarlos mejor in viam Domini.
The Way, 42/1 (January 2003), pp. 7-21. 8 Philip Endean
Pope requires them; the witness of the saints and common sense confirm it. But these laws are only secondary:
. . . the supreme wisdom and goodness of God our creator and Lord is what must preserve and govern and carry forward in his holy service this very little Society of Jesus, just as he deigned to begin it, and on our part, more than any exterior constitution, the law from within of charity and love which the Holy Spirit writes and impresses upon hearts . . . 2
Moreover, the purpose of the laws is not to instil a spirit of conformity, but rather to keep people moving:
. . . we hold it necessary that constitutions be written, that should help us move forward better, in conformity with our Institute, along the way that has been started which is the divine service.
‘Institute’ here has the connotation of ‘beginning’: what Christ our Lord has begun must be carried forward with equal creativity. Ignatius has not laid down a blueprint, but rather initiated a ‘style of moving forward’ (modo de proceder).3 A similar set of ideas can be found at the outset of the Spiritual Exercises. When Ignatius introduces what we call a retreat director, he speaks of ‘the person who gives to another the style and structure (modo y orden) of meditating and contemplating’. The hope is that the person will take this foundation as a gift to be used creatively, and find for themselves ‘something which enables the story to be clarified or felt a little more’. For we can trust that ‘the Creator and Lord’ will be directly, and in person, with the creature. And this will be ‘more appropriate and much better’ than if another person had been prescriptive, and thereby inevitably implied that their own form of response to God was normative. 4 What we do in ministry is pointing us further forward along the way of ‘the divine service’—not only the service we perform for God but also God’s service to us. The healthy minister is comfortable with an educated ignorance about how things will turn out. Neither in the
2 Constitutions, Preamble [134]; see also X.1 [812]. 3 If we insist that proceder must be translated etymologically, as ‘moving forward’, we must play fair, and refuse to translate modo as ‘way’! 4 Exx 2, 15. The Ignatian Spirituality of the Way 9
Spiritual Exercises nor in the Constitutions does Ignatius attempt a direct description of the encounter that he seeks to foster, the encounter on which, nevertheless, both his masterpieces centre. This is because of his respect for God’s freedom and for the diversity of times, persons and circumstances. The process is a way of continuous growth, of God carrying forward what God has begun.5 Ignatius’ language often shows how he had internalised this sensitivity to a God ever greater in the lives of others: witness his fondness for a phrase like ‘style of moving forward’ or ‘way of proceeding’, or his description of a formed Jesuit as one who Ignatius was sensitive is ‘running along the way of Christ our Lord’.6 He does not to a God ever greater try to define spiritual consolation through a set of necessary in the lives of others and sufficient conditions; he simply gives us three examples of what ‘I call consolation’, and thereby leaves open the possibility that we who come after might want or need to supplement them.7 ‘In the Exercises, Ignatius, out of the fifty or so contemplations on the life of Christ, gives no parables at all, only six miracles, and about forty contemplations which involve a journey.’ 8 At least in principle, therefore, the Ignatian tradition of spirituality can be of service to anyone serious in their desire for God. Nevertheless, it is perhaps especially suitable for those whose vocations do not lie within the conventional, for those whose experience of life and of God drives them somehow beyond the boundaries, beyond what is normal. The first Jesuits opted out of patterns of ministry centred on local churches, and sought to serve wherever the need was greatest: ‘we accept the care of those for whose well-being and salvation either no- one cares at all, or else they care negligently’.9 The discernment learnt in the school of the Exercises enables us to act with integrity in worlds for which rule books have not been written, or where those that are available are inadequate. There are thus close links between the spirituality of the Exercises and the margins of church and society, the places where questions are
5 Constitutions X.12 [825]. 6 ConstitutionsVI.3.1 [582]. 7 Exx 316. 8 Tad Dunne, ‘Models of Discernment’, The Way Supplement, 23 (Autumn 1974), pp. 18-26, here p. 22. 9 MHSJ MN Orationis observationes, n. 281, cited by the 34th Jesuit General Congregation in 1995 (GC 34, d. 26, n. 22). 10 Philip Endean being asked of inherited tradition, the places where images of the self are being renegotiated. The most recent Jesuit General Congregation identified three contemporary sources of such questions: the bewildering and diverse cultural changes through which we are living; the historical links between official Christianity and an economic and political order seemingly far different from the justice of God’s reign; the need for subtler and more generous accounts of Christian uniqueness amid the richness of the world’s religious traditions. This list is surely not exhaustive: the Congregation’s own decrees on women and on priesthood show an awareness of deeply problematic issues regarding gender, power and sexuality that may challenge Christian self- understanding to a deep purification. There are questions, too, about ecology and the integrity of creation, questions which the Congregation could only remit to further study. An Ignatian journal of spirituality is thus interested not just in Ignatius’ teaching on discernment, but also in how this wisdom interacts with the questions raised by life today. Thus this first issue of The Way in its renewed form quite deliberately brings together two kinds of writing. Some pieces are written professedly within the Ignatian tradition, and focus in particular on the themes of pilgrimage and inculturation. Others concentrate on questions of contemporary experience: on working interculturally, on the pathologies that afflict those who live at the margins, on spirituality and the contemporary culture of the United States. Ignatius would never have wanted us to make an idol of his own writings. The Exercises encourage us to face outwards and onwards, to wherever there is potential for the greater glory of God, for new and creative forms of Christian discipleship.
The Way Travelled Arriving at this vision has been itself, of course, a matter of process. When The Way began in 1961, Fr Johannes Baptist Janssens, then Superior General of the Jesuits, seems to have understood Ignatian spirituality in terms almost exclusively of the Society of Jesus:
The review of spirituality soon to be launched should certainly treat sometimes of Christian spirituality as such and of other, non- Ignatian schools; but a Jesuit review ought principally, even if not exclusively, to promote the spirituality of the Society. The lack of such studies in the English language is truly very sad: everything at The Ignatian Spirituality of the Way 11
present available on the Exercises of St Ignatius is a translation from other languages, and I fear that many of Ours have no deep understanding and appreciation of the Exercises. It is highly desirable that the new review should foster such knowledge and appreciation of the spirituality of the Society among both Ours and others.10
The Way, or at least its Supplements, has certainly done much to help overcome the lack of English-speaking writing on the Exercises that Janssens was here deploring. Even at the outset, however, the vision informing The Way was broader. James Walsh, its principal, and often sole, Editor till 1982, was a specialist in the spirituality of the high Middle Ages as well as a promoter of the Ignatian renewal. The first issue, in January 1961, contained three interesting pieces, under the heading ‘The Acceptable Time’. These sought to assess ‘the spiritual needs of our world and . . . the ways in which these needs are to be fulfilled’.11 Read with hindsight, these pieces show something of what was afoot in the Roman Catholic Church in the early 1960s. Both the Australian and the British author sense that the expansion of educational opportunities for Roman Catholics in their countries following World War II was raising questions that the Church culture of the time would be unable to answer; for his part, the author from the United States, while lamenting that ‘too many lay people feel it is the priest’s job to devise and supervise everything’, nevertheless stoutly declares, ‘paternalism is dead, by Pontifical decree’. The unconscious irony in that last quotation evinces a tension running through the early numbers of The Way. There is a sense of change in Catholic experience (the journal is not yet ecumenical); there is a sense that studying the Church’s spiritual traditions will somehow foster that change. But spirituality is still seen as a deductive application of dogmatic principle, as the execution of directives. The first editors of The Way did not follow Fr Janssens’ orientations literally, and Ignatius receives rather little mention in the first number. The most
10 Johannes Baptist Janssens to Philip Caraman, 1 January 1960, cited and translated in John Coventry, ‘The Way 1981-1986’, Letters and Notices (a private publication of the British Jesuit province), 87/3 (Easter 1986), pp. 117-128, here p. 128. 11 The Way, 1 (1961), pp. 9-26: Paul Crane wrote on Great Britain (pp. 9-13), Walter M. Abbott on the USA (pp. 14-20), and J. Philip Gleeson on Australia (pp. 21-26). The quotation comes from the Editorial (no page number). 12 Philip Endean
prominent exception, however, is revealing. It comes in the brief Editorial at the outset:
In his Rules for Thinking with the Church, St Ignatius begins by saying that ‘we must keep our minds and hearts ready to obey promptly, at every turn, the true bride of Christ our Lord, our Holy Mother the Hierarchical Church’. The task, then, which we set ourselves, in offering this new Review of Spirituality to English-speaking Catholics, is to understand and interpret as faithfully as possible the Church’s spiritual message to her children at the present moment. We hope that The Way will help its readers to think, will, and live with Christ in His Church today; to recognise Him and to give Him to each other in the way in which the Church is now presenting Him to us.
More significant than the choice of Ignatian text, more significant even than the restriction of the journal’s appeal to ‘Catholics’, is the unreflective assumption that spirituality is uncomplicatedly dependent on the Church’s authority: a journal of spirituality ‘interprets the Church’s spiritual message to her children’. The idea that the Church’s authority might need to learn from human experience, even within— let alone beyond—the Church’s formal membership, has not yet entered the editors’ consciousnesses. The early numbers of The Way took biblical themes, and treated them in largely expository fashion. In 1969—when of course the Second Vatican Council had intervened—the editors announced that ‘the time has come to change our formula’. They announced the inauguration of ‘the New Way’.12 For them (in ways that of course the neo-traditionalists of today would dispute), liturgical and biblical renewal had given a salutary shock to Christian complacency,
. . . and nowhere more thoroughly than in the naive belief that all that was needed were certain running repairs. Frequently, the removal of the cracked paintwork has revealed that the woodwork underneath was rotten. What was called for was renewal, not restoration. We still have to fight against the traditionalism of the last century which precisely confused restoration with renewal, and
12 The Way, 9 (1969), pp. 259-266. I am grateful to Fr Michael Ivens, who contributed to the process informing this Editorial, for drawing it to my attention, and for reminding me that the present re-launch of The Way is not the first of its kind. Ironically, the final article prior to the 1970 re-launch, by James Walsh, was entitled ‘Nothing New Under the Sun’. The Ignatian Spirituality of the Way 13
preferred to backdate rather than to update. . . . The nefarious consequence is that inner renewal is so channelled as to ensure the preservation of the very exterior it is meant to re-create.
Again, there is something to smile at in the way the new style of writing on spirituality is announced:
Beginning with the first issue for 1970, our readers will notice a shift of emphasis and approach. Instead of a biblical theme we shall choose an area of concern. The first will be—Man.
Within a few years, feminist awareness would make a sentence like that embarrassing. Nevertheless, a major shift has occurred:
A new Church is emerging slowly. It is a new Church, because there are new Christians. Now, more than ever before, we are compelled to remember that when we are talking of the Church or of the world we are talking about people. There was a time when we were less conscious of this basic fact, when we thought and spoke institutionally. . . .
It is easy to define religious experience at the price of delimiting a particular area of life and proclaiming that within those limits religious experience may take place. But what of the rest, often the major part of life? Today people are seeking for religious experience in a wider field, and the Church must be there searching with them.
It is Vatican II which immediately provoked these reflections,13 and indeed Ignatius is not mentioned in this programmatic piece. Nevertheless, the authors have retrieved a key Ignatian insight: that the truth of God resides not just in the teaching of authority, but rather in an interplay between tradition and human experience at large. It is through journeys into the unknown and uncharted that we discover God. Though The Way of course continued to change after 1970, the shift articulated here was decisive. If Christian authority resided exclusively in tradition, then ‘spirituality’ could only refer to some part of that tradition, and arguably only a minor part: that enshrined in the religious orders. If, however, human experience was also a locus of
13 See the various essays in John W. O’Malley, Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1989), notably his classic piece first published in Theological Studies, 32 (1971), pp. 573-601: ‘Reform, Historical Consciousness, and Vatican II’s Aggiornamento’. 14 Philip Endean
religious insight, then ‘spirituality’ could become a matter both of major theological significance and of broader relevance and appeal. Of course, it has not been just in The Way that the understanding of ‘spirituality’ has changed over the last forty years. In 1960, ‘spirituality’ was a subject taught only in faculties and An ecumenical, seminaries of a Catholic bent. It dealt primarily with the ways inter-faith of life and prayer characteristic of various forms of consecrated enterprise life. At least in some parts of the world, this vision of spirituality has broadened.14 Spirituality is a human phenomenon, not confined to believers, still less to those in consecrated life or priesthood. Inclusiveness and holism are watchwords. The study of spirituality is thus essentially an ecumenical, inter-faith enterprise—although much Christian writing on ‘other religions’ is marred by an unconsciously colonialist naïveté. For obvious reasons, students of spirituality typically focus on forms of religious commitment or expression that conventional theology and or religious authority tend to marginalise: ‘believing without belonging’, ‘I’m spiritual but I’m not religious’.15 Spirituality offers a basis for conversation between Christianity and other religions; it can also make bridges with secular academic disciplines as they recognise the need for religious categories of interpretation. There is, of course, a continuity here with the great religious orders: these too fostered patterns of human living going somehow beyond the conventional. The important point here concerns the uses to which the wisdom developed in consecrated life is put. At the end of his groundbreaking study of ethics, After Virtue, Alasdair Macintyre expresses his hope for,
. . . the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.
14 See, for example, Sandra M. Schneiders, ‘Spirituality in the Academy’, Theological Studies, 50 (1989), pp. 676-697; and the gradual development of the United States based Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, with its journal, first the Christian Spirituality Bulletin, now Spiritus. 15 Compare the claim made by GC 34: ‘People’s spiritual lives have not died; they are simply taking place outside the Church’ (C 34, d. 4, n. 21). The Ignatian Spirituality of the Way 15
And he concludes:
We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.16
The Benedictine tradition is valuable, not only because of what it says about how to run a monastery, but also because of how it can nurture human possibilities in a situation of threat. Similarly, Constance FitzGerald can draw on Carmelite traditions about the Dark Night to interpret, constructively and hopefully, the situation of impasse that she finds in contemporary US American culture:
We stand helpless, confused and guilty before the insurmountable problems of our world. . . . We cannot bear to let ourselves be totally challenged by the poor, the elderly, the unemployed, refugees, the oppressed; by the unjust, unequal situation of women in a patriarchal, sexist culture; by those tortured and imprisoned and murdered in the name of national security; by the possibility of the destruction of humanity. . . . The experience of God in impasse is the crucible in which our God images and language will be transformed, and a feminine value system and social fabric generated.17
As The Way enters a new phase of its history, it is committed to bringing the Ignatian tradition of spirituality, in particular its understandings of discernment and mission, to the new questions being raised for Christians in the twenty-first century. What is the Spirit saying to us through our discoveries in the human and natural sciences, through our enriched experiences of gender and sexuality, through our encounters with other great traditions of faith and culture? How is the divine wisdom preserving us and governing us and carrying us forward as these changes occur? How can we be constantly sensing God’s most holy will, and perfectly fulfilling it in new situations? These are the perennial questions facing the Ignatian family; they are also close to the questions which animate and inspire the contemporary study of spirituality.
16 Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 245. 17 Constance FitzGerald, ‘Impasse and Dark Night’, in Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development (New York: Paulist, 1996 [1986]), edited by Joann Wolski Conn, pp. 410-435, here pp. 423, 429. 16 Philip Endean
Reform, Tensions and Identity ‘But what do you mean by “spirituality”?’ The question will be familiar to anyone who has worked in this field in recent years. Those of us who teach spirituality put it to ourselves every time we wonder if a student project or a new course syllabus belongs in a spirituality programme; others may put it to us with some hostility, as they question spirituality’s credentials as a serious field of study. Sandra Schneiders has claimed that spirituality is at a stage typical of nascent disciplines. As psychology and sociology were developing,
. . . there were scholars who were interested in studying phenomena they intuitively knew existed, but which were not the object of any recognised discipline, namely, relationships as such, and the human psychic structure and function.
Students of spirituality—of ‘religious experience itself’—must live with similar ambiguity:
It is going to take some time to delineate precisely the new field and to distinguish it adequately from that of other fields, but we know we are interested in studying something that exists and that does not fit precisely into any of the existing fields of study.18
Specialists differ regarding the relationship between spirituality and theology: about whether the perceived gap between the two indicates an essential difference between them, or alternatively some dysfunction in one or both. This point, however, is in the end of only secondary importance: in either case, the study called ‘spirituality’ is asking questions about human experience and about God that conventional approaches disallow or avoid. It is concerned with realities that are elusive, nascent, easily ignored: realities that are in continuity with what is known as good and true, but in ways that are not yet apparent. By calling The Way a journal of spirituality—rather than of theology or of catechetics or of pastoral care—we are indicating a special commitment to explore these life-giving, if still fragile, realities. The tensions arising in the contemporary expansion of spirituality are similar to those intrinsic to the Ignatian and Jesuit traditions.
18 Sandra M. Schneiders, ‘Spirituality as an Academic Discipline: Reflections from Experience’, Christian Spirituality Bulletin, 1/2(Fall 1993), pp. 10-15, here p. 15. The Ignatian Spirituality of the Way 17
Towards the end of his life, Karl Rahner imagined Ignatius speaking to a contemporary Jesuit of his desire to communicate God’s Word:
I wanted to say this just as it had always been said in the Church, and yet I thought—and this opinion was true—that I could say what was old in a new way.19
The early Jesuits were caught up in a tension between their distinctive ‘style of moving forward’—its internationality, its independence of local structures, its lack of structures such as choral office—and their commitment to the Church as a whole, a commitment which of course was the raison d’être for their distinctiveness. One early Dominican critic, Tomás de Pedroche, objected strongly to the title, ‘Society of Jesus’:
Certainly this title and name is proud and schismatic, and not a little insulting to the Christian people as a whole. For, since—as the Gospel bears witness—there cannot be but two societies, one the Society of Jesus, the other the Society of the Devil, then if these people and only these are called, and in fact are, the Society of Jesus, then it follows that all the rest both are called, and in fact are, the Society of the Devil.20
An unsympathetic critic can mount an exactly analogous argument against the claim that the discipline of spirituality is concerned with ‘religious experience in itself’: what, then, is left for the rest of theology to do? And just as the early Jesuits had to negotiate their way through frequent charges of heresy and illuminism, so too the contemporary study of spirituality is beset by accusations of irresponsibility. Part of the pain of a prophetic vocation consists in having to live with the sense that such accusations will always sound plausible and may even be partially justified. Yet lack of conceptual clarity about what is occurring is no conclusive ground for doubting our authenticity as we move forward along the way into God’s truth; nor is uncertainty about the rightness of our intentions or the soundness of our position conclusive grounds for abandoning the journey. Living with such ambiguity is part of the prophetic, mystical vocation.
19 Karl Rahner, ‘Ignatius of Loyola Speaks to a Modern Jesuit’, in Ignatius of Loyola, translated by Rosaleen Ockenden (London: Collins, 1979), pp. 11-38, here p. 11. 20 MHSJ FN 1, pp. 319-320. 18 Philip Endean
Perhaps, indeed, any renewal movement in any idealistic organisation can attract such a reaction from the wider body. The call to integrity, to an ever greater appropriation of the Gospel message, leads us forward into territory that is not only unknown but also conflictive. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus begins his public ministry by entering the synagogue and presenting himself as the fulfilment of Third Isaiah’s prophecy:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. . . . Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’21
Luke brings out how this message creates division among and within the hearers: on the one hand, all ‘spoke well’ of Jesus; on the other, all were ‘filled with rage’. Growth into gospel truth engages people at their vulnerable points; it calls forth both positive and negative reactions. If this sounds bleak, we can remember Ignatius’ teaching about suffering. In certain carefully specified circumstances, ‘injuries, false accusations and affronts’ can be a source of ‘spiritual profit’, indeed something to be desired.22 As with Jesus we engage what is dark, violent and unconverted, resurrection life can come into being, not only for ourselves but for the many.
Pedro Arrupe in Thailand On his last working day as General Superior of the Jesuits, August 6 1981, Pedro Arrupe was in Thailand. He gave an impromptu speech to Jesuits involved with what was then the new Jesuit Refugee Service there. A few years later, members of that group were to write eloquently of the message that refugees held for the Church in general and for the Ignatian movement in particular:
Beware, they are saying to us, of immobility, of fixed institutions, of set patterns of behaviour and modes of operation that bind the Spirit; be bold, be adventurous, for to gain all one must be ready to lose all—as we have. For the Church, the refugees are a constant
21 Luke 4:18-19, 21; see Isaiah 61:1-3. 22 Examen 4.44 [101]; see Exx 147, 167. The Ignatian Spirituality of the Way 19
reminder that the people of God is essentially a pilgrim people, never settled, always on the move, always searching.23
Arrupe’s speech begins sensitively. He has noticed the stresses of refugee work, initially as these come out indirectly:
I can see that you are happy. But I can also see that your work is burdensome. Sometimes when you speak from the heart some feelings come out, not bitter feelings exactly, but ones that result from the burden of hard work—really hard work. And perhaps this is not always recognised by others.24
He touches on shortage of resources; on difficult relations with the local Church; on the permanent sense of uncertainty and risk as his hearers are working with the unknown; on differences of opinion in the group. Nevertheless, there are also exhilarating possibilities:
. . . how terrific it would be for the Society to have non-Christians coming to work for the poor in the villages, coming motivated by philanthropy. . . . Then we would be collaborating with people to much greater effect than we can through those few Catholics that we are in the Orient. And through the mass media we can present matters in a human way, and so multiply the work and its effects.... This would amount to pre-evangelization done by non-Christians.... I see an opening within refugee work for such an apostolate.
The idea of ‘pre-evangelization’ done by non-Christians’ may seem strange. But life with the displaced leads us to question, discerningly, our sense of identity, and the political and religious constructions which we might otherwise take for granted. Arrupe’s struggle to express himself in a second language comes powerfully to reinforce the sense of a man exploring frontier issues:
I will tell you something I ask myself very often. Should we give spiritual help to the guerrillas in Latin America? No, you say? Well, I cannot say no. Perhaps in the past I have. But they are men, souls, suffering. If you have a wounded person, even if he is a guerrilla you
23 ‘A Vision for JRS’ (1985), in Everybody’s Challenge: Essential Documents of Jesuit Refugee Service 1980- 2000 (Rome: Jesuit Refugee Service, 2000), edited by Danielle Vella, pp. 70-72, here p. 71. 24 Pedro Arrupe, ‘Final Address to Jesuits Working with Refugees in Thailand’, in Everybody’s Challenge, pp. 33-37. 20 Philip Endean
have to help him. . . . We cannot be naïve and allow ourselves to be used politically by other people. But on the other hand we need a real Christian commitment. . . . Charity is one thing, principle another, and casuistry is a third. Actual cases can be very difficult to resolve.
Surely with a twinkle in his eye, Arrupe muses that the Pope had told him to send Jesuits to a Communist university in Ethiopia, and reminds himself of Paul VI’s radical teaching on private property.25 Then he becomes more serious: ‘situations such as these are very difficult and complicated. Everything must be done with great discernment.’ It is in this context that Arrupe talks about prayer, in words that have become famous:
I will say one more thing, and please don’t forget it. Pray. Pray much. Problems like these are not solved by human efforts. . . . We pray at the beginning and at the end of meetings—we are good Christians! But in our three-day meetings, if we spend half a day in prayer . . . we will have very different ‘lights’. And we will come to quite different syntheses—in spite of different points of view—ones we could never find in books nor arrive at through discussion. Right here we have a classic case: If we are indeed in the front line of a new apostolate in the Society, we have to be enlightened by the Holy Spirit. These are not the pious words of a novice master. What I am saying is 100 per cent from St Ignatius.
There are deep connections between the forms of prayer promoted by the Exercises, and the prophetic character of Ignatian ministry. If the spiritual life is being lived authentically and well, it will be permanently questioning us, stretching us, subverting our self-understanding. If there are no movements, if the spirits are not stirring us, something is wrong.26 Arrupe’s Ignatian spirituality and sensitivity to his own experience leads him to question the orthodoxies of Cold War politics. Authentic Ignatian prayer sets off a change in the construction of the
25Populorum progressio (1967), n. 23: ‘the right to private property is not absolute and unconditional. No one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of life. In short, “as the Fathers of the Church and other eminent theologians tell us, the right of private property may never be exercised to the detriment of the common good”.’ (Paul VI was quoting one of his own earlier statements). 26 Exx 6. The Ignatian Spirituality of the Way 21 self, a divine dissatisfaction with the conventional, a quest for the magis. The expression of this growth may be indirect and tentative, but it leads, if authentic, to a Gospel inclusiveness, calling forth unpredictable and conflicting reactions even within individuals, let alone in groups. In multiple ways, subsequent narratives tend to smooth over the conflict and ambiguity of such situations, and thus simplified myths—often using the rhetoric of ‘obedience’—establish themselves. The hagiography that is already surrounding Arrupe obscures how his leadership was controversial, how he had influential detractors, and how the questions raised by his witness remain provocative, divisive. The hagiography has an important function: it contains the tensions, both within the self and among members of the Church, raised by an authentically spiritual life, and thus holds us together so that we can continue the journey in good order and in communion. But our primary commitment is to the way itself, to the questions that arise as we journey into the mystery of God and of God’s reign, to a conflictive process of growth—growth into One always greater than whatever we can hope or imagine.
Philip Endean SJ is Editor of The Way and Tutor in Theology at Campion Hall, Oxford. Until 2001, he taught at Heythrop College, University of London. ON RECEIVING AN INHERITANCE
Confessions of a Former Marginaholic
James Alison
ALK OF MARGINALISATION AND ALIENATION has often enough Tbeen bunk, and pernicious bunk at that. I am not making this claim as someone who has always been above such bunk, or who has not experienced the powerful moral forces that are at work when such words are being used. Quite the contrary. Over the last twenty years or so, I have regularly danced, more or less feverishly, to such tunes. My claim is that of the recovering marginaholic. Let me try to explain what I mean. Some fifteen years ago I went to live in Brazil, in order to do my theological studies as a Dominican. It was the height of the boom in liberation theology. My way of dealing with my own sense of marginalisation as a gay man, unable to fit in with any of the power structures, or to belong in any way at all, in my country, was to get out, to go into exile. After all, if you do not belong, it is easier to live in a foreign country than in your own. Once I arrived in Brazil, I tried to face the world of AIDS, which was beginning to emerge powerfully there. For me, a gay man with a conscience still bound by the voices of society and Church, AIDS opened up the possibility of being good; it gave me a ground on which I could justify myself, prove that I might after all be a good thing. I remember the pleasure I felt when one of the leading voices of liberation in my community at the time solemnly informed me that working for people with AIDS wasn’t really a liberating thing at all, since it didn’t transform society. The only way to transform society was to work with a political party or a trade union. This of course merely confirmed me in what I had begun to suspect about the liberation ‘thing’, namely that its doyens had a peculiar knack of associating liberation with things which wouldn’t cause them to lose their reputations. I had caught him out. By identifying with the world of
The Way, 42/1 (January 2003), pp. 22-33 On Receiving an Inheritance 23
AIDS, I could be even more marginalised than the self-appointed guardians of holy marginalisation. And therefore, of course, even more holy. My sense of identity was very much dependent on being rejected. I knew, or thought I knew, that that was what the Gospel demanded, and I had managed to fool myself that my search for being marginalised was of God. How did this pan out in the actual time I spent with people dying from AIDS? I have not yet been able to give any satisfactory account to myself of this part of my life, of what it means. I hope that the people I accompanied will welcome me into the heavenly halls as their brother; but if so, then it will be because they have been I approached the able to see through the mixed motives and hugely complex place of shame and series of needs which I had when I was with them—needs marginalisation which, as I was vaguely aware even then, had more to do as a voyeur with me than with them. Let me put it this way: it was as though I was a voyeur of those who occupied the place of shame and ultimate marginalisation. I was terrified of being where they were, not only because of the disease and its ravages, but because of the shame involved. As a priest I was able, of course, to offer them sacraments and the other gifts of priestly ministry. I remember even then being struck by how they were able to receive a power and transforming grace from the sacraments. This power and grace had absolutely nothing to do with how I was feeling—my eyes were scarcely daring to look at what I was doing. It was as if in fact the sign was working quite independently of its minister, who was a sort of Baalam’s Ass of ex opere operato grace. Looking back now, I think I can see what was missing in this powerful compulsion to such ambiguous compassion, and I will try to expand on this below. But one can put it in a nutshell: what was missing was the ability to like anyone. I couldn’t like them; I couldn’t like myself. It was as though I was dancing terrified before the veil of a ghastly reality—a veil that I didn’t dare to go through—while remaining quite unable to like either those on either this side or that side of the veil. Something of this became a bit clearer to me when I moved later on to Bolivia. You can’t, I thought to myself, get much more marginalised than living in Bolivia; surely therefore it must be an heroically holy thing to choose to work here. And yet one of my abiding memories of the eighteen months I spent in that beautiful, and indeed severely marginalised country, teaching in its Catholic University, is of my 24 James Alison complete inability to like the place or its people. Yet again I managed to inspire others to find it necessary to get rid of me; yet again I set myself up to become holy by being rejected—what I have referred to in a book I wrote as ‘the self-canonization of the self-victim’.1 It was as though I was not dealing with a real place and real people, but with some sort of sounding board I needed—something at which I could hurl my Angst. However, here I began to be a little clearer about what was really happening. Not far beneath the surface of my own apparently confident self-presentation there were gnawing doubts. Perhaps my real agenda was far from holy. Perhaps a friend of mine was right when he tried to show me, after I had managed to figure for the nth time at the centre of a bout of sacrificial violence, that I was wandering around with a large label pinned to my back saying ‘kick me’.
An Experience of Dying The breakthrough probably happened in the period following this time in Bolivia. Three things came together over the course of a year. Firstly, I managed to finish my doctoral thesis; I had never before completed an educational process, and thus for the first time in my life I felt I had successfully concluded something. Secondly, the Dominican superiors in South America joined forces to get rid of me (something for which, I should make quite clear, I am now profoundly grateful). Thirdly, the man in Brazil whom I loved in died suddenly and unexpectedly. He was three weeks into the first infection to which his weakened immune system had opened him after some ten years of being HIV+ (this was all before the cocktail of drugs currently in use became available). Finishing a Project In retrospect, I can see these three events as setting off a process which I can only refer to as dying. A couple of years later, I began to understand that in a real sense I had died. Let me try to explain. My doctoral thesis (appropriately called The Joy of Being Wrong) had been, for some time, my way of surviving, of holding on to a sense of doing something worthwhile, a way of achieving something. About six months before I finished, a French Dominican asked me what was my ambition in life; ‘to finish my thesis’, I replied. The truth was that I
1 Raising Abel (New York: Crossroad, 1996), p. 184. On Receiving an Inheritance 25 didn’t have any ambitions after that, because I just wanted to die. However, I needed to have done at least something first; this, I hoped, would be it. And as I finished it, I began to realise that I was now ready to go: I simply didn’t have any ambition left, any desire to do anything. There was also a strange sense that I had somehow been reached by whatever is meant by the phrase: ‘there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ’ (Romans 8:1). And this was accompanied by a certain interior collapsing with relief. Some sort of battle was over. I had no ambition left, and nothing to win; I only desired to die. Yet here something was beginning to empower me, empower me to ‘walk not after the flesh but after the spirit’ (Romans 8:4). You Are Not One Of Us’ Then there was my repudiation by the Dominican superiors in South America. This gave me a clean break, and therefore some relief. But it was also, of course, a shock. They seemed to be saying to me something like this: ‘Your attempt to have a life project here in this continent has failed, it is over. You are not one of us.’ And they were, of course, quite right. I had obscurely been using them, just as I had been using the people with AIDS whom I had accompanied, and just as I had been using Bolivia. They even had the decency to repudiate me in a violent and irrational way. This meant I was spared the humiliation of having to recognise publicly that they were right, and that I had been barking up the wrong tree for years. I was able to go off with my dignity of the destroyed-one intact, so bad did they make themselves look. At the same time, however, I knew, deep down, that I had been let off, and rejoiced in the fact. My membership of my religious order was annulled; I was deeply relieved that the game was up. I was, I should say, also simply terrified of what this would mean: I I was deeply had no idea of any other way of living than the institutionally relieved that protected way in which I had lived my whole life. The idea of the game was up making a living, of surviving off my own bat, was completely terrifying to me. So it did take something like a year before I dared, with my hands covering my eyes, to walk the plank and fall into the rest of my life. But this experience was also a form of death: the death of a whole fake life project and of all the props for survival which it afforded: home, country, ‘family’, profession, training, ability to be of worth in public, ability to tell a life story which makes sense. These are things usually lost at death. 26 James Alison
A Friend Dies Then the third element of my dying was the death of my friend Laércio in Brazil (I was in Chile at the time, packing my stuff so as to go back and be with him, since at the time 80 per cent of seropositive patients died within five months of presenting their first symptom). Again in retrospect, I can see that here for the first time I had actually managed to make an autonomous decision to do something genuinely loving. I had taken the decision, too late though it turned out to be, to go back and be with someone, perhaps at some risk to my own security. It was not just that my last ambition had died and I had literally nothing left to do. In the days after Laércio’s death, I realised that the love I had felt was genuine; it was nothing to be ashamed of; it was something that could really happen; indeed, this love was what life was all about. It was a completely new and destabilising possibility, completely disarming my strategies of careful self-protection against the fullness of life while dancing on the edge of marginality. I knew all this as a sense of not really having lost Laércio at all; indeed the only way I could respond, could express my gratitude, was by actually accepting this kick into life which he was offering me. Furthermore, something else gradually dawned on me. Because I found myself actually loving Laércio, the place of shame which had been made visible for me by gay men dying of AIDS was suddenly no longer a place of shame. If Laércio whom I loved, and whom I knew to be wonderful, could have undergone this place of shame and death, then so could I. It didn’t hold any terror for me any longer, nor any fascination. I was no longer dancing frenziedly round the edge of the veil; I had found myself sucked through it. At the same time, there was a sense of having at last been able to grasp something of what Jesus’ promise of eternal life was about. And something too about how Baptism is a death undergone in advance, so that death no longer needed to dominate me. It was not that shame was suddenly cancelled; rather I discovered that shame held in love as something tender and delicate is not really shame at all, but a certain rejoicing. These then were the three factors which seemed to combine in my experience of dying. I lost my ambition and need to succeed; I lost a fake and compulsive life project; and my sense of shame, something that had defined me, was transformed—transformed into something On Receiving an Inheritance 27 holding neither fear nor fascination. It opened up the possibility of just being human. And even of liking the possibility.
On Being an Heir What is life like in this place where death is somehow behind me? The word that best suggests what is growing on me is ‘heir’. It is as though I am receiving an inheritance. Let me explain. The Bible passage I have in mind is this:
. . . and if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God. Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again?2
The heir is the owner of the estate. The heir is not marginalised, in any way. You are absolutely central. The whole estate is going to come to you. Whatever is going on, whatever battles and squabbles seem to be dominating the scene, whoever seems to be in and whoever seems to be out—none of this matters to you one bit. For you are and remain the heir; you know you’re eventually going to inherit it all whatever happens. This idea corresponds to the experience of living as having died that I have been trying to describe to you. Increasingly I seem to find a sense of being in on the centre of what it’s all about. It is not as though
2 Galatians 3:29–4:9. Any attempt to replace ‘sons’ with a more inclusive expression here distorts the meaning. 28 James Alison
I am making a claim to power, or indeed any claim at all. It’s more a realisation that I am being given something, or, more accurately, being given the capacity to be someone. And this someone is taking part in a huge and largely hidden adventure. Being In On The Centre I am not quite sure where this experience of being an heir is leading; let me nevertheless try to tease out some aspects of it. In the first place, there is a sense of being in on the centre of things without actually being the centre. It is Christ who is in the centre of the experience, the one who occupies the place of shame and marginalisation and victimage. This leads to a paradox. Because Christ occupies this place in freedom, and because Christ likes us, we can have a strange sense of being in on the centre; he has made it a place not to be feared. At the same time, it is no longer a specifically sacred space, and therefore no longer a frightening place. Thus, in another way, there is no centre at all any more: the centre is everywhere, including where I am. Perhaps Pascal was getting close to this when he described nature as a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.3 One can put the point more concretely by looking at what Christ does with religious institutions. On the one hand, Christ does away with both Temple and Church in so far as these are institutions with sacred centres of mimetic fascination, institutions The new creation which exercise a powerful draw on the imagination and is my project; emotions of those who live close to them, both yet it is not mine at all, attracting and repelling them. At the same time, he but something given actively creates a new Temple, founds a Church, as something which is universal—something which has no centre and thus no periphery, a community where there are no outsiders or insiders. When I say I feel I’m an heir, receiving an inheritance, what I mean is that I’m somehow finding myself in on that collapse and in on that new creation. I’m a receptive participant in that process. The new creation is my project; and yet it is not mine at all, but rather something given to me—given so that I can be part of it. One of the side-effects of this awareness is an increasing inability to take seriously the need both to be ‘for’ the Church and ‘against’ it, which seems to be so strong with us. It often seems as though on the
3 Pensées, n. 72. On Receiving an Inheritance 29 one hand our goodness depends on there being a Church, yet on the other we need to be able to kick against the Church in order to be good: we need to be on the centre and at the margins at the same time. It now seems to me, however, that we get into this situation because we are driven by a need to justify ourselves over against someone else, by a sense that I can become good only if there are bad guys for me to battle against. We fall victim to an addictive pattern of desire, an inability to receive death and goodness and life as gifts to be relaxed into, and thus a compulsion to hold on to something. Paul is speaking of something beyond all this. If we hear his message, we need no longer be ashamed of being insiders. For in truth, we are neither insider nor outsider; inside and outside have passed away. Being On The Periphery At the risk of contradicting myself, I would also like to talk about a sense of being on the periphery. I use ‘periphery’ rather than ‘margins’ deliberately. The centre of things is Christ, and God’s dynamic movement towards us so as to make us active shared participants in creation. This centre is an overwhelming power and presence, one that makes it a delight to be a recipient, a peripheral recipient, of all this goodness. Our sense of self is dependent on the ‘other’, which is massively prior to the formation of the ‘I’ of any of us. The gospel tells us that this ‘other’ is hugely and powerfully benevolent; it is OK to relax into receiving its power and benevolence, to be swept up by it, to let go. However, this sense of being peripheral to a hugely benevolent, powerful other is not at all the same as being ‘marginal’. It includes the realisation that there is no one who is not just such a peripheral; it then gives us the possibility of discovering fellow peripherals, who, like me, are receiving an inheritance, being called into rejoicing. But with a difference. None of us has to achieve anything, to get anything right, to be a success. I can therefore rejoice in others. I am in no sort of competition with them; I do not need to protect myself against their mortality, their time-wasting, their deficiencies, or indeed against my own. For it is precisely in this fallible state that we are liked; precisely thus that we are being gifted to become something new. If religions and societies are organized round a sacred centre, they will generate margins. These margins are dangerous places. Much effort must be expended not to be among the losers, whether in terms of 30 James Alison finance, health, reputation or whatever. The Temple which Christ is building is neither sacred nor a centre. It creates a generous spaciousness, where we delight in dwelling among the weak and those of little account; there is, always, despite what the poet said, ‘world enough and time’. The gospel generates a peripheral existence—an existence which enables us to like being among those who have nowhere to go. They are neither competitors, nor sign of scarcity; not threat of loss, nor object of compassion, but sign of gift and shared story that has no end. Complacency The third theme I want to tease out is that of complacency. Isn’t there something complacent about this sense of receiving an inheritance? Doesn’t the New Testament exhort us, in rather athletic-sounding language, to keep striving, keep persevering? There are always little voices from my old self kicking in to tell me that I should, like a good evangelical, be somehow doing more. But I think those voices are wrong. Contrary to its bad name, complacency is rather a good thing. ‘Complacency’ means dwelling with liking in something. The Father says of his Son, ‘This is my son in whom I am complacent’ (Mark 1:11). If you want to know that I am not making this up, here is St Jerome’s translation: Tu es Filius meus dilectus; in te conplacui. If the Father dwells with liking in someone or on someone, then to receive the Father’s regard must involve liking being liked, strange though it may seem. It becomes presumption only if it is held onto as something which is no longer being received, but rather as a possession as that is already held—something closing us off from further delighted growth into the Father’s pleasure. We tend to confuse presumption and complacency; we tend to reserve the word ‘complacency’ to refer only to a closed-off self-satisfaction, to something which cuts one off from involvement with others, from vulnerability towards others. Complacency, properly understood, is more positive than this. Though it can degenerate into presumption, it can also deepen into compassion. Someone who is liked who can appreciate what is really likeable about another person, and bring that out. I remember reading a story of a gay man who, together with his partner, rented a video. Unbeknown to the man, his partner had previously acted in porno videos of a rather violent and disturbing sort before they met. The shop assistant at the video store that evening put the wrong video into the On Receiving an Inheritance 31 box, and—hey presto—they suddenly found themselves watching a degrading film in which one of them was playing a central part. Needless to say, the former actor rushed out of the room with shame and fear at his being uncovered, and only dared to come back in several hours later. He found his partner just sitting and crying in front of a blank TV screen. The former actor imagined that this meant it was all over between them, and that he should collect his things and move out. But no, it turned out that the man was crying because of the debasement to which someone he loved had subjected himself, or been subjected; he was crying with compassion as he saw something of the sort of deep dark place his partner must have been in. Only someone who is really aware that they are liked, only someone who is really complacent, can defuse another’s place of shame and make it spacious. And it is out of complacency that liking can flow to those who are like. If I am complacent, I am not frightened of being like someone, liking them, being liked by them. To share with them in equality is not a demand or a burden, but part of the discovery of who I am. This discovery occurs as I find a spacious sharing with the one I like—a sharing which is turning me into someone different. There is something deeply non-moralistic about this. We find ourselves learning to receive the other as gift. It will be apparent that I am still struggling to learn this; I am talking about something that I can only hope to receive. But whatever it is, it draws the sting from the issue of marginalisation, alienation and estrangement. The marginal can appear demanding, burdensome, reproachful. It can make us feel that relaxing into being loved is something selfish, something that detracts from our being the sacrificial givers we ought to be. We can become anxious: we can fear that having it good, being loved and contented, will make us insensitive to the marginal other, invulnerable to the victim’s demands. If I discover myself as loved, and start to relax into that regard, if I come to realise what Paul meant when he spoke of our being known by God, of our being at the periphery of God’s regard, will I not then in my complacency lose my anguished sensitivity to the other? Will my ears not become dull to the cry of the oppressed, and my eyes blind to the sufferings of the victim, and will I thus not miss out on salvation? 32 James Alison
So there is a sort of trap. I tell myself that I can only be attentive to those on the margin if I myself am discontented and marginalised. Even, however, as I act in this way, I dimly sense that I am only acting out my own drama; there may be no real ‘other’ in my ken. And when I fully experience receiving an inheritance, the trap vanishes; God’s loving regard enables me to like and to be liked. This enables us to be curious, unthreatening, experimental, creative in our relationships with others. It gives us a trust that we will receive all that we need; it holds us open to the irruptions of the other. It is a gift when the other irrupts in my life and causes me to become someone different. They tell a story embracing elements of being human that I couldn’t imagine. And only if I understand the other as gift can the marginal other really be other for me—really be part of my being upbuilt by God. Otherwise they are drawn into my defences of a controlled way of being, into my appropriation of goodness. They are being used simply as a sounding board for my own tale of tragic heroism. What I am talking about here is the experience of being given a heart. Banal though this sounds, it expresses what was lacking in my sense of shame and in my frantic batting about in the margins. I was so ashamed that I didn’t have a heart, that I didn’t have any of the right reactions, didn’t feel compassion, pity, love. I was so ashamed that I would be found out as being this heartless person that I fled to the ends of the earth. I covered up; I put myself in places where no one would be able to understand me, and therefore no one would be able to discern the huge hole where my heart should have been. The Father knows marginality, alienation and scarcity, pain and death, only as surds that weigh too heavily on us. It is his desire to empower us, so that we can imagine our way creatively into playfulness. What could be a greater inheritance than to receive a new heart, to receive His heart?4
James Alison is a Catholic theologian, priest and author, who has lived and worked in Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and the United States, as well as his native England. He earned his doctorate in theology from the Jesuit Faculty in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and is the author of several books. Having lived with the Dominican Order between 1981 and 1995, he currently works as an itinerant preacher, lecturer and retreat giver. He lives in London.
4 This article originated as a talk for the British and Irish Association of Practical Theology Annual Conference, held in July 2002.
THE IMPACT OF TRANSITION
Barbara Hendricks
ASTORAL MINISTRY TODAY IS OFTEN, and increasingly, cross-cultural. PThe days when it was only missionaries who had to learn about adapting to different customs are long gone. Any serious programme of pastoral formation needs to be preparing people who can communicate across cultural barriers. But there will be a cost. This kind of ministry and mission require people to pass through a barren desert, a ‘no-self land’. The call to continue the mission of Jesus in the world today is a call to transmit meaning—the meaning of life at its deepest level. There is a strange paradox in this call to mission. The very person who is called to transmit meaning must themselves go through a searing process, a deep crisis invading their own world of personal meaning. To be effective in mission and ministry at the deepest level, I must be willing to pass through a period of crisis, a time of meaninglessness.
Passing Over Crossing the cultural barrier usually begins for pastoral ministers when they, like Abraham, set out at the call of God to a place that will be shown them. There is a barren desert to pass through at the frontier of mission. The initial period of orientation, the first moment of contact with people in a new setting, with new customs and a new culture, is an invitation to a deep conversion. It invites the minister to go into a desert place, a place of barren wastes. Here, the lack of familiar supports and the sense of disempowerment provide—paradoxically— the possibility of opening out to a new world and a broadened horizon. Here a real conversion can begin, a metanoia, in which pastoral ministers begin to perceive more clearly and more deeply not only what God’s creative power is doing in the world, but also what God is doing within their own selves. In his book, The Way of All the Earth, the theologian John S. Dunne describes a phenomenon which he calls ‘passing over’. What he says is close to my concern here. Dunne writes:
The Way, 42/1 (January 2003), pp. 34-43 The Impact of Transition 35
Is religion coming to birth in our time? It could be. What seems to be occurring is a phenomenon we might call ‘passing over’—passing over from one culture to another, from one way of life to another. Passing over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion. It is followed by an equal and opposite process we might call ‘coming back’, coming back with new insight to one’s own culture, one’s own way of life, one’s own religion.1
‘Passing over’ is essentially a matter of sympathetic understanding: people must have somehow within themselves what they find in another. At the same time, we can gain insight into our own standpoint only if we are willing to pass over into the lives of others. For it is only in the moment of passing over into other lives that one has a glimpse of what full enlightenment would be. In that particular moment, according to Dunne, one’s own self and its habitual standpoint disappear, and one sees what it is like to care for others in their own right, as opposed to caring for them only in so far as they have a role in one’s own life. In passing over to the standpoint of the other, one becomes conscious of oneness with other people and with God. Ultimately, it becomes clear that every person is really an incarnation of God. Eventually, we recover a sense of our own identity, of our own uniqueness and distinctness; but our former horizons have receded and broadened. The boundaries dissolve, change. As we move from one horizon to another, there is a conversion experience—indeed the passing over to the standpoint of another is comparable to the experience of passing over to God. Dunne thus describes how insight is gained and shared in a lifetime of passing over into the lives of other people. What he says is intensely and directly applicable to the vocation of any pastoral minister working cross-culturally. To cross the boundaries between one culture and another, between one way of life and another, requires a willingness and commitment to pass beyond the security of the familiar, of the homeland. At the frontier of the new culture, the voyager will find a new world of meaning and values. This often poses a threat because it seems so impenetrable, and yet it offers the possibility not only of broadening one’s horizon, but also of self-transcendence.
1 John S. Dunne, The Way of All the Earth (New York: Macmillan, 1972), collated from pp. ix, 223-224, 85-86, 91. 36 Barbara Hendricks
‘Passing over’ involves making new discoveries about the human person and the human community, about the creative power universally at work in human life. Cross-cultural pastoral ministers are Christians who choose and commit themselves to a process of passing over sympathetically into other lives, cultures and religions. They try to reach the point at which they understand others’ interests, their attractions, their ways, and indeed resonate with them. At this point the minister can begin to feel an at-homeness in the ‘foreign land’. Dunne calls this sympathetic understanding an ‘experience of universal compassion’. When one passes over to other lives, other cultures, and other religions, one comes back again with new insights into one’s own life, one’s own culture, and one’s own religion. In the moment of passing over, one sees one’s solidarity with other people and with God; and in the moment of coming back, one sees one’s own concreteness and individuality. Perhaps this growth in universal compassion is the greatest fruit of a missionary vocation. The Impact of Transition 37
Transitional Experience What actually happens to the pastoral minister in the course of this ‘passing over’ to another culture? Behavioural scientists speak about the transitional experience. They describe the human psyche’s passage from one culture to another in very concrete terms. Every person experiences the world through their own culturally influenced values, assumptions, and beliefs. When the person encounters another culture these are called into question. The encounter with a new culture often poses a threat to one’s way of life. It usually involves what has been called ‘culture shock’.
Culture shock is primarily a set of emotional reactions to the loss of perceptual reinforcements from one’s own culture, to new cultural stimuli which have little or no meaning, and to the misunderstanding of new and diverse experiences.2
The experience of culture shock often involves feelings of helplessness and irritability; one can fear being cheated, contaminated, injured or disregarded. Culture shock can be recognised as a form of alienation. But it also represents an attempt to comprehend, survive in, and grow through immersion in a second culture. This is the view of Peter S. Adler, who points out that culture shock is very significant in the understanding of change, including the changes that come when people move from one place to another. What he calls ‘transitional experiences’ hold a great potential for growth and development. In such situations of psychological, social or cultural tension each person is forced to redefine some level of their existence. Many people are relatively unaware of their own values, beliefs, and attitudes. The transitional experience, in which the person moves from one environment into another, tends to make them aware of cultural predispositions and hence gives rise to conflict. These new environments of experience tend to produce psychic disintegration. But this disintegration can be positive. It can be the beginning of a reorientation of the personality to a higher level of consciousness and to a new psychic integration.
2 Peter S. Adler, ‘The Transitional Experience: An Alternative View of Culture Shock’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 15/4 (Fall 1975), pp. 13-23, here p. 23. 38 Barbara Hendricks
The transitional experience, according to Adler, is a movement from a state of low awareness of one’s self and one’s culture to a high awareness. The person can be seen to pass through five stages of adjustment to the new culture: Contact Disintegration Reintegration Autonomy Independence
Contact The first stage is marked by excitement and euphoria. The person is usually captivated by the new culture and by its seeming contrast with previous experiences. The person remains functionally integrated with their own culture. In the contact stage the person is more in touch with the similarities, less so with the differences. Disintegration The second stage is marked by a period of confusion and disorientation. Differences become increasingly noticeable as different behaviours, values, and attitudes intrude into the perception of the newcomer. Tension and frustration increase. There is a growing sense of being different, isolated, inadequate to the situation’s demands. Confusion over personal identity mounts. There can be experiences of alienation, depression, and withdrawal, leading to disintegration of the personality. Reintegration The third stage is characterized by strong rejection of the second culture. The person becomes hostile to that which is experienced but not understood. Personal problems may be projected onto the second culture as the person withdraws into the security of the familiar. The expression of negative feelings at this stage can be a significant sign of healthy reconstruction. They may represent a growing cultural aware- ness and an increasing ability to act on feelings. The person now makes a choice: either a) to regress to the superficial behaviour of the contact stage; or b) to move closer to a resolution of the difficulties and frustration; or c) to return to the home culture. The choice that the person makes will depend on the intensity of the experiences, the The Impact of Transition 39 resilience of the person, and the interpretation and guidance provided by significant others. Autonomy The fourth stage is marked by an increasing sensitivity, and by ever greater skill in understanding and living with the second culture. The person relates to people from the other culture, and becomes able to understand them. They acquire autonomy: they can survive without cultural cues and props from the home culture, and can let themselves experience fully new situations. The person functions completely in their role, both comfortable with their status as an insider-outsider in two different cultures, and secure in it. Independence In the fifth stage of the transitional experience, that of independence, the person comes to relish cultural differences and similarities and to enjoy their significance. The new-comer is able both to give and to elicit a high degree of trust and sensitivity. They can view both themselves and others as human beings who are influenced by culture and upbringing. They are capable of putting meaning into situations. The person exercises choice and responsibility even as they still experience the other emotional, behavioural, and attitudinal states characteristic of earlier stages.
The transitional experience begins with the encounter of another culture and evolves into the encounter with self. The sequence of changes which take place between contact and independence are indicative of a progressive unfolding of the self.3
In Adler’s model this independent stage is not a culmination. Rather, it is a state of dynamic tension, in which discoveries of one’s own self and of cultural difference have opened up the possibility of a deeper level of experience in general. In a set of intensive and evocative situations, the person moves through the transitional experience by perceiving and experiencing other people in a distinctly new manner. They then experience new dimensions of existence.
3 Adler, ‘The Transitional Experience’, p. 18. 40 Barbara Hendricks
Outward and Inward Adler’s model of the ‘transitional experience’ can be correlated with Dunne’s model of ‘passing over’ into other religions and other ways of life. The two models together can give invaluable help in orientating pastoral ministers for cross-cultural mission today. Both Adler and Dunne confirm that the process of acculturation is always a journey into the self. The more one is capable of experiencing new and different dimensions of human diversity, the more one learns about oneself. The The more you process of entering into another culture demands the experience human willingness to set out on an inner journey as well as an diversity, the more outer journey. Passing over into other people’s lives by you learn about understanding them is an experience of sympathy and yourself resonance. One must find within oneself something corresponding to what one sees in another. It leads to the discovery that one has within oneself all that exists in every other human being. Each of us is a human person, but we must discover within ourselves the realm of feeling, imagination, thought, and action which corresponds to the humanity in the lives of others. In the process of acculturation, of going through the period of culture shock, of passing from stage to stage, what at first seemed alien, uninteresting or repulsive can evoke resonance. To pass over into other lives through sympathetic understanding requires a letting go of security, of certainty and of familiar relationships, but it leads the willing traveller to a new horizon, beyond their own narrow standpoint. When one begins to perceive a broader horizon, the original standpoint begins to change. It too becomes broader and deeper. Through sympathy and resonance, one begins to move toward a life of universal compassion. What began as an outward journey to other people and other cultures becomes an inner journey to a deeper and more authentic self. Values, assumptions, attitudes and beliefs are clarified, modified or discarded. New insights challenge old behavioural patterns. The more people learn about themselves, the more they discover that the barriers to universal solidarity are paper walls. As walls, they obstruct the building of the Reign of God; they cast shadows onto the world instead of intensifying light. But they are paper walls. We can pass over into another culture and break through them, entering the lives of other people at a deep level. As the walls crumble, light appears; as the The Impact of Transition 41 horizon recedes and broadens, understanding and compassion grow; as insight expands, one becomes more truly human. Understanding and becoming what is more truly human lead us to perceive and love what God is and what God through Jesus Christ is doing in our world.
More Than Spoken Words In the light of what has been said so far, it is clear that cross-cultural ministry requires more than simply language study. A programme design for this first step into the new culture must include strong elements of orientation towards the host culture and its pastoral needs. It is necessary for the pastoral minister to have been exposed to the process of acculturation. They must also have done a critical reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of their own culture and nation: its values and counter-values, its sinful structures and its grace-filled ones. The pastoral minister must have a good sense of who they are. The key to missionary activity today is relationships. Pastoral ministers need to know their own identity well enough to be able to enter into healthy and enduring relationships with others. The whole process of acculturation, of passing over, is impossible without the capacity for living and acting in communion and solidarity with others, without the capacity for coping creatively with conflicts and frustrations. This means that a minister must be in touch with their own interiority. They must also be in touch with their own gifts, and, at the same time, be aware of egocentric patterns of behaviour which stifle authentic speaking and listening, giving and receiving, loving and being loved. Cross-cultural mission demands radical re-adjustment. It is a moment when the pastoral minister is faced with an invitation to a deep conversion. More is going on here than ‘learning the language’. According to linguistic specialists, it is more accurate to speak of the development of communication skills. Implied in this latter phrase is a more holistic or contextualised approach to the language study period. In other words, the learning of a language is only one part of an overall process, a process of entering into a new culture. The technical skills required to learn to speak a new language must be coupled with a thoughtful and intuitive leap into a completely new reality. Language provides a set of symbols which introduce one to a new culture; but much more than mere verbalisation is needed to enter 42 Barbara Hendricks
a culture. We also need other types of skills: listening, observing, questioning, clarifying, imaging, sorting-out, reflecting, intuiting, making a new reality our own and so on. The pastoral minister must be helped to practise such skills in an entirely new situation, consciously applying them to the task at hand. Moreover, in addition to the practising of skills, there is a deeper reality involved: spiritual and imaginative horizons must broaden, attitudes must be clarified, convictions must be sharpened, and a new energy must be released. This is the process of conversion taking place.
In the Community During this initial period of acculturation there must be time and space for reflection and prayer, both individual and communal. The learning about language and culture is part of a process centred on the personal growth of the pastoral minister. And this must be nurtured by the community of ministers during the initial period. Furthermore, whatever styles of personal and communal reflection may be set up during the orientation period, these should be realised in the context of a community sent in mission. Pastoral and theological reflection, talks, readings, pastoral visits, part-time ministries, discussions, pastoral counselling sessions, and so on—all these should have as their main goal the personal growth of the pastoral minister and the building of a community of faith, hope and love. The new pastoral minister has crucial need of the support and challenge of Christian community as they set out on a voyage of discovery. In fact, it is the community experience, at The need for support, this critical moment, which will determine the way in insight and challenge which the minister integrates (or does not integrate) the personal and societal dimensions of a contemporary spirituality for mission. If the newly arrived minister is to pass through the various stages of the transitional experience and move toward adequate acculturation, they will certainly need loving support, theological insight, Christian challenge, careful listening and sensitive responses from significant others. There must be honest, trusting and faith-filled sharing between newly arrived ministers and those who have already been involved in the ministry, those who have taken the journey of discovery many times before. Mission is a voyage of discovery—discovery for the Church which is strengthened and The Impact of Transition 43 enriched by the multiplicity of cultures it embraces and informs, discovery for the pastoral minister who reaches new levels of consciousness and depths of faith, and discovery for those who open their hearts to the message, no matter how strangely it is spoken or how clumsily it is offered. The transition period of passing into a new culture is a critical time of journeying. It is both an outward journey and an inner one. Whether we describe it psychologically, sociologically or theologically, it involves life, death and resurrection. It demands personal choice and the willingness to endure patiently. It requires a community of faith, hope, and love—a community willing to give support and challenge.
Barbara Hendricks MM was born in Detroit, Michigan and entered the Maryknoll Sisters Congregation in 1945. She served as a missionary in Peru and Bolivia for 23 years. She has also served as President of the Maryknoll Congregation, as Director of Orientation at the Maryknoll Language Institute in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and as Director of the Mission Institute at Maryknoll. In recent years she has been giving retreats, doing research, and writing a book on the spiritual heritage of Mother Mary Joseph Rogers, foundress of the Maryknoll Sisters Congregation. Theological Trends JESUIT THEOLOGIES OF MISSION
Michael Sievernich
N THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD, the Church began to become truly Iglobal, universal, as opposed to being simply the Church of the West. This implied a new missionary awareness, which the Jesuit approach to mission did much to shape. The Jesuits’ mobility was significant in this connection, as were the Spiritual Exercises. In the Contemplation on the Incarnation that opens the Second Week, Ignatius asks that we look on the world with God’s eyes, so to speak, looking at its whole extent and at all its many peoples who are in need of salvation (Exx 101-109). But that is not all: the one making the Exercises is meant to ask themselves how they can contribute to the Church and to its missionary task. This spiritual dynamic, this openness for ‘being sent’—‘missions’— by the Pope led the early Jesuits to a range of missionary enterprises. Even in Ignatius’ lifetime these extended from Brazil to Japan. In 1549, Francis Xavier, the Society’s first missionary, reached a Japan that impressed the Europeans with its high culture; in the same year, Manoel da Nóbrega landed in Brazil, the territory of Latin America assigned to Portugal, where the cannibalism of the Tupí, a nomad tribe, caused the Europeans no little consternation. Wherever the Jesuits worked, they developed forms of respectful encounter, moving beyond the ethnocentric conventions of the time. This strategy became known as ‘accommodation’. It was controversial when it was first developed, both among the Jesuits themselves and in the Church at large. Matteo Ricci’s innovations in China led to the Chinese Rites controversy; Roberto de Nobili’s in India to the Indian Rites Controversy. Ultimately, in the eighteenth century, Rome decided against
The Way, 42/1 (January 2003), pp. 44-58 Jesuit Theologies of Mission 45 accommodation.1 But Jesuit creativity in the theology of mission was not confined to the period before the Society’s suppression in 1773. There was also innovative thinking stimulated by the Second Vatican Council. This article attempts to survey some of this material.
On the Way to Inculturation ‘Inculturation’ is one of the ideas that has had a striking effect on how the post-Conciliar Church understands its mission. Both among theologians and in official documents, it has quickly become a standard term. Jesuit leadership has contributed significantly to this development: not only Jesuit General Superiors—notably Fr Pedro Arrupe (1907-1991)—but also Jesuit General Congregations, the highest legislative authority in the Society. ‘Inculturation’ was a neologism.2 It covered the same sort of ground as older expressions such as ‘accommodation’ or ‘adaptation’, but it stressed how the encounter between Christianity and a particular culture could enrich both. It originated in Jesuit circles—not surprisingly given the Society’s long tradition of intercultural experience. It was only after the Council that the idea fully developed. As early as the 1950s, ‘inculturation’ was used by the Belgian Jesuit missiologist, Joseph Masson, and by others, to describe how the Christian message could take root in, or be grafted onto, non-Christian cultures. At that stage, the terminology was unstable, and there were oscillations between ‘inculturation’ and ‘acculturation’. During the preparations for the Council, Masson spoke—admittedly in something of a throwaway line—of the need for ‘a Catholicism inculturated in various different ways’ (catholicisme inculturé d’une façon polymorphe).3 Vatican II itself did not use the word ‘inculturation’, but the idea is in line with the Council’s central pastoral principle: the Church is related positively to today’s world.4 For the Council the ‘law of evangelization’ is ‘sensitive proclamation’ (accomodata praedicatio); it
1 See The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, edited by D. E. Mungello (Nettetal: Steyler, 1994); Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth- Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 2 See François Guillemette, ‘L’apparition du concept d’inculturation: Une reception de Vatican II’, Mission, 2 (1995), pp. 53-78. 3 Joseph Masson, ‘L’Église ouverte sur le monde’, Nouvelle revue théologique, 84 (1962), pp. 1032-1043, here p. 1038. 4 Gaudium et spes, n. 1 and its important footnote. The reference text for Vatican II quotations is Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, edited by Norman P. Tanner (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990). 46 Michael Sievernich recognises that each race has ‘the capacity to express Christ’s message in its own fashion’.5 These statements provide a kind of foundation charter for the development of contextual theologies, and the point becomes quite explicit when the Council encourages theological reflection within every significant cultural area.6
Jesus Comforts the Women of Jerusalem One of the Stations of the Cross in Lodwar Cathedral, Kenya
In the following decade, the 32nd General Congregation of the Jesuits was held (1974-1975). This gathering contributed much to the establishment of ‘inculturation’ in standard theological discourse. Though initially various terms were used, people were reluctant either to revert to older concepts such as ‘accommodation’, or to use more recent ones such as ‘indigenisation’. Instead, the Congregation drew on the English word ‘enculturation’, used by cultural anthropologists such as Melville J. Herskowits7 to designate how individuals break into a new culture and learn to express themselves within it. ‘Enculturation’ in
5 Gaudium et spes, n. 44. 6 Ad gentes, n. 22. 7 Melville J. Herskovits, Man and his Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology (New York: Knopf, 1948). Jesuit Theologies of Mission 47
Latin had to be inculturatio; and when the back-translation appeared in the Congregation’s English texts, it had become ‘inculturation’. Moreover, in 1974 the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences had already spoken in Taipei of how ‘the local church is a church incarnate in a people, a church indigenous and inculturated’.8 The Congregation passed a final document on the general principle that proposed an ‘inculturation’, understood as the ‘incarnation of the gospel’ within the cultural values of the individual peoples. It had special application in Asia and Africa, but it also had relevance for the countries of the West, which could no longer be regarded as Christian, and for the Eastern bloc countries under atheistic ideologies. It was not just a matter of dialogue with the inheritors of the great non-Christian traditions; there was also need for inculturation regarding ‘the new, more universal values’ emerging from more intensive international exchange.9 At this General Congregation, inculturation was, of course, only one theme among many. It was in the shadow of other issues that at the time appeared more urgent, notably the relationship between faith and justice. Nevertheless, people were aware of its explosive potential, even if it could not be fully discussed. The Congregation therefore asked the then General Superior, Fr Pedro Arrupe, to take up the theme more deeply in a later letter or instruction to the whole Society.10 The letter was published on 14 May 1978. Arrupe drew on Ignatian spirituality and the Jesuit tradition of adaptation in order to express the fundamental principle as follows:
Inculturation is the incarnation of Christian life and of the Christian message in a particular cultural context, in such a way that this experience not only finds expression through elements proper to the culture in question (this alone would be no more than a superficial adaptation), but becomes a principle that animates, directs and unifies the culture, transforming and remaking it so as to bring about ‘a new creation’.
8 For All the Peoples of Asia: Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences Documents from 1970-1991, edited by Gaudencio B. Rosales and C. G. Arévalo (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1992), p. 14. 9 GC 32, d. 4, nn. 53-56. References to Jesuit General Congregation documents are taken from the editions produced by the Institute of Jesuit Sources in St Louis. 10 GC 32, d. 5, n. 2. 48 Michael Sievernich
Arrupe was thus stressing how the need for inculturation was universal, something for the whole Church. If modern humanity was to be presented the message of the Gospel effectively, inculturation applied not only to the lands where Christianity had hardly spread at all, but also to the countries that were now becoming post-Christian. It would be a dangerous mistake to deny that these latter countries did not need the faith somehow to be reinculturated. Besides this official letter, Arrupe also published a working paper that had been prepared in his office and under his authorisation. The stress was similar. Inculturation was defined as,
. . . that effort which the Church makes to present the message and values of the gospel by embodying them in expressions that are proper to each culture, in such a way that the faith and Christian experience of each local Church is embedded, as intimately and deeply as possible, in its own cultural context.11
This text brings out the need for the gospel to be ‘embodied’ and ‘embedded’ in a culture, and the diversity of the ‘cultures’ in question: there is a ‘culture’ of distinctive ethnic groups, and there is also a ‘culture’ in, say, the academic world. Theologically, ‘inculturation’ was often derived from the incarnation, but mention was also made of Pentecost.
Inculturation in the Church at Large Pedro Arrupe had been a missionary in Japan before becoming the Jesuit General, and had lived through the bombing of Hiroshima. He made many public statements on the theology of mission, beginning with an intervention on atheism during the debates about what became Gaudium et spes (22 September 1965) and continuing up to some thoughts on the inculturation of catechesis during the fourth Synod of Bishops (1977).12 Pope John Paul II’s post-synodical exhortation, Catechesi tradendae, still talks both of ‘inculturation’ and ‘acculturation’,
11 The letter can be found in Pedro Arrupe, Other Apostolates Today, edited by Jerome Aixala (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1981), pp. 171-181. The working paper (as well as the letter) can be found in English in Acta Romana Societatis Iesu, 17 (1977-1979), pp. 264-281. 12 Pedro Arrupe, ‘Catechesis and Inculturation’, in Other Apostolates Today, pp. 163-167; Adolf Exeler, Katechese in unserer Zeit: Themen und Ergebnisse der 4. Bischofssynode (Munich: Kösel, 1979), pp. 149- 151. Jesuit Theologies of Mission 49 but it is quite explicitly concerned to point out how genuine catechesis ‘“takes flesh” in the various cultures and milieux’.13 Thus it was that the Church’s official teaching began to take up the idea. The trend was to be followed in the document following the 1985 Extraordinary Synod, in the document of the Latin American bishops at Santo Domingo (1992), ‘New Evangelization, Human Development, Christian Culture’, and in John Paul II’s encyclical on mission, Redemptoris missio (1995)—this latter document uses the term ‘inculturation’ quite unselfconsciously. The text speaks of inculturation as one of the ways of mission, alongside personal witness, the formation of local Churches, basic ecclesial communities, and interreligious dialogue. Inculturation ‘means the intimate transformation of authentic cultural values through their integration in Christianity and the insertion of Christianity in the various human cultures’.14 The International Theological Commission also took up the theme,15 as did the continental Synods held in the 1990s in their attempts to set out the mission of the various local Churches.16 The concern was that the Church’s mission should engage new cultures in ways that honoured their distinctiveness and otherness. Vatican II had already stressed that the Church’s activity should affirm human culture, so that,
. . . the good seed that is found in people’s hearts and minds, or in their particular rites and cultures, is not only saved from destruction, but is made whole, raised up, and brought to completion.17
Beyond these references in official documents, there were also a number of publications exploring what inculturation might mean in different cultural contexts, or discussing theologically the meaning of the concept and the range of its legitimate application.18 Thus the Dutch theologian working in Rome, Arij Roest-Crollius, defined inculturation as follows:
13 Catechesi tradendae, n. 53. 14 Redemptoris missio, n. 52, citing the 1985 Extraordinary Assembly, Final Report, II D 4. 15 Commissio Theologica Internationalis, ‘Fides et inculturatio’, Gregorianum, 70 (1989), pp. 625-646. 16 Ecclesia in Africa (1995), nn. 59-64; Ecclesia in Asia (1999), nn. 21-23. 17 Lumen gentium, n. 17. 18 See Peter Schineller, A Handbook of Inculturation (New York: Paulist, 1990). 50 Michael Sievernich
The inculturation of the Church is the integration of the Christian experience of a local Church into the culture of its people, in such a way that this experience not only expresses itself in elements of this culture, but becomes a force that animates, orients and innovates this culture so as to create a new unity and communion, not only within the culture in question but also as an enrichment of the Church universal.19
Here inculturation is seen as involving three phases: encounter, interaction, new synthesis. The Church receives, taking into itself elements from the new culture; at the same time it also changes that culture, actively shaping it. The most frequently invoked theological basis for inculturation is the Johannine idea of the word becoming flesh in human nature and culture; similarly, the Church takes new flesh in a particular culture. However, attention to other religions has led to a different sort of argument, starting from the theology of creation: all human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, share the same nature, a nature which enables them to develop cultures (and religions). Of their nature, however, the different cultures are open to exchange with each other. Each represents a realisation of what it is to be human; each is endowed with distinctive, creative gifts. As they develop over time, they form together in their relatedness the history of the one human race. One can also argue for inculturation on the basis of a theology of the Holy Spirit: God’s Spirit works in the cultures of the world and empowers inculturation. Some more critical voices have also been raised. They point out that inculturation is always about the interaction of two cultures, not about religion and culture: no culture exists without a religion and no religion exists without a culture.20 Nor is it a matter of putting an indigenous spin on a universally valid theology, but rather of generating a theology out of the situation of the Church in a particular place. Thus
19 See Arij Roest-Crollius, ‘What Is So New About Inculturation?’ Gregorianum, 59 (1978), pp. 721- 738, here p. 735. 20 See for example Paulo Suess, Evangelizar a partir dos projectos históricos dos outros (São Paulo: Edicões Paulistas, 1995); Felix Wilfred, From the Dusty Soil: Contextual Reinterpretation of Christianity (Madras: University of Madras, 1995). Jesuit Theologies of Mission 51 there is now talk both of ‘intercultural theologies’ and of ‘contextual theologies’.21 By introducing the idea of inculturation, the Society of Jesus has thus significantly contributed both to the theory and practice of Christian mission. This contribution is all the more relevant as Christianity in late modern Europe becomes—as it were—exculturated, and religious traditions are now sharing the same space in what is called ‘patchwork religiosity’. The idea still needs to be deepened—a process that will require still more intensive networking between various different contexts.
The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice The question of inculturation was not the only one preoccupying the Jesuits at their 32nd General Congregation: there were also questions about social justice and its relationship to faith. Though the importance of inculturation was recognised in connection with evangelization in different situations, the principal theme was that of the commitment to faith and justice. The Congregation, reading the signs of the times, saw injustice as one of the major obstacles to the spread of faith. It could look back to the previous Congregation (1965-1966), which had taken up Paul VI’s call to engage with atheism, and which had regarded social injustices within the developing countries as a reason why atheistic teachings had spread. In continuity with all this, the 32nd Congregation, meeting almost ten years later, made its fundamental option to see engagement in the struggle for justice as what defined Jesuit identity for our time.22 This option shaped a decree of the General Congregation that drew wide attention, a decree that described the Jesuit vocation today in terms of ‘the service of faith and the promotion of justice’. This fundamental option was grounded on the claim that love of God and love of neighbour were to be identified:
21 See David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991); Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991); Clemens Sedmak, Lokale Theologien und globale Kirche. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Arbeit in praktischer Absicht (Freiburg: Herder, 2000). 22 Ildefonso Camacho, ‘La opción fe-justicia como clave de evangelización en la Compañía de Jesús y el generalato del Padre Arrupe’, Manresa, 62 (1990), pp. 219-246. See GC 31, d. 3, n. 3; GC 32, d.2, n. 3; d. 4, n. 36. 52 Michael Sievernich
Since evangelization is proclamation of that faith which is made operative in love of others, the promotion of justice is indispensable to it.23
It also affirmed the need to address structures:
In a world where the power of economic, social and political structures is now appreciated, and the mechanisms and laws governing them are now understood, service according to the Gospel cannot dispense with a carefully planned effort to exert influence on these structures.24
Moreover, it drew on the rhetoric of liberation, which was being developed in this decade for Latin America by such figures as Gustavo Gutiérrez:25
The struggle to transform . . . structures in the interest of the spiritual and material liberation of fellow human beings is intimately connected to the work of evangelization.26
More generally, the decree even reformulated in terms of liberation theology the Society’s initial inspiration: ‘for the defence and propagation of the faith, and for the rendering of any service to the Church that may be for the glory of God and the common good’. To seek the salvation of our neighbours’ souls is, in modern terms, equivalent to ‘the total and integral liberation of humanity, leading to participation in the life of God’s own self’.27 It was in connection with this vision that the Congregation called for closer collaboration with others, both inside and outside Christianity, for social commitment, and for solidarity with the poor. A whole range of influential Jesuit theologians in Latin America had addressed the question of the Church’s mission within the framework of liberation theology. They had come up with a variety of answers, both reflecting and taking forward different trends current in
23 GC 32, d. 4, n. 28. 24 GC 32, d. 4, n. 31. 25 Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, translated by Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (London: SCM, 2001 [1972]). 26 GC 32, d. 4, n. 40. 27 GC 32, d. 2, n. 11. Jesuit Theologies of Mission 53
Latin America at the time. One of them was the Uruguayan, Juan Luis Segundo (1925-1996). His concern was for the liberation of theology— to quote the title of one of his books; he advocated an approach whereby intellectuals became advocates on behalf of the poor. Ignacio Ellacuría, the rector of the Jesuit university in El Salvador who was murdered with other Jesuits in 1989, drew on the philosophy of the Spaniard, Xavier Zubiri, and spoke of how the Church had a ‘historically liberating mission’. The Argentinian, Juan Carlos Scannone, insisted that mission needed to be directed towards popular piety: how was this to be understood and transformed in the face of the challenge to bring about a more just society, a culture open to the transcendent, and a movement beyond purely technical rationality? The Brazilian, Marcello de Carvalho Azevedo was also concerned with culture. Against the background of how Brazil was developing he describes the Church’s mission in terms of inculturated, liberating evangelization. All these positions were addressing, in different ways, the relationship between faith and justice; the latter two in particular were also connecting this question with that of culture, and therefore beginning to extend it.28 When the 33rd General Congregation assembled in 1983, its main task was to accept the resignation of Pedro Arrupe, who by now had fallen seriously ill, and to elect a successor, the Dutchman, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach. However, the Congregation took the opportunity to reaffirm the double commitment to faith and justice, while criticizing some one-sided and unbalanced interpretations of it, and some of the conflicts that it had evoked. ‘Neither a disincarnate spiritualism (sic) nor a merely secular activism truly serves the integral Gospel message.’ The Congregation lamented
. . . that we have not always recognised that the social justice we are called to is part of that justice of the Gospel which is the embodiment of God’s love and saving mercy.29
This statement pointed forwards to an idea that the next such gathering in 1995 was to take up and deepen: a closer connection
28 Valentín Menéndez Martínez, La misión de la iglesia: Un estudio sobre el debate teológico y eclesial en América Latina (1955-1992), con atención al aporte de algunos teólogos de la Compañía de Jesús (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 2002). 29 GC 33, d. 1, nn. 33, 32. 54 Michael Sievernich between social justice and the justice of the Reign of God (Matthew 6: 33). Before that meeting, however, the new General Superior, Peter- Hans Kolvenbach, had given some clear leads towards a contemporary understanding of Jesuit mission and the double commitment to faith and justice. Addressing all the Provincials in Loyola in 1990, he spoke of evangelization as the Jesuits’ major task—it being understood that the promotion of justice was an integral element in this evangelization.30 This statement already contained the essential features of a richer vision of Jesuit identity.
Evangelization Through Justice, Inculturation and Dialogue The main achievement of the 34th Jesuit General Congregation, which came together in Rome in 1995, was to integrate what had been said previously about inculturation with the idea of the service of faith and the promotion of justice. Moreover, it also brought all these ideas into relationship with the concept of interreligious dialogue. The result was a new understanding of Christian mission.31 First, the Congregation rooted the Jesuit missionary vocation theologically in the mission of Christ and of the Church, and connected all this with the Ignatian idea of being on pilgrimage. Secondly, it deepened previous teaching about the connections between faith and justice by drawing both inculturation and interreligious dialogue into the picture. These had, of course, often been mentioned in discussions of Jesuit mission, but had never been before been given a central systematic role.32 It is the introductory decree, ‘United with Christ on Mission’, which establishes the connections just mentioned between mission, christology, ecclesiology and the Ignatian idea of being on pilgrimage. Later, we are told that the Society of Jesus sees itself
. . . at the crossroads of cultural conflict, social and economic struggles, religious revivalism, and new opportunities for bringing the Good News to peoples all over the world.
30 Documents of the First Congregation of Provincials (Anand: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 1991), pp. 31-33. 31 See Carl F. Starkloff, ‘Pilgrimage Re-Envisioned: Mission and Culture in the Last Five General Congregations’, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 32/5 (November 2000), pp. 1-30. 32 See, for example, GC 32, d. 4, nn. 37, 54. Jesuit Theologies of Mission 55
Specific mention is made of different parts of the world: Africa, Asia and Oceania, Latin America, the post-Communist countries, Western Europe and North America. Mission is thus a complex reality, but its origin is always the same: the crucified and risen Jesus, who issues the call and whose power always accompanies and sustains anything undertaken in his name. Then the different dimensions of mission are deepened in turn. We begin with a subtle, but significant, specification of the understanding of justice: this is to be understood biblically, in terms of the ‘justice of the Kingdom’.33 In 1975, the concern had been more with social justice as such, even though, following an intervention from Carlo Maria Martini, later to become Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, there was one mention of ‘the justice of the gospel’ as a fruit of the Spirit.34 The 1995 Congregation took up this biblical hint, and corrected merely economic understandings of justice. The new idea of justice does not simply extend to ‘structural changes in the socioeconomic and political orders’; it also ‘transcends notions of justice derived from ideology, philosophy, or particular political movements’—notions ‘which can never be an adequate expression of the justice of the Kingdom’.35 New dimensions of justice have been discovered here. The most important of these is human rights. But others must also be mentioned: global interdependence; the need for a culture of life in face of such realities as AIDS, terrorism, and abortion; ecological balance; the development of participative forms of social life. A particularly urgent problem was explicitly named: the forced migration of indigenous groups and of refugees, especially in Africa. Moreover, the connections made between faith and even this deepened version of justice were extended. The Congregation declared:
The aim of our mission (the service of faith) and its integrating principle (faith directed towards the justice of the Kingdom) are dynamically related to the inculturated proclamation of the Gospel and dialogue with other religious traditions as integral dimensions of evangelization.36
33 GC 34, d. 2, n. 14. 34 GC 32, d. 4, n. 18. 35 GC 34, d. 3, nn. 5, 4. 36 GC 34, d. 2, n. 15. 56 Michael Sievernich
The service of faith, evangelization, was thus explicitly linked to particular social, cultural and religious contexts. In considering the relationship between mission and culture, it was important to bear in mind not just the large cultures spread over whole continents, but also smaller indigenous cultures, postmodern culture, and—in continuity with Ignatius’ preference for the urban37—the kind of synthetic, eclectic cultures characteristic of today’s cities. The decree on interreligious dialogue addresses today’s rich social, cultural and religious pluralism, and lays particular stress on the different dimensions of dialogue (the dialogues of life, of action, of religious experience, of theological exchange), as well as on the great religions of the world and on religious fundamentalism. This new account of mission is at one point summarised almost poetically: No service of faith without promotion of justice entry into cultures openness to other religious experiences.
No promotion of justice without communicating faith transforming cultures collaboration with other traditions.
No inculturation without communicating faith with others dialogue with other traditions commitment to justice.
No dialogue without sharing faith with others evaluating cultures concern for justice.38
Thus the polarity between faith and justice is finally incorporated into a wider understanding that draws the foundational service of faith into the social, cultural, and interreligious spheres. These formulations avoid presenting faith in isolation: on the contrary they insist on respect for
37 Michael Sievernich, ‘The Evangelization of the Great City: Ignatius Loyola’s Urban Vision’, Review of Ignatian Spirituality, 80 (1995), pp. 26-45. 38 GC 34, d. 1, n. 19. Jesuit Theologies of Mission 57 the different contexts in which, as 1 Peter puts it, an account of Christian hope is to be given.39 This kind of inculturated account of Chrsitian faith makes, just as it always did, significant personal and psychological demands. Francis Xavier had gone into Japan dressed in silk, even though he did not know the language. Roberto de Nobili had presented himself as a Christian sanyasin, following the life-style normal in the high-caste culture of South India. The missionaries of New France had to deal with the brutality of the Iroquois. Dominicus Mayer, from the Black Forest in Germany, had moved among the Mojos in the Peruvian Jesuit province as ‘mother, doctor and surgeon, teacher and farmer, cook and bridge-builder’, as he put it in a letter on July 20 1727.40 Similar initiatives are required in our own day, when indeed all Christians have a vocation to spread the faith. Inculturation requires us to witness with our very lives, whether we are in the tribal cultures of Africa, in the postmodern societies of Europe, in post-communist China or in the religious pluralism of India. Then justice requires of our witness a preferential option for the poor; sensitivity to culture requires us selflessly to risk ourselves within worlds that are unfamiliar; respect for other religions requires us to be able to live and work together. Amid all this, witness to the gospel is always liable to call forth rejection, persecution and even martyrdom. The present Jesuit General, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, has subsequently confirmed this new understanding of service to the gospel. And it is quite clear that this conception of mission is of relevance to a far wider circle than simply the Society of Jesus. It has enormous potential to stimulate new forms of spirituality and vocation, and to enrich theological discourse about the Church’s mission.
Michael Sievernich SJ was born in Cologne in 1945, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1965. He is Professor of Pastoral Theology at the Jesuit faculty in Frankfurt, and has served as its academic rector. He has published widely on pastoral theology, on mission studies, and on Ignatian and Jesuit topics.
39 1 Peter 3:15. 40 Dominicus Mayer, Neu aufgerichteter Mayerhof, das ist: Schwere Arbeiten und reiffe Seelen-Früchten, neuerdings gesammelt in neu aufgerichteten Missionen in America (Augsburg: Bernhard Homodeus Mayer, 1747), p. 170. From the Ignatian Tradition
GUIDELINES FOR PILGRIMS
Coimbra, Portugal 1546
Simão Rodrigues
Ignatius seems to have envisaged his Exercises as only one element in a broader process of conversion. For new Jesuits, the Exercises were to be followed by a spell in the ‘hospital’. They were to help and serve all, ‘the sick and the well’,
. . . in order to lower and humble themselves more, giving a whole- hearted sign about themselves to the effect that they are parting company with the whole business of worldliness and its pomps and vanities, so as to serve in anything at all their Creator and Lord, crucified for them.1
Then there was to be a pilgrimage:
Making a pilgrimage for a further month without money, but rather at appropriate times begging at the doors for love of God our Lord—so that they can get used to eating badly and sleeping badly, and so that, at the same time, leaving aside all the hope and expectation that they might have of money or other created things, they might place it whole-heartedly, with true faith and intense love, in their Creator and Lord.2
In the book of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius left space for things to happen beyond anything he himself could imagine. In an important sense, the
1 Examen, n. 66:3: . . . por más se abaixar y humillar, dando entera señal de sí, que de todo el século y de sus pompas y vanidades se parten, para servir en todo a su Criador y Señor crucificado por ellos. 2 Examen, n. 67.1-2: Peregrinando por otro mes sin dineros, antes a sus tiempos pidendo por las puertas por amor a Dios nuetsro Señor, porque se pueda avezar a mal comer y mal dormir; asimismo porque dexando toda su speranza que podría tener en dineros o en otras cosas criadas, la ponga enteramente, con verdadera fe y amor intenso, en su Criador y Señor.
The Way, 42/1 (January 2003), pp. 58-70 Guidelines for Pilgrims 59
meaning of the text has to be discovered anew every time a person enters the process. Nevertheless, the immediate aim which Ignatius had in view is also clear. Ignatius directs his text at well-to-do clerics, who may at least hope to be in possession of a benefice. He is encouraging them to develop a new self- understanding, as ministers of the gospel, devoted to God and to God’s people. The commitment to ‘poverty’ is a symbol of the change, and the pilgrimage a lived exercise in ‘going out from one’s self-love, will, and interest’ (Exx 189.10). It also symbolizes a commitment to ministry beyond conventional structures, beyond the regulations of particular places. Ignatius’ vision of pastoral formation here may perhaps always have been impossible to put into practice literally. But it remains worth pondering that 3 Ignatius seems not to have envisaged the Exercises standing on their own. Conversions provoked by the Exercises today may be different in form from those of the first Jesuits, but they still need to be consolidated somehow. The text that follows was written for use on the pilgrimage. It dates from around 1546, and was written at Coimbra in Portugal, which was the first substantial settlement of Jesuit students, and which was later to cause Ignatius considerable problems. Its author is probably Simão Rodrigues, one 4 of Ignatius’ first companions. There is a naïve pride in some of the writing, bordering on the smug; but it is also impressive how intensely the author imagines the pilgrim internalising the thought-patterns of the Exercises, especially in the second section. The author may draw on traditional ascetical and eschatological motifs, but he is not using them to encourage any sort of flight from the human condition. Rather, he is seeking to help people internalise the values informing a new kind of service, a new form of engagement with the world.
he POINT OF THE PILGRIMAGE IS SOMEHOW to attain firmer hope in TGod our Lord during our labours, and to let experience confirm the care He has for those who take on labours for His sake. When I thus experience that He never fails, I will become generous-spirited, broad-minded, so as not to leave off doing, for worry that He might fail me, anything in Jesus Christ’s service. For in some way I will already
3 For fuller documentation, see Philip Endean, ‘Origins of Apostolic Formation: Jerome Nadal and Novitiate Experiments’, The Way Supplement, 39 (Winter 1980), pp. 57-82. 4 The text has come down to us in Portuguese and Latin versions, printed in MHSJ Regulae Societatis Jesu, edited by Dionisio Fernández Zápico (Rome, 1948), pp. 92-115. Old Spanish translations exist in manuscript. This text follows the sparer, Portuguese version, with occasional recourse to the Latin in order to resolve unclarities. Translational and textual problems have been resolved tacitly. 60 Simão Rodrigues have experienced the opposite. Thus I will be able to follow Him without having to deal with what is contrary to this; I will not be tied to anything; I will be sure that all the labours, insults and disparagements that I receive from the world are very much accepted by Him, since I will be receiving them in order to conform myself with the many things he suffered for me. I will also be clear that all the opinions and judgments of the world are vain and short-lived, and that only the honour of God is to last for eternity. It follows that, if I want to attain the freedom of spirit to be able to live for the Lord’s glory and not following my appetites, I must also want the means that help me towards this. Therefore, just as I am searching for greater strength of faith and hope, so I must also look for labours, which are the means for attaining these virtues. Thus I shall rejoice in labours, and be consoled in them because I am finding what I am seeking. I shall find more spirit from the Lord than I believed or hoped before. As I experience many times how the Lord ‘is a stronghold in time of trouble’, I will not be troubled, whatever happens, because the Lord ‘is at my right hand’ (Psalms 9:9, 16:8).5 The more trouble comes, the more hope grows; in this way, I should remember, the virtue of faith and hope is confirmed.
Afghan Refugees 2001
5 The original text cites the Bible from the Vulgate. This translation gives Hebrew Bible verse numbering, and follows NRSV unless there is good reason for doing otherwise. Guidelines for Pilgrims 61
If anyone were to take these troubles away from me, they would be taking from me growth in this virtue of faith and hope. If anyone wanted to give money for the journey and I took it, so that it was unlikely I would be in any very great need, I would be taking a means towards meriting less, and thus the only labour would be physical: I would not obtain any spiritual fruit. However far a person goes physically, it all counts for nothing if the spirit is not exercised. For if they take money, they are taking what makes them hope in God less— they will have no worries about going without anything since they are travelling well equipped. What is at stake here is completely different: the person is to hope that, in taking God with them, they are taking everything, with nothing lacking to them. They should remember how Jesus Christ sent out his disciples ‘without staff or purse’ (Matthew 10:10). They should be consoled by the knowledge of how the disciples rejoiced in their troubles. For it is not simply being poor that is to be praised; you rejoice in poverty out of love of Christ, who said, ‘strive first for the kingdom of God, and all these things will be given to you as well’. Then later he says, ‘Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? . . . Indeed your heavenly Father knows what you need’.6 I will think about what Christ used to do when he was tired, and what his disciples used to do: how they were joyful at their trials, and how they were consoled at seeing the face of Christ; how, as they saw his patience and his tiredness, their own troubles seemed little. I will try to make myself present to all this. I will often examine my awareness,7 to see if I am acquiring more faith and hope in the Lord—this so as to grow each day in my spirit. I must remember that now I am not going to worldly feasts and pleasures. Nor am I travelling in order to be praised except by God alone, with grief for my sins. I am meant to be suffering some little part of the much that I deserve, strengthening the faith, hope, patience and other similar virtues in my soul. Thus I shall desire to be disparaged by all; it will be a burden to me to be honoured by anyone. For in justice and reason I deserve to receive dishonour from all creatures for not
6 The quotations are from Matthew 6: 26, 32, 33. The author seems to have misremembered the order of the texts. 7 In context, this rendering of the Portuguese concientia seems clearly appropriate. 62 Simão Rodrigues having honoured my God and my Lord, but rather having sinned against his commandments. It will happen that I imagine labours both many and great, with much sadness and desolation to boot; it will seem to me as if it were impossible to get out. Then I will notice how different thoughts come on me, new feelings—arguments for changing my way of life, arguments making what I previously agreed to seem bad to me. Still, I will also remember to prevail in these encounters, however powerful they are, raising my eyes to God: ‘for in God I shall leap over a wall’.8 Anything else I will think of as lies, only looking like truth; they can last only for a short time. For what does not exist does not last. I will bear in mind that a day or days of great heat, or cold, will come. Some of these will pass without my finding anything to eat, or anywhere to sleep under cover. But the troubles arising from this will not stay in the memory, as I reckon that I am present before the Lord:
Thou in toil art comfort sweet; Pleasant coolness in the heat; Solace in the midst of woe.9
And He is greatly content and pleased with these labours. I will never make any change when I am in sadness and desolation, because normally reason is darkened by such states. I can deal with the enemy by reasoning that I cannot suffer anything worse than death, and dying for Christ is nothing, since He died for me. I will answer simply the questions that they put to me. And if they ask me why I am travelling like this, I will reply: ‘because I am poor, and because my sins deserve it’. I will try, as far as I sensibly can, to make sure no-one becomes bothered about my sanctity; I will not say who I am. But if, from having seen me talk about things of God, they find in me some virtue, then I shall take advantage of this. With such a person I shall not abandon my purpose of talking with them about things of God. For God does not make saints out of what people say and think. And if someone presses to know who I am more specifically, I will say that I am a student, or whatever seems to fit.
8 Psalm 17:30. 9 From the Pentecost sequence, here cited in Edward Caswall’s translation. Guidelines for Pilgrims 63
I should remember that God does not gain from the trouble I take; nor do I have anything to complain about regarding God or anyone else except myself: the problem is that I do not recognise the great mercy which God is doing me in letting me share in His trials, so that if I suffer I will be glorified. I should reckon that everyone who sees me is meant to be laughing at me: they are supposed to be surprised at me, holding me as just lost and as having taken leave of my senses, a Everyone who dishonour to my lineage and to all my relatives. Meanwhile, sees me is I will remember that precisely here is the wisdom of Christ. meant to be With him the world was always in conflict and at variance. laughing at me And so I will say something like this: ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent of the world and have revealed them to the little ones’.10 I will think about the great disorientation and shame that those reprobated by God will feel at the day of judgment, and about how hard their sentence will be: ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire’, etc.11 And about how much better it will be to be judged by human beings here than by God there. So I will try not to be one of those of whom Christ said, ‘those who are ashamed of me, of them I will be ashamed when the Son of Man comes in his glory and the glory of the Father’, etc.12 If I see that they are giving alms to others but not giving them to me, I will reckon that either now or in the future that person will have more need of them than I do. When I am not in contemplation on the way, or trying to think of some good things, or speaking for the good of some neighbour, I will try to occupy the time in praying either with the beads or the psalms. I will often go to confession and communion. When I arrive at the place, I will go first to the church if I reasonably can and if it is near. There I will give thanks to God for the loving-kindness shown to me throughout that day, and I will ask for help over the whole day. And then I shall beg for alms, very humbly and sincerely.
10 Matthew 11:25. 11 Matthew 25:41. 12 Alluding to Luke 9:26. 64 Simão Rodrigues
A More Specific Application of the Above Rules I should not try to go too far in one day, lest with the concern to arrive the memory of Christ be lost. Every time I leave the house in the morning, I should leave aside all other thoughts and try hard to imagine Christ with me, in real life, with me taking Him as a companion, and the whole heavenly court following Him. I will think about what a person should say and do when they are constantly in the presence of such holy company and being accompanied by them. I should lament how the world does not see so great a good, and how it does not sense the great waste it is to occupy oneself in such short-lived things while neglecting the lasting good. And so I will sometimes address words of compassion to Christ about these things so that He might remedy them. Other times, I will speak words of love, such as: ‘I love you, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer’, or other words like these.13 In the same way I will ask for the help and favour of the glorious Virgin, of the saints and angels, not forgetting my guardian angel. I will ask for love, for humility, and for strength so as to be able to suffer some trial for Him. I will suggest that He might like to use me and all my Brothers, and that He should take the whole congregation of them under his protection. Sometimes I will rejoice with him; other times I will lament, remembering how much he suffered for me and seeing how little it all is that is being suffered for him. When it is time for rest, for eating, or recreation, I will imagine that I do nothing without his permission, and that he gives me this with regard to everything. For that was how He used to eat with His disciples, saying: ‘make them sit down’, and ‘I prefer that they not starve rather than become weakened on the road because they have not had anything to eat’.14 As long as humanity lives in the flesh, they are not to live like angels, but rather to eat and drink and do other natural things. I will carry a New Testament, and every day will read something, in the hours when I find myself less busy, from the Acts of the Apostles as a way of meditation—and I shall consider the labours of St Paul.15 I
13 Psalm 18:1-2. 14 The allusions are to the narratives of the feeding of the five thousand, but they are not exact. 15 The choice of text here is surely significant, given the early Jesuits’ commitment to itinerant ministry. Guidelines for Pilgrims 65 shall not read in order to get to the end, but rather to relish and to draw some fruit from what I read. I will notice how the words of good people were not idle nor over-clever, but rather all for the service of our Lord. ‘Greet no-one on the road’, said our pilgrim Jesus Christ, as if he meant to say: ‘don’t get involved in things that are not part of your purpose in going, which is that of serving the Lord’. And so I would rather go alone than with someone, unless there were some chance of giving them some spiritual teaching or assistance, as St Philip did in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 8. That is a mystery I will be able to read and contemplate in between times, applying everything to obtain profit and teaching. So too I will be able to take from the life of Christ other similar mysteries in keeping with my work, remembering how much greater the labours of Christ and his disciples were. If I do not find relish in my labours, I will look at what Job said in chapter 10: ‘If I am wicked, woe to me! If I am righteous, I cannot lift up my head, for I am filled with disgrace and look upon my affliction’. Our troubles are nothing compared to what St Paul was talking about to the Hebrews:
Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy.16
I will remember that Christ did not go round with his flesh swathed in cotton. If my hands and feet are hurting me, so his hurt him: indeed, they were pierced with nails. If my body hurts me, I must remember how he was scourged; if I sweat, he first sweated drops of blood; if I am thirsty, I must remember his thirst; if I do not find lodging, ‘the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’; if I am tired, ‘Christ too, tired out by his journey, sat by the well’. I will console myself with this, and ask for some of the water that he was promising to the Samaritan woman, water that is only given to the poor and simple in spirit, ‘for His talk is with the simple’.17 And I can take this meditation on the Samaritan woman before arriving where I am meant to be having my evening
16 Job 10:15; Hebrews (following what was then the standard attribution to Paul) 11:36-38. 17 Matthew 8:20; John 4:16; Proverbs 3:32 (Vulgate). 66 Simão Rodrigues
meal, a league before, more or less. And as I am begging, I must always think to walk with Christ alongside me. In the evenings, before arriving at the place where I am meant to be sleeping, a league before, more or less, I will contemplate how two of the disciples were going to a village called Emmaus,18 and how Jesus Himself was going along with them, and ‘their eyes were kept from recognising him’. And I will ask the Lord that As I contemplate the He might open my eyes, so that I not belittle or disciples on the road to disparage the labours I am going through, Emmaus, I will ask the believing such a way of service not to be very 19 Lord to open my eyes pleasing to the Lord. And if I begin to look at other paths different from my vocation, saying, ‘we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel . . .’, and so on—I too hoped and expected that I’d be in a state of great solace on this journey, I too thought I could live in this way and be able to work both my salvation and that of many others (note you are certainly being tempted here) . . . then, ‘O you stupid people, how slow of heart to believe! . . . Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer and thus enter into His glory?’ I will ask Him to stay with me and not go away, ‘because it is almost evening and the day is now setting’. And because He is the light, I will find myself in darkness without Him. ‘As you turn these things over, won’t your heart be burning?’ and so on. ‘So, show yourself to God as a sweet-smelling sacrifice; work steadfastly; believe that you have Christ as a leader on your journey and in your life.’ I will be with this meditation, working through the points that seem good for me, until I go into the hospital. As I come into the hospital, I will be aware that I am entering the house of God, remembering how He was born in a stable. This was not as good a place as what I am entering now; and yet in this stable the shepherds and the Magi kings found Christ. In this way, I will try to find Him, and so on. I will take this meditation on the Nativity a number of times, and then other meditations. As I come into the hospital, I will be aware that I am entering the house of God. In it I will see Christ disfigured, present again in the poor.
18 Luke 24:13-35; again, the quotations are sometimes free. 19 The advice here is interestingly different from what was said in the first set of rules: ‘I should remember that God does not gain from the trouble I take’. The two sets seem to address the needs of people at different stages or in different moods, rather like the two sets of discernment rules in the book of the Exercises. Guidelines for Pilgrims 67
I will see how these souls are free from the world’s honours. I will rejoice at being in the most despised place in the world, so as to flee its cares. I will reflect on how, were God to be on earth, I would find Him in this place rather than in kings’ palaces or houses, ‘for those who are in the houses of kings wear soft robes’.20 And so I will not have any fear of being in the place where the King of Kings was. I will have desires on behalf of the poor, wishing their good in my soul. I will ask the Lord that, since they are poor, they should be aware of this and draw profit from it. I will think about how they have been poor for so long, and some perhaps without wanting it, and about the great blessing I am receiving from the Lord in taking it on of my own will. When I feel sad and tired, I will remember how the prophet Elijah was persecuted by Jezebel:
He was afraid; he got up and fled where his will carried him . . . and sat down under a juniper tree. He asked that he might die. He said, ‘it is enough for me, O Lord; take my soul; for I am no better than my ancestors’. Then he lay down in the shade of the juniper tree and fell asleep . . .
And how help comes during our labours and not during our rest, when we are in need and not when we have plenty—help from the Lord,
. . . who sent his angel to him and said to him, ‘Get up and eat’. He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water.
The Lord did not give Elijah delicacies or manna, because eating delicacies while travelling in the desert lessens one’s desire for the city, and leads one to think of the stomach rather than the spirit. ‘Thus Elijah ate and drank, and then went back to sleep.’ 21 We mix up the mercies and the favours that we receive in this life from the Lord—mix them up with such earthliness, so many imperfections and unnecessary cares, that we lose our awareness of such great good. We come to be, with these mercies we have received, just as we would be without them. We end up sleeping in our wretchedness.
20 Matthew 11:8, slightly changed. Here, exceptionally, a chapter reference is given in the text itself. 21 1 Kings 19:3-6, somewhat imaginatively interpreted. 68 Simão Rodrigues
The east calls and we look to the north. The Lord shows us the way, and there is no one to go on it. The Lord calls, and his servant does not hear. O good, faithful, gentle Jesus, may your servant hear what their Lord is saying. May your voice sound in my ears. Arouse the one who is asleep; invite the one who is reluctant; draw on the one who is hesitant; hold in the one who is escaping; bring back the runaway. Give sight to the one going blind, understanding to the ignorant, so that the servant may hear what their Lord is saying. ‘Arise, eat, for you still have a long way.’ ‘Elijah, Elijah, are you asleep when the angel is speaking to you? Aren’t you getting up? Aren’t you awestruck? Do you want the angel to strike you, to beat you? Don’t you see who it is that is showing you, by the heat of the bread and by the water, that you are going to dissolve into dust and ashes just as water slips into the sea? And you’re still asleep? Are you asleep in order to relieve the tiredness and fatigue of your body, when you know the text full well:
. . . what the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten, and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten. Wake up, you drunkards, and weep; and wail, all you wine-drinkers, over the sweet wine. . . .
For the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.’22 You are not going up Horeb, the mountain of God, like Elijah; you are not going You are on pilgrimage up Mount Sinai like Moses; you are not fleeing to the heavenly to Mount Shechem like Lot; you are not fleeing Jerusalem, the holy city like Noah into an ark he made of wood. You are going up, rather, to the holy city, Jerusalem, adorned with eternal glory and splendour, where the Lord will place on our heads ‘the diadem of eternal glory’, because ‘in Sion and Jerusalem the Lord will be our salvation’.23 Is not Jerusalem the glory of Judah? There is no wickedness in the inhabitants there, such as to cause a salty waste. There ‘the sun shall not burn you by day, nor the moon by night’, nor strangers pass through it, because the Lord our God is in its midst? Glorious things are spoken of you, city of God—you whose foundations are in the holy mountain; ‘if I forget you, let my right hand wither; I will
22 Joel 1:4-5; Romans 8:18. 23 Baruch 5:2; Joel 2:32 (Vulgate differing from Hebrew Bible). Guidelines for Pilgrims 69 place you above my highest joy’.24 Jerusalem—built as a city that is bound firmly together. May, indeed, that Sion take me back:
Sion, the peaceful City of David, Whose maker is the author of light, Whose gates are the wood of the cross, Whose keys are Peter’s word, Whose citizens are always joyful, Whose walls are living stone, Whose guardian is the festal king.
Here sweet perfume fills the sky; Here is always festal melody; Here there is no corruption, No failing, no complaining, No diminishing, no decaying: All are conformed to Christ.
Heavenly city, blessed city, City built upon a rock, City built in a safe haven, From afar I salute you. I salute you, I sigh for you, I aspire to you, I seek you.
Those who dwell within can know How much your people rejoice in you, How merrily they feast together, The desire that binds them as one, The gems that adorn the walls, The chalcedon, the hyancinth.
Good and gracious Jesus, I ask: May our memory draw us always here, To the broad streets of this city; May it be bonded to the crowds of saints, 25 May it be placed within your glory.
24 Allusions to Psalms 107:34, 121:6; Joel 3:17; Psalms 87:1-3, 137:6; 122:3. 25 The MHSJ editors were unable to find a source for this hymn, ‘Me receptet Sion illa’. The resources of the internet suggest that it was written by Hildebert of Lavardin (1056-1133), Archbishop of Tours, a prolific writer and much admired stylist. The poem features in works by the US American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and also by the British composer, Arthur Sullivan. More recently, it has been set to music by Judith Weir as the anthem, ‘Ascending into Heaven’; the translation offered in the publicity material for that latter work is the starting point of the version given here. 70 Simão Rodrigues
When I arrive at the church to which I am making my pilgrimage, I will take the saint to whom it is dedicated as one who does me special favours before the Lord. I will give Him great thanks for having brought me to the place in question, and ask for help to persevere in His service. And I will renew all my good purposes and specific intentions about God’s service, calling on the saint whose house it is as a witness, asking them that they should always remember me especially before the Divine Majesty, seeing the obligation that I have to God. PRAISE GOD! THE EARLY JESUITS AND THE ROAD
Mario Scaduto
Mario Scaduto (1922-1995) was an expert on the history of the Italian Jesuits in the sixteenth century, writing three large volumes about the years following Ignatius’ death, when Diego Laínez and Francis Borja led the Society. This 1 seminal article is a by-product of those books, and reports lovingly on the ‘spirituality of the way’ to be found in the letters of Jesuits from those periods.
ANY, INDEED MOST, OF THE EARLY JESUITS knew both the fears and Mthe consolations of the road. They travelled it in all weathers, by night and by day, alone and in groups, in conversation but also in long periods of silence. They knew how roads could be spacious and level. They knew too about stony country lanes with twists and turns and perilous mountain paths. But whatever the case with all that, the road always had another, more important significance for them: it was a means of connection with other people and a means of encountering God. The help of souls was part of their very existence; it was for the sake of this service that people travelled from one place to another, or for that matter stayed where they were. Ignatius himself had been a great traveller. When he dictated his Reminiscences, he seems himself to have recognised, fifteen years on, how much of his spiritual adventure had been linked to the road, when he referred to himself as ‘the pilgrim’. Pedro Ribadeneira, a young disciple of Ignatius, once saw that blood was flowing from his feet, sore and worn as they were from the road:
. . . but he, making nothing of his own pain, was striding forth, and encouraging himself by turning round to me and saying, ‘it’s nothing, Brother Peter, it’s nothing’.
1 The article was first published as ‘La strada e i primi Gesuiti’, Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu, 40 (1971) pp. 335-390. We are very grateful to the Editor of this journal for permission to reproduce this abridged English version. Interested readers are referred to the original for full references, and also for a generous selection of the primary texts.
The Way , 42/1 (January 2003), pp. 71--84. 72 Mario Scaduto
Ignatius had set out some general norms for travel in the Constitutions, while leaving superiors free to decide on details. They could go ‘like the poor’, without a horse or food, or else in greater comfort; they might have letters of introduction or not. The criterion was always to be ‘the greater edification of one’s neighbour and the divine service’. The norms were codified in rules written by Polanco, Ignatius’ secretary, and by Nadal, one of his closest advisers. Laínez, Ignatius’ successor, published these; and it was only a decade later, under Francis Borja, that travelling on foot disappeared. The first Jesuits referred to journeys, quite significantly, as ‘missions’. These missions could cover matters of government, ministry and study; those in formation undertook pilgrimages. Letters show that superiors generally took care not to send people alone, above all because of the risks involved in travelling without a companion. They often took letters patent, and sometimes a formal safe conduct document. They wore what was then their normal dress: a black soutane, with a hat, a cloak and a pair of shirts. Often they would be dressed a little better than at home, and there are complaints about superiors who were lacking in care and generosity on this matter. Especially if they were travelling in Protestant countries, they were meant to dress reasonably well, ‘so as not to look like beggars’ in the eyes of ‘the heretics’—as Peter Canisius several times admonished people raggedly dressed in Germany. Novices on pilgrimage were instructed to wear warm underclothes as a protection against the cold, but their outer wear was to be ‘like that of the poor’, in order to promote both their own growth in humility and the edification of others. This latter consideration was an intense concern, so much so that people would avoid travelling on feast days in order not to cause scandal, even though this was in principle permitted. They were not to travel more than 40 miles in one day. Despite the austerities, the financial sums invested in travel were relatively high. For the early Jesuits, travel was an evocative adventure: always busy, often tough, sometimes really painful. The road helped them see how their particular way of life fitted into the wider history of Christianity. As we shall see, travel provided a vast, varied backdrop, often a rough one, with surprises and hazards at every turn. Bad weather, or the incomprehension of others, or sheer human wickedness tested and strengthened people’s characters, preparing them to work for Christ. Every street corner, every bend along the way, could become— The Early Jesuits and the Road 73 and indeed did become—a place of unobtrusive apostolic ministry, of decisive pastoral encounter.
Travel by Sea For important journeys, travel by sea was preferred; it was quicker and less problematic—at least if everything went smoothly. The journey from Naples to Palermo took 33 hours in good weather and with favourable winds. But in other circumstances, it might take much longer: 60 hours or more. One letter sent to Laínez as General tells of a voyage on this route that lasted a full week:
. . . the water came in with such force, and in such great waves, that we were all drenched and our wits befuddled. . . . When we wanted to move the sail, the ropes broke. At that point we all raised our hands to heaven with fervent prayer, afraid that we would be food that day for the fish. We were all like sardines piled one on top of the other, because we were in total fifty passengers in such a small ship.
Storms in that part of the Mediterranean were frequent. Erasmus Völker described a journey in 1561 from Naples to Palermo as follows:
. . . the sea was too frightening, too horrible, for words. The winds were so violent and strong that the sailors lowered the sails; the waves were like mountains, high enough to smother the ship, and they buffeted the ship from side to side, so much so that the ship was in danger of being lost with all hands. And this was on the high seas, with no possibility for escape.
Similar tales were told of journeys in the Adriatic, between Ancona and Venice. Völker had another difficult experience here, three years later, in 1564:
. . . after we had gone a short distance, a contrary wind sprang up, which . . . so disturbed the sea that we and our boat were in danger. Because my shipmates had never been in this sort of danger before, they were in quite low spirits, and full of melancholy. . . . Since I had been on another occasion in this kind of danger, and indeed more so, I tried to cheer them up, either comforting them or teasing them. 74 Mario Scaduto
Besides the difficulties with the weather, there was also the hazard of unbearable fellow-passengers—squalid people or convicts, who could make a ship into an ‘epitome of Hell’, as well as the dark threat of ambush from pirate ships. Völker’s party were also worried about rumours that the Turks had taken some religious as prisoners. In 1565, Bartolomeo Vallone, a Sicilian, was captured between Venice and Ancona, along with a German Jesuit. ‘As they made him enter the pirate galley’, wrote the Jesuit rector in Venice to Borja, ‘they dealt him enormous blows to the head with some kind of wooden stick’. The German tried to escape and drowned; for Vallone, this beating was the beginning of a Calvary that was to last for 14 months, during which the idea of his being rescued comes up frequently in superiors’ correspondence. Eventually he was released, from Alexandria in Egypt. He was ordained in 1572; he then went as a missionary to Goa, dying there in 1578.
Travel by Road Journeys by land had their difficulties too, but of different kinds— difficulties which began even before departure. Drivers and horses were a frequent source of vexation. Gian Filippo Casini told Borja about a journey to Naples in October 1562:
Because of the route that these people made us take, we were always travelling through woods. Nowhere could we find anything to eat until nightfall. Because we did not know about it, we had not made provision—we thought we would find an eating-place as usual. But Our Lord provided through one gentleman who gave us a loaf of bread, and through another who was in a hut and sold us another two loaves.
Here, too, there were problems with robbers. Attacks of other kinds could also occur. Völker wrote to Polanco in 1561, recounting how he and others had passed below a high mountain, from which ‘some wretched and villainous men at the top’ had thrown down ‘enormous rocks’. Another Jesuit wrote of a journey on a horse whose underbelly was crowded with sores: The Early Jesuits and the Road 75
To put it reverently, he stank like a dead dog. He would only move forward if you beat him; and we had to buy some wine and bread and give him morsels soaked in the wine so that he could move forward.
Emond Auger told of a horse that had a mind of its own. It threw all four members of Auger’s party in succession. Auger remarked drily that ‘he inspired little confidence’. Sometimes, however, the poor animals were not themselves to blame. A little nag ridden by Giovanni Maldonado in 1563, ‘was lame in one foot, and therefore could never walk straight. He had a very old wound on his back, for he also lacked a part of his bone.’ When it began to rain, he got stuck in the mud, and there was no way of getting him out; nor could he ford streams. Stefano Baroello wrote of his ‘laborious journey’ in 1565:
Three times the horse fell. The first time it got up at once, and left me in the mud. The second time, it landed on my leg, with the result that neither it nor I could move. The third time it fell backwards, but nevertheless threw me off, leaving me caught in the brambles.
Passers-by came to the rescue on this occasion, as also later in the journey:
I was riding a horse that was quite old and lazy. I did not have my eyeglasses, and found myself in a place that made me gasp. If you went forward, it looked as though the horse would not get through; nor was there room to turn round. I had to dismount—but my left foot got stuck in the stirrup. It was a sorry sight to see this fat old man upside down with his leg trapped.
Injuries, too, caused difficulties. Otto Briamont writes of his travels in the Alps, coming down the St Gothard pass to Altdorf:
. . . my left knee swelled up. It was in any case quite weak, and it became very inflamed, with the result that I could not use it at all, or manage even the slightest movement from one place to another. Thus, with enormous difficulty, Fr Jona carried me on his horse; I had one foot in the stirrup, and the other on the horse’s neck, holding myself on the saddle with one hand in front and the other behind. For where we were, there was no surgeon or any other sort 76 Mario Scaduto
of help. I travelled the whole day in this state, like a gipsy, until I got here (which is about halfway). When we dismounted, Fr Jona—who is a giant—carried me in his arms into the inn, indeed right into the bedroom, and looked after all my other needs—and this with a charity and cheerfulness to match his size.
It was quite normal to travel in a state of fever or injury.
The Two Pilgrims, Jacques Callot (1592/3-1635)
It is thus no wonder that people often lost their way; they were in a weakened state, and they were frequently unfamiliar with the territory. Lorenzo Maggi tells us, with some irony, about an adventure he had in September 1558:
We left Rome on the 20th of this month. We made a good beginning to our journey: we took two detours of some nine or ten miles, The Early Jesuits and the Road 77
having been misdirected by people we had asked about the route. If it had not been for two men, friends of ours whom we had met in a thick wood, who took us along with them, we would have landed back in Rome that evening when we had expected to reach Borghetto. . . .
Friday morning we left Amelia and set off for Perosa. When night fell, we were still on horseback. Then we lost the way, and therefore had been wandering around by moonlight for some five or six hours before we got to the inn. In order to calm us down further, the landlord took his time about answering us. After many insults and mutterings, in the end ‘he filled the hungry and gave rest to the weary’.
Rain was one of the worst tortures: the theme recurs insistently, obsessively, in the correspondence. We can cite one vivid example, from a Jesuit in Milan in 1565:
. . . on the same day, that group of seven who are off to France turned up. They were in good health, but tired, and under strain from the heavy rains that we have been having in these days. Not far from here, two of them had spent the whole night in the open air, marooned on an island the size of a small room between two branches of a river. They had not been able to get across the second branch because it had become very deep; nor could they turn back because of how the branch they had already crossed had swollen up.
Rivers, indeed, often played cruel tricks. Gian Filippo Casini tells us about what happened to him and a companion:
We had to cross two rivers by boat. At the second, there was a great danger that we would lose Brother Michael. He had already crossed the first one with some others. The drivers had refused to let us travel together, nor could we wait for each other. Thus it was that he was crossing the second river while I, along with some others, was crossing the first. At that point the two others were already submerged to their neck (the boat was still giving them a bit of support), while Michael had grabbed hold of a cord that was suspended between the two sides of the river, and was travelling by this means, though even for him the water was up to his chest. He was in this way dragging the boat and getting it to move across, with the other two inside it. So it was that Our Lord saved these two 78 Mario Scaduto
through Michael’s means—the boatman had already swum away in flight across the river. After that we all prayed, along with those whom he had helped. No-one had wanted to go into the water, given the size of the river. But, when human help had been lacking, divine help supplied.
Cassini’s last point here is typical of the serenity, even joyfulness, with which these Jesuit travellers accepted their discomfort—a serenity reminiscent of Francis’ Fioretti.
Observers of People and Places It was not the case, however, that these travellers lived in peaceful, unrealistic detachment from everyday events. They had a sharp eye for people and places: they had a quite unusual sensitivity for what was a time of serious social upheaval. Lorenzo Maggi’s letter to Laínez in 1558, already cited, tells us how,
. . . on Sunday we arrived in Montepulciano, where the troops for the Duke of Florence were assembling (it wasn’t clear where they were off to). No money was being given to the soldiers. We felt very sorry for those poor wretches: though they had nothing else with which to support themselves and their families except their own hands, they were being forced to enlist.
This kind of sensitivity to the poorer classes is, for its time, quite unusual: it might lead historians to revise some judgments about the early Jesuits and elitism. The road was also a place from which to observe the countryside and local culture. Otto Briamont’s letter, already cited, gives us some rich examples of life in the Alpine regions.
. . . this whole region is very hemmed in. It is all surrounded by rocks and very high mountains. Anyone looking round feels that they are in a monastery shut in by very high walls—and it is quite constricted, given that in Altdorf we are no more than a day’s journey from the summit of St Gothard.
He reports on the animal life, and on how it reminds him of Scripture. The blood of some of these is regarded as medicinal. Bells occasionally ring in the villages as a way of summoning the men to hunt the bears The Early Jesuits and the Road 79 down; the bears’ heads can be seen spiked on the gates of the towns. There are partridges with feet all covered in feathers, though it is more like hair than feathers. The people, for their part, know how to feast. They have solemn banquets, with game of various rich kinds. As for drinking, each one has a medium-sized silver cup; and then there are two or three large tankards from which everyone drinks, cups that are clearly very ancient. The feasts typically end with a preparation of stiffly beaten cream and chestnuts, reminding the learned Briamont of a line from Virgil. After three or four hours—and with a final swig from the communal cups—the feast comes to an end. Briamont is, of course, in Swiss territory. The mountain people are keen to fight against Zwingli’s followers for ‘the old faith’. Briamont is harsh in his judgments. Writing of Bernardino Ochino (1487-1584), a famous convert to Protestantism whose daughter was getting married at the time he was writing, Briamont expresses the wish that ‘they had burnt him like they did Zwingli’. These were hard times, and people lost their sense of proportion—but we might at least remember the commitment and affection which motivated Ignatius himself to take risks in seeking Ochino’s return to Catholicism.2
The Road and the Jesuit Vocation The road also had a significant function within the Jesuits’ formation structures. The journey was a kind of test, and served to weed out those were unsuited. At the end of April 1560, a small group of Jesuits left Rome for Vienna. On the way, or perhaps in Venice, one of the party, a Fleming called Antonio ‘behaved quite unusually badly both regarding obedience and modesty’. The superiors in Rome were informed about this, and became alarmed, for they were also aware of ‘other grounds for suspecting that he is not straightforward’. They told Benedetto Palmio to hold the young man in Venice, and to make him work in a hospital, ‘where he can serve the poor and do penance, or else go off in God’s name’. Meanwhile, some bad reports had arrived about another Fleming, Gisbert. Palmio was told either to dismiss the pair of them, or to keep them both in the hospitals, ‘or else send them to Rome on pilgrimage, not giving them a penny and without their getting any financial help at all . . . one after the other, not together’.
2 Igantius to Claude le Jay, 12 December 1545, MHSJ EI I, pp. 343-344. 80 Mario Scaduto
The journey was a way in which future apostles could be tested. The various natural obstacles that have been mentioned, and the human malice they encountered, tested these men’s virtue and conduct, and shaped them into people who could be sources of inspiration for others. Here is a description of a group in the early stages of a journey from Rome to Gaeta in 1559:
. . . in the inns, we spent the time like this. Firstly, we rested together in rooms which we had been able to acquire that were separated from everyone else. Then, while some saw to the food, the rest prayed; then grace was said, and we ate in an orderly fashion. After having eaten and given thanks to Our Lord, one gave exhortation to the others. . . . On the road, in the inns, and everywhere, the brothers always proceeded decently, with great love and charity, helping each other whenever they were in need, all cheerful and good-spirited.
Auger reported on his journey to Loreto as follows:
. . . if you knew the consolation (as God gives it to us to feel), the spirit and the cheerfulness of the brothers, I expect you would be more assured of what is said: ‘whenever I am weak, then I am strong’, and ‘power is made perfect in weakness’—bearing in mind that we were almost all either delicate, or weak, or sick, and little used to such discomforts. We were singing psalms, litanies and other devout things, when innkeepers or passers-by would have expected us to be sorrowful.
A pupil at the college in Vienna, who later became a Jesuit, recorded some years later the impression made on him by a group that passed through the city in 1552:
. . . their countenance was robust, tough; their hands were not white and smooth, but hardened and blackened, as if burnt by the sun. In sum, their whole physique appeared accustomed to labour and to discomfort. At the same time, there shone forth from them such learning, such liberty of spirit, such candour and such piety that all Vienna was caught up in admiration. For my part, I had the sense of having cast eyes not on ordinary people but on apostles of God. The Early Jesuits and the Road 81
In the end, the road was a place of ministry, of the apostolate—and very fruitfully so. It served as an extension of the pulpit or the confessional, but was more accessible, closer to people. Unexpected encounters could happen. Maggi met a generous The road became benefactor who confided his desire to become a Jesuit; a place of ministry Briamont found a former diplomat who turned out to be a very useful contact; Angelo Davisi met Cardinal Vitelli in Spoleto in 1561, who offered alms very promptly, alms that were welcome owing to the prices in the inns. They also found, more significantly, people in need of spiritual help. In this way, the squares and crossroads became places for improvised instruction. The long journeys often enabled ministry to happen even before people arrived at their goals. Manoel Gomes’s journey to Cyprus illustrates the point. He left Rome with Clemente Pucci, a brother. Two days after their departure it was a Sunday, and he wanted to celebrate Mass. This desire, held ‘despite how the sterile mountains and uninhabitable countryside protested the contrary’, led them to a rural parish church, where people used to come for Mass. He celebrated Mass, preached and distributed communion; he gave alms to those who were most needy, and gave the parish priest some needed instruction. Gifts in kind flowed from the houses near the church: eggs, loaves, chickens, fruit. They were, of course, left behind with the parish priest, but they were the sign of the good things that had been planted, and of the consolation that had been felt. They moved on, and stopped for a day and a half at Pesaro. Here they found two Jesuits from the community at Loreto engaged in ministry. They also learnt that a 32-year-old priest had a concubine, and Gomes went to confront him at home. He encouraged the priest to send the woman away, while nevertheless making sure she would be secure. He was successful, and left further help to his confrères from Loreto. They then sailed from Pesaro to Venice, and came across ‘some opinions that smacked of heresy’. Personal contact led to fruitful dialogue, so much so that one of those who were behind such ideas eventually came to him in Venice to make a confession. They sailed to Cyprus in the same ship as the Archbishop of Nicosia with his retinue. The latter remarked on how, 82 Mario Scaduto
. . . all his own family were sending into the ship—depending on what they could afford or what they wanted to do—baskets and strongboxes full of comforts for the sea. When he saw that we were not doing anything like that, he twice told me that I should get my stuff loaded. I replied that all our stuff was already with us on the ship; however, His Reverence and Lordship should forget any concern for our case, because we were well looked after. As indeed we were, sustained by the arms of the richest Gospel poverty, which is the greatest and richest treasure that this Egypt of ours can boast. Therefore nothing was lacking; poverty was supplying it in another form throughout the whole voyage, much more so than externally it seemed we were lacking.
Ministry during journeys always had this unprogrammed quality; it emerged from one-off encounters. During the voyage just mentioned, Gomes was aware of ‘not a little fruit from our small labours’ on the way to Cyprus, whether among the members of the bishop’s entourage, or among the passengers and the sailors. Hatreds were resolved; theft vanished; ‘the sins of sodomy that often happen on ships’ were The Early Jesuits and the Road 83 eliminated. In short, ‘this ship seemed every morning and every evening like a monastic choir’. There are numerous examples of whole groups carrying out ministry in this way. One case must suffice here. Louis Coudret wrote to Laínez in 1558:
. . . on our journey we preached in many places, such as Siena, Florence, Bologna, Pisa, Parma, Plasentia, with large audiences and—so it was said to us—with great fruit. . . . Whenever we saw that something was afoot in the streets, and a great crowd of people, we got down from our horses and preached. Most people listened to us willingly, even if others who were rather uncouth laughed at us and cursed us. One time, once they had heard the sermon, they left the dance and all went away.
Pierre Favre If we were to seek out one prototypical Jesuit traveller, the obvious person would be Pierre Favre.3 He was almost always on the road, normally on foot, occasionally on a mule. He carried some books with him, such as the breviary, and also—as of 1543—a portable altar. He had nothing other than this small luggage, and no other homeland except these roads: ‘our roads’, as he would call them. He lodged with friends; on the road he would spend nights in inns, in hospitals, or even in the open air. Though he was rarely alone, he was constantly exposed to dangers of all kinds. Throughout the then Empire, the roads had a bad reputation: in Savoy, the highwaymen used to disguise themselves as pilgrims in order to kidnap distinguished personages and seek a ransom; in Spain, there were similar problems. Then you have to reckon with the ‘great plagues’, with soldiers and their harassments, and with the political tensions. Put all that together, and you have a reasonably good picture of the reality within which Favre had to work each day. However, what made him really suffer was not so much these exterior dangers, but rather the constant uprooting which his
3 In this eloquent final section, Scaduto follows, more closely than we might expect, the remarkable introduction to the French translation of Favre’s Spiritual Diary (Mémorial) by Michel de Certeau (Paris: Desclée, 1959), pp. 41-54. English readers may now consult The Spiritual Writings of Pierre Favre, edited and translated by Edmond C. Murphy, John W. Padberg and Martin E. Palmer (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996). 84 Mario Scaduto journeying involved. When he arrived in a new country, he was alienated: the culture, the language, the ideas were not his. Gradually he would adapt—but then it would be time to pack his bag again and depart. Nevertheless, every city that he left behind left a deep mark in his heart, a nostalgia for it. They all remained present to him even as he was continuing further along his path and making new friendships. Yet Favre often thought in terms of a deeper, less fragile unity which remained amid all the ruptures: ‘the Spirit that can exile hearts from their homelands’ is also the one ‘who fills the face of the earth’. By moving from town to town and extending the network of his acquaintances and apostolic concerns, Favre made his own this Spirit of the whole universe. He thus ended up with the desire ‘not to remain in one place, but to be a pilgrim for the whole of his life in one or other part of the world’. He had a sharp sense of the tensions between Catholic Spain and the Protestant Rhineland. Since reconciliation was not possible, and since the Emperor who ruled both was incapable of restoring true unity, there was a need to reconstruct it in a different way: centred on the papacy, on prayer and on ministry. Favre dedicated his life to this cause: he was an agent of reconciliation, entrusted with missions from the Pope. At the same time, he recognised interiorly that there was no hope for this enterprise, humanly speaking. Yet his ‘universal spirit’ still sent him along a path of ecumenism: he could draw together in the same prayer the great figures of this divided Europe: the Pope, the Emperor, the King of France, the Sultan of Turkey, Calvin, Luther. In his prayer, he brought together the capital cities, both ancient and modern, that represented these opposed powers: Wittenberg, Geneva, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Moscow, Alexandria and Antioch.4 Moreover, the communion of saints was there to sustain him. The pilgrim was moving through a world in which heaven was interested, a world in whose history heaven played a part, a world whose tiniest details could thus take on a significance that was universal.
4 Favre, Spiritual Diary, nn. 25, 33. SEPTEMBER 11 AND CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES
Thomas Hughson
HE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11 2001 have altered the lives of people T throughout the world, not just in the United States and in Afghanistan. This brief article, however, focuses on the experience of Christians in the United States. Thousands of families, predominantly middle- and low-income, lost husbands, wives, children and friends, whether on the aircraft, in the World Trade Center or at the Pentagon. If the victims represented the US population at large, over 90% were Christians; others were Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist; some may have had no specific religious affiliation. But this may not be fully accurate, because citizens from more than 60 nations perished when the World Trade Center towers came down. Al-Quaida’s meticulously planned, low- tech assault changed everyday life in the US. Defence measures were tightened; security measures at borders, in airports, and aboard planes became more stringent. Civilian flight crews and airline passengers assumed the worst about any aggressive behaviour, and acted against it. Soon some commentators noticed that people in public spaces seemed to feel more connected to one another, especially in New York. Others remarked that ambitious young women and men were talking about a new focus on family life and friendships. A few noted that when people talked about heroism, they were talking, not so much about sports and film stars, but rather about those who fell in the line of duty that day. Nevertheless, it is interior images which are now the sharpest effects of the attacks, images carrying a weight of subdued grief. The memorial illuminations at the World Trade Center were turned off in March. Security breaches at airports cause inconvenience but less alarm. The sense of national emergency that shaped autumn 2001 has begun to wane. A version of normality has returned. Admittedly, students, workers and celebrities across the nation are still wearing caps marked >FDNY=, in tribute to the Fire Department of New York, and the New York Times ran capsule biographies of World Trade Center
The Way, 42/1 (January 2003), pp. 85-97 . 86 Thomas Hughson
victims for much of the following year. It is the broad contours of daily life after September 11 that are different, not many of the external details. Can one say anything about how September 11 has affected less visible currents in the lives of Christians in the United States—their faith, their interior lives, their spirituality? Has the trauma intervened in religious spontaneity so as to plunge people into a new condition of perplexity? One possible reading of the situation is that September 11 has indeed drawn Christians from a relatively well-organized society into a collective experience of no-exit. And this experience may be positive. September 11 may have drawn us, to use ideas of John of the Cross,1 into a dark night of the American soul. John helps us see that fidelity to God, whether for an individual or a church, does not Perhaps the Lord necessarily mean that the spiritual life carries on as usual. Quite of history is using the contrary. God can draw a person or a Church into a the attacks to condition of perplexity: familiar categories cease to work; one draw US Christians feels unable to pray; one is challenged to stay faithful. The dark beyond civil night is a purifying passage to deeper love through the spirituality transformation of desire. Though September 11 led many US Americans of all religions to public prayer, to the standard religious responses of civil spirituality, there was also a certain confusion accompanying this for many Christians. They were absorbing a pain and loss that were somehow too acute to be contained in this way. Perhaps September 11 marked the beginning of something new. Perhaps the Lord of history is using this occasion to draw US Christians beyond civil spirituality, transforming their desires and drawing them into closer intimacy. An alternative reading focuses on the heroic devotion to duty shown by so many. We can think of Fr Mychal Judge OFM, Chaplain to the Fire Department of New York, as well as of the firefighters, the policemen, and the Port Authority personnel who died in the World Trade Center. Such people may have opened up some new possibilities. They show us that our occupations can be seen primarily as service of others—families, friends, society—rather than as >careers= oriented
1 In a widely appreciated article, ‘Impasse and Dark Night’, Constance Fitzgerald OCD has explored various forms of societal impasse in terms of John of the Cross’ dark night of the soul. The article is most easily available in Women’s Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development, edited by Joann Wolski Conn (New York: Paulist Press, 1996 [1986]), pp. 410-435. Thanks to Carol Ann Smith SHCJ for helpful remarks on this subject. September 11and US Spirituality 87 towards self-interest and private gain. They are counter-witnesses to an individualistic model of citizenship. They help Roman Catholics appropriate their Church=s social teaching more deeply; they model Vatican II=s teaching about Church-as-communion being the full expression of human existence, understood as inherently relational. But it is too soon to know whether such a change in attitudes might take hold. Again, it would require a transformation of desires: success would no longer be defined by wealth. Another approach would be more negative. Perhaps the attacks need to be understood in terms of what Ignatius says about the Two Kingdoms in the Spiritual Exercises. Perhaps they reveal the complete opposite of Christ=s teaching about God=s Kingdom and how it advances. Perhaps they confronted Christians in the United States with cruel deeds, with the very opposite of the Kingdom of justice, mercy, and love. There is undoubtedly a truth here, but again we cannot yet tell whether it will be of lasting significance. Many Christians, whether versed in Ignatian spirituality or not, find themselves without any familiar path of response to September 11. The events raise questions about the situation of Islamic peoples, and about solidarity with the oppressed, that cannot be easily answered. One frequent, though in my view mistaken, response interpreted the al- Quaida assault on civilians as a desperate and illegitimate, but nevertheless understandable, lashing out. The stricken Third World was protesting against an international economic order that keeps the poor in misery. The sensitivity to international social justice lying behind such a response is obviously admirable. But the response avoids an uncomfortable fact. It was not a desire to improve anyone’s economic condition that determined the goals, strategy and practice of Usama bin Laden, of the former Taliban authorities, and of al-Quaida: it was a set of theocratic principles. The events of September 11 came out of a theology quite unconcerned with the economic condition of the poor, whether in Afghanistan, in Somalia or elsewhere. Among documents retrieved from an Afghan cave was a written oath by one of al-Quaida’s jihadi: ‘that I will slaughter infidels my entire life . . . and with the will of God I will do these killings . . . ’. Such sentiments are not those of a liberation movement. We are in no position to reflect fully on the impact of September 11: there is no clarity regarding what it means for Christianity. US citizens are still confused about it; and in any case spiritual experience 88 Thomas Hughson of any kind cannot be reduced to particular doctrines. Those most directly affected, those who have borne the full weight of the suffering, are in the end the ones with sufficient knowledge and standing to speak with moral authority. Whatever clarity is attainable will emerge according to its own rhythm; it will not simply respond to our search for answers. For the moment, all we can do is pray for enlightenment, and make some brief conjectures.
Listening We can begin by noting that September 11 introduced US citizens to a new sense of vulnerability to external attack. This has not been part of US consciousness: the country is flanked by only two nations, and its relationships with its neighbours to the north and south are peaceful. Such vulnerability is not part of US American civil spirituality, not part of how the citizens of a superpower articulate their national identity. US history has certainly been marked by suffering, but not by this kind of vulnerability. The Civil War was internal, with limited incursions from abroad. US citizens have died in foreign wars since then of course, notably in World War II. Here, however, it was civilians who died, at home. The experience was unsought, unexpected. Such an experience cannot but call forth—however fleetingly—an experience of being placed near the Cross: the saving Cross of the sinless Christ. For people in this condition, words of solidarity from ordinary people and from officials around the world became a powerfully consoling balm. Blessed is the nation that mourns, for it shall be consoled in seeing the goodness of others. Perhaps the spiritual lives of US Christians need to carry this vulnerability. Perhaps US Christians need to learn more about this strength received from other peoples, and to drop the illusion of national self-sufficiency. If so, it would represent a shift in US civil spirituality. Since the eighteenth century, millenarian expectation in the United States, born of revivalist evangelical readings of the Book of Revelation, has looked to Christ=s return. This apocalyptic perspective animated the Second Great Awakening,2 and it has shaped the national culture in many ways. US civil spirituality has often imagined the righteous Lamb
2 This term is used to denote an evangelical revival movement in the 19th century that affected all Protestant denominations, Catholicism, and US civil religion. September 11and US Spirituality 89 of God, Christ, as the returning Judge of the world. It has then identified with the righteous who will be blessed before his throne, while the unrighteous will be assigned eternal loss—a judgment occurring not in heaven but on earth. So, for example, the famous Civil War anthem sung by the northern army, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’, uses such language with reference to victory over the South. President Reagan=s reference to the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’ drew not just on Star Wars but also on the Book of Revelation. Within such a framework, the suffering endured by Christians in the United States at the hands of their enemies is part of the travail endured by the saints before the coming of Christ. The story will be completed when the reality of divine judgment appears in human history, perhaps soon; US Christians will then appear as agents of divine righteousness. President George W. Bush floated the idea of naming the military campaign against al-Quaida as ‘Operation Infinite Justice’. This counterpart to a jihad did not sit well with many US Americans and it was dropped. But it was a fleeting glimpse of a civil spirituality—a civil spirituality that assumes not only that God is on our side, but also that God has chosen the United States to be an instrument of divine righteousness and justice.
A view of the World Trade Center 90 Thomas Hughson
This civil spirituality differs from a more typically Catholic spirituality of the cross. This latter would understand the present suffering of Christians as a sign of nearness to the crucified Christ, nearness to One who can redeem suffering by drawing it into his own passion. Perhaps, then, September 11 is inviting US Catholics back to their own deepest experience of faith, and to transform what they have absorbed from civil millenarianism. Perhaps September 11 has reawakened US Catholics’ sense of being linked to an international communion of Churches; perhaps it has begun to transform their desire, and to lead them into a more visible witness to Christianity as international communion. Perhaps it has begun to wean them off understanding themselves as a righteous body of saints starkly and apocalyptically opposed to its enemies. Perhaps we have begun to defend the common good by a variety of means—means which may include military force, but which extend beyond such an option. It should nevertheless be noted that this experience of vulnerability has not called any of the major institutions of US society into question. Neither the US government, nor the public at large, nor Christians specifically feel themselves in a state of impending collapse. September 11 has not undermined the credibility of either church or state; nor has it caused people to have any doubt as to whether the government has a basis on which to govern or to think that Christianity itself has been put at risk. By contrast, the unprecedented closeness of the 2000 presidential election was quite threatening. Al-Quaida would have done more to destabilise the institutions of democracy had it stuffed ballot boxes in Miami. A similar point can be made about people’s sense of their faith. Perhaps grieving families ask, ‘why did this happen?’, but in general it is clergy scandals, not September 11, that have had a negative effect on the confidence of US Roman Catholics in their Church. Indeed, the heroic witness of the Fire Department, which includes many Roman Catholics, has moved the nation to awe and gratitude.
‘Lord, Whose Sin Was It?’ The crash of Flight 93, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, provoked both the religious right and the secular left to offer answers to the kind of question put to Jesus: ‘whose sin was it, theirs or September 11and US Spirituality 91 their parents?’3 For which sin, and whose, did the United States deserve September 11? Jesus’ strategy with such questions was to deflect the inquirers’ interest, to move them forward from blaming the victim into a larger framework of repentance and belief in the gospel. The religious right, by contrast, spoke of America=s sins of pornography, homosexuality, drug- abuse and abortion: finally God had been provoked into withdrawing protection so that instruments of wrath could inflict long-deserved punishment upon an immoral nation. With equal assurance, the secular left declared that the attacks were an obvious result of blundering imperialism. However, most people did not seem to think September 11 was so clearly and easily commensurate with America=s wrong-doing, of whichever sort. They wondered instead about Usama bin Laden=s religio-political vision of the world. The Cold War had set the West in more or less acute confrontation against a regime that was officially atheistic. By contrast, this new situation revolved September 11 cannot be around another set of issues that could not, despite the understood within a efforts of some, be assimilated into a Cold War Cold War framework framework. It was no longer that the US was standing on the side of a social order open to human spirituality and divine transcendence, and opposed to the dialectical materialism of the Soviet Union. Something more unsettling had emerged: now the very liberty of the West was being violently rejected as godless secularism. Perhaps the hand of God was to be sought, not in any message the terrorists were bringing, nor indeed as guiding any measures of retaliation, but rather in how people were being led, tentatively, to cope with the ambiguities of a new, post-Cold War historical condition. During the week after September 11 Edward Cardinal Egan of New York was invited by a concerned television pundit to explain how a good God could let such a terrible thing happen. What were parents to tell their children? Instead, however, of trying to develop a theodicy, as Leibniz had done in response to the Lisbon earthquake, the Cardinal had the wisdom just to recount his experiences with suffering victims and with distraught family members. These people were not asking for explanations, but for someone to be with them, to pray with them, to contact their loved ones. The Cardinal=s response seemed to emerge from a spiritual reflex influenced by Vatican II=s Gaudium et spes. In that
3 John 9:2, compare Luke 13:1-5. 92 Thomas Hughson
document, the response of faith to suffering takes the form of practical, effective solidarity, rather than theoretical justification of God=s ways. Cardinal Egan was giving public witness to a spirituality that had appropriated the spirit of the gospel as taught by Vatican II. Sharing the Cross of Christ had been integral to every Christian spirituality. But Gaudium et spes presented compassionate solidarity as a renewed way of being Christian in a broken world. Compassion and effective service— as modelled in different ways by the men of the Fire Department and by the Cardinal in this response—are surely the best immediate answer to questions about a disaster, even if there may be a place for theodicy later. Al-Quaida had laid its plans according to an accusation that amounted to an absolutely certain and brutally simple answer to the question, ‘Lord, whose sin was it that caused September 11?’ The sin was that of a modern West still thought of—strange though it may seem—as Christendom: specifically the United States physically trespassing into Saudi Arabia and supporting Israel, as well as the more diffused Western intrusions of mass media and global marketing. Though there were a few vengeful incidents, the President and the people of the US distinguished al-Quaida from Islam. A televised prayer service at National Cathedral in Washington DC, with the President in September 11and US Spirituality 93 view, included an imam offering public Islamic prayer alongside Christian clergy and a Jewish rabbi. This drew Christians into a civic spirituality of creatureliness not connected to any specific religious identity or organization. Though this could degenerate into a vague, Deist mystique, Roman Catholics can read it in terms of Vatican II’s affirmation of religious liberty, and its commitment to what religions have in common. And US citizens of all religions—perhaps apart from some sects—hold this openness to others as a primary virtue in what might be called a civil spirituality: a sacred commitment to liberty that gives rise to a set of tolerant attitudes towards different religions. Western Christianity speaks of self-transcendence. One easy line of thought is to say that Western religion must therefore somehow absorb some elements of Islam’s critique of the West, somehow let itself be challenged by Islam’s otherness. It is quite fashionable We are being drawn for critics to suppose that religions must be judged from to re-appropriate the some ahistorical, Archimedean point, independent of gospel so that we any commitment, if the true spiritual substance of any can revise our religion is to be found. This familiar way of thinking views of Islam disconnects true spirituality from the Church, and indeed any specific, social, organized religion. Paradoxically, it discredits the social structures that are logically necessary if any contact between different religions is to be possible. The truth, rather, is more demanding: it is precisely the spirit of the gospel that we are being drawn to re-appropriate, in order that we can revise prior, one-sided views of Islam. The hasty interpretations of September 11 offered by the religious right and secular left were deterministic: they presented the attacks as the inevitable consequence of different forms of US wrongdoing. What such approaches cannot accommodate is that the destruction emerged from free choice, nourished by religious practices and ideas that were somehow perverse. Yet this latter interpretation seems more plausible, closer to the reality we have always to be dealing with. It was not legitimate Third World resentment about the chasm between rich and poor that caused the attacks; it was religion gone wrong. We often suppose that sincerity, zeal and commitment are hallmarks of genuine religion. September 11 disabuses us of that belief: the religious terrorists had those qualities in abundance. Faced with secularism, modern Christians have tended to defend ‘religion’ as such. Perhaps that strategy is too unspecific, too neglectful of real problems in 94 Thomas Hughson
religious practice. Religion is ambiguous. September 11 has brought an awareness of that point from the precincts of theology and religious studies into the daily experience of US Christians. Such awareness does not represent a sell-out to Enlightenment critiques of religion. On the contrary, it is an integral part of growth into the probing discernment of all things, including the actual life and thought of devout religion, a discernment proper to Gospel living in the Spirit.
Becoming Catholic Another effect of September 11 was to make people in the United States aware, at least briefly, of a deep level of connection that they felt with their fellow-citizens. Christian spirituality cannot ignore this kind of experience, and some sociologists of religion are sensitive to the reality:
. . . the full depth of the political life of our communities is so identified with the foundations of our existence as the concrete persons we are that this depth can only be regarded as sacred . . . 4
But this sacred or religious depth in our political and cultural life is unstable and ambiguous. In so far as it implies an absolute identification between a political agenda and the fullness of justice or goodness, it leads us to confuse a vital distinction between merely creaturely realities and the utterly transcendent Creator. A political project is treated as if it were divine; thus it becomes an idol, often inciting violence against perceived opponents. In such a situation, the sacred ceases to be a source of ‘creativity, courage, and confidence’. Instead it unleashes the reins ‘of blind fanaticism, of infinite arrogance, of imperial ambition, of unlimited cruelty, and of ultimate violence’.5 This ambiguity means that there are some forms of religious fanaticism that US American Christians find themselves opposing, quite as much as they resisted Communist atheism during the Cold War. Moreover, if they are to repudiate bin Laden’s perversion of Islam, and be consistent in so doing, they must also be vigilant against similar fundamentalist tendencies within themselves, their churches and their
4 Michael J. Himes and Kenneth R. Himes, Fullness of Faith: The Public Significance of Theology (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 80. 5 Langdon Gilkey, ‘The Political Dimensions of Theology’, in Society and the Sacred: Toward a Theology of Culture in Decline (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1981), pp. 42-56, here p. 45, quoted in Himes and Himes, Fullness of Faith, p. 81. September 11and US Spirituality 95 nation. Christian prayer, worship and morality, if authentic, will always involve a demanding summons to conversion, conversion away from our own idolatry. September 11 evoked a powerful sense of national community; religiously pluralist though the US may be, a sacral depth of fellowship irrupted. US Christians need to consider how to interpret this. From a Christian perspective, such experiences can only be a beginning. The direction of growth, of a pilgrimage led by the Spirit deeper into the mind and heart of Christ, can only be towards catholicity, towards a community transcending national boundaries, open to forms of life and to religious expressions not native to Christianity. Edward Schillebeeckx once made a sage observation that Christians too often ignore manners of divine mediation not specifically Christian and so lose access to common ground in religious experience with non- Christians, as well as overlooking the possibilities for Christian growth in holiness given by more general kinds of religious experience. This catholicity requires of us a discerning, critical alertness. I suspect that an important distinguishing feature of contemporary Christian spirituality is an openness to how God works in human lives and human societies not avowedly Christian. If the Church is to grow in catholicity, its inner life must be informed by this generous Christian vision. Only so can it be a true sign and instrument of human unity.
Civil spirituality However, this pilgrimage leads US Christians into an encounter with their civil religion. The theological influences on this religion are Protestant, even Deist; its vision of human society centres on liberty under law. The orthodoxies it generates are, perhaps, resistant to any sense of sacred depth in fellowship across national boundaries or to varieties of religious experience not specifically Christian. Admittedly, the founders of the Republic were more Deist than Christian—but that is not to say that they were any closer to Judaism, to Islam, or to the sacred cultures of the native Americans. They were influenced not just by Enlightenment humanism but also by Puritan beliefs and outlook. Puritan covenant theology imparted a diffuse habit—and one that is now largely unreflective—of referring the origin and history of the United States to God’s sovereignty and providential purposes. Thus it is that US national consciousness will still draw on the language of divine 96 Thomas Hughson
election, covenant, purpose and accountability. When persons and Churches appropriate this way of understanding the nation under God, a civil spirituality is generated, emphasizing the duty to support this divinely-appointed national mission. Significant national events are couched in terms of divine transcendence and judgment. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address stands in such a tradition; the most notable twentieth-century example is Martin Luther King Jr.=s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. Usama bin Laden makes connections between the United States and Western crusades. This rather obscures the truth that the United States originated as a breakaway from Western Christendom. The earliest Pilgrims and Puritans emphatically did not understand themselves as the successors of medieval Western Christianity. For them, the Atlantic Ocean was the Red Sea; European monarchy in general, and the English monarchy in particular, functioned as Pharaoh in their religious imagination; New England was a new US civil religion Israel, a transatlantic promised land, a new home. The has no memory of the history of conflicts with Islam did not feature within this Crusades imagery. Thus, civil religion or spirituality in the United States has no memory of St. Bernard of Clairvaux preaching a crusade against Islamic forces, of the Spanish reconquista or of the Battle of Lepanto. US civil religion inherited no crusader dedication to the Holy Land. It was the experiment in secular democracy that became invested with a sense that the nation stands in a national covenant with God, a sense that still marks evangelical Protestantism in the US. When the religious right connected September 11 to the sins of US society, they were presupposing that the US had failed to abide by such a covenant. Thus, like Israel in the bible, it had been punished by God.6 The debates about how to respond to the terrorism can be seen in terms of a contrast between civil spirituality and a more thoroughly Christian spirituality. Civil spirituality encourages a sense of the US as a
6 A large measure of righteous innocence nonetheless shapes civil religion and civil spirituality. For example, not too many recalled after September 11 that the cities selected for the Atom Bomb in 1945—Hiroshima and Nagasaki—had contained large numbers of civilian casualties. The calculation was that these would demoralise a bellicose government, and that the war in the Pacific would end more quickly. Similar rationales underlay the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden. Some, but not many, US Christians publicly opposed this kind of bombing. It did not succeed. After all the Axis alliance had sought to enslave and exterminate Jews, while it was an Asian enemy that had launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. September 11and US Spirituality 97 divinely chosen instrument, appointed after September 11 to the task of a world-wide, cleansing mission against all terrorism of whatever sort or definition, rather than merely a campaign limited to the defeat of al- Quaida for the sake of national self-defence. A more developed Christian spirituality, Catholic or Protestant, does not make such simple assumptions about a national covenant. God’s covenant does not focus on one nation alone; political leaders have no clear or easy access to God’s purposes for the nation. Most responses to the attacks have bee moderated. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the US sought to respond militarily to the attacks not as the single agent of divine purpose, but as part of a community of nations. Perhaps there are some connections between this more thoroughly Christian response to the attacks, and the kind of tentativeness in religious matters encouraged by what is termed postmodernity. Life before God in faith; communion with Father, Son and Spirit; participation in the visible Church as the body of Christ—all these remain, even when we have lost confidence in grand cultural narratives, even when we live in a religiously pluralist world. We live in fragments. We experience them as valid and indeed definitive; but we do not know what will happen when we engage in dialogue with adherents of other religions. Nevertheless, God is calling us to openness and dialogue, even as we seek to defend ourselves against a violently distorted form of Islam. Christians in the United States may well be committed to national self-defence, but—I would guess—not many of them define their spiritual lives primarily in such terms. Many are uncertain about how to combine a commitment to national security with other concerns: the desire for a deeper grasp of Islam; a sense that US policies must always be critically reviewed in the light of a commitment to social justice; and the search for a practical way of being religious that acknowledges religion=s own ambiguity.7
Thomas Hughson SJ was ordained priest in 1971 and has been teaching at Marquette University, Milwaukee, since 1981, notably in the areas of Christian discipleship and of Church-State relations. He is an Editorial Consultant for Theological Studies, and also active in the American Academy of Religion.
7 An earlier version of this article appeared in Lumen Vitae, the catechetical journal published in Brussels. RECENT BOOKS
Peter McDonough and Eugene Bianchi, Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 0-520-23055-8, pp. 390, £19.99.
Passionate Uncertainty offers a sociological account of the Jesuits in the United States, based on interviews with former and present members of the Order. Bianchi and McDonough describe a predicament which United States Jesuits share with those in other parts of the Western world. In the last 40 years, the number of Jesuits has declined by over a third, while their average age has increased sharply. Like members of other Catholic religious congregations, they have been both participants and pawns in an unpredictable interplay—an interplay between the forces for change released by Vatican II, and the forces of restoration insisting on hierarchy, celibacy and rigorous sexual morality. This tension makes it difficult to establish a corporate sense of priestly identity, and partly explains the decline in the numbers of priests and religious. As an overarching sense of Jesuit identity is thus weakened, the authors see many Jesuits identifying variously with conservative, socially radical and gay subcultures, which, for all their differences, share a conscious opposition to the dominant United States culture. In the face of numerical decline and of looser identity, how do Jesuits hold together at all? Bianchi and McDonough answer that they live with the tension between liberalising trends and intransigent central authority by dividing their lives into separate compartments. In their spirituality, they have eclectically incorporated therapeutic emphases; in their ministries, they have adapted to smaller numbers by emphasizing professional qualifications and standards, by encouraging lay responsibility, and by taking new initiatives for social justice. They cope with the differences between the Roman construction of the church and their own view by ignoring them. They can do this because they can generally find adequate space to live and work fruitfully. The balance achieved, however, is unstable and under threat. Bianchi and McDonough emphasize how diminishment can become corrosive. The decline in the numbers of Jesuits affects the sense of common identity by increasing tensions between subgroups, and also by restricting the Recent Books 99 possibility of Jesuit leadership of ministries. As lay leadership is encouraged and becomes more widespread, the distinctive gift of priestly ministry is also placed in question, the more sharply because of the continuing conflict in the church about priesthood. Under these pressures it will be difficult to recover a strong corporate sense of identity. And without that, the Order is unlikely to attract many recruits. McDonough and Bianchi draw both on interview material and on writing about the contemporary Church; what they have produced, though overwritten, is constantly thought-provoking. I was not persuaded, however, by its central thesis, because it does not pay due attention to the Ignatian tradition: the complex of images, practices, stories, language and ideals by which Jesuits live, all summed up in the Jesuit phrase, ‘our way of proceeding’. One can only understand this reality adequately as a matter of the Christian faith. Traditional phrases such as ‘discernment of spirits’, ‘an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ’, and ‘thinking with the Church’ mean what they say. By contrast, Passionate Uncertainty offers an analysis in terms of organizational structure, upper and middle management, needs, desires and rationalisations. These are valid categories, but they offer only a thin account of how Jesuits work, because they minimise the content of belief. They distinguish, for example, between three contemporary Jesuit approaches to the tension between Rome and the Society: some ignore the tensions and find personal satisfaction and meaning in the daily grind; some cling to obedience to Rome; some are torn between the Society of Jesus and the institutional church. These tensions are real. But they are also inherent in the Ignatian tradition, in which solidarity with the Church and availability to the Pope for missions have always formed the context for discerning what God asks of the Jesuit. There is nothing new about Jesuits differing in the priorities which they give to personal discernment and to Papal direction. Their differences in this regard, however, exist within a shared tradition. The tension is greater at times when there is widespread call for the reform of the Papacy, as in Ignatius’ age or our own. But of itself, it is not new. Nor is its threat to Jesuit identity new. Bianchi and McDonough also make claims about how US secular culture affects Jesuits—claims which once again reveal a failure to take seriously the shared imagination, convictions and practices that structure life in the Society. For the authors, the insistence by the official Church on a celibate priesthood, on strict sexual morality and on an authoritarian constitution clashes with the culture in which United States Jesuits work. Such Jesuits, inspired by the more democratic ideals of Vatican II, will 100 Recent Books
inevitably question the official Roman line, and thus come to question their rationale for priestly ministry. I do not believe, however, that the interlocking values of celibacy, strict sexual morality and hierarchical authority were ever central to Jesuit identity. It follows that an analysis in these terms can never do justice to the Jesuit predicament today. Certainly celibacy, strict sexual morality and strong hierarchical authority undergirded a theology and spirituality of priesthood that was very influential in the past. But in the Jesuit tradition, priesthood was set in a different matrix. Jesuits were commonly attracted first to the Society, and only consequentially to priesthood. Their fellow Jesuits, moreover, include unordained Brothers. Moreover, the Jesuit vow of chastity differs from the commitment to celibacy made by diocesan priests. Jesuit chastity is part of a shared commitment to availability for the Society’s mission. In crude terms, it expresses the inner and total gift of self for mission that Jesuits share with other religious, not the unmarried state that they share with other priests. Hierarchical authority, too, has a distinctive resonance in the Jesuit tradition. As the historian John O’Malley has suggested, the Jesuits have less in common with the localised priests and monks of the early church than with the evangelists—people who crossed boundaries, and who travelled light. The demands of this way of life are reflected in the emphasis on discernment and pragmatism. While these qualities may have been obscured in the practices of the Society, they were preserved in stories and rhetoric which told of conflict with church authorities resolved amicably. That bishops and popes were favourable was regarded as a grace and not as a right. Correspondingly, the belief that Christ acts through those who bear authority within the church was always recognised as an act of faith. It never implied that virtue or wisdom inspires the decisions made and directions taken within the church. This whole Jesuit tradition is riddled with tensions which threaten to blow it apart. The interviews recorded in Passionate Uncertainty illustrate both the effects of a contemporary numerical decline and the influence of cultural expectations regarding affective satisfaction and right governance. But the tensions established within the tradition are perennial. Even if the directions given at Vatican II were followed within the Church, even if it adopted all the democratic and cultural changes the authors suggest, the tensions would remain. They lie at the heart of Jesuit identity, as do the resources which Jesuit tradition has developed for dealing with them. Andrew Hamilton SJ Recent Books 101
Jessica Rose, Sharing Spaces? Prayer and the Counselling Relationship (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002). 0-232-5238-7, pp. 143, £9.95.
Fraser Watts, Rebecca Nye and Sara Savage, Psychology for Christian Ministry (London: Routledge, 2001). 0-415-24037-9, pp. 336, £15.99.
The belief that there is some sort of essential opposition between ways of understanding human experience based in theology and pastoral care on the one hand, and in psychology and counselling/psychotherapy on the other, is more or less dead. It is still occasionally heard, though it is now mainly voiced by older members of each professional group. What has become clear over the past couple of decades is that those involved in pastoral care in all its forms need to take account of what psychology and counselling have to offer, while those who work as psychologists, counsellors or therapists need to pay attention to the dimensions of human experience which have traditionally been seen as the concern of the churches. These two books illustrate, in very different ways, just how fruitful can be the results of the developing dialogue. Jessica Rose is a counsellor and teacher of pastoral care, living within the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Her eminently readable book is a series of reflections, rooted in her counselling experience and drawing on her knowledge and love of her religious background. While a number of books have been published with similar-sounding titles, mostly dealing with such questions as the professional and ‘boundary’ implications of praying with counselling/therapy clients, Sharing Spaces ranges both more widely and more deeply. It offers reflections on such topics as the place of prayer in the lives of us all; on the ways in which counselling and prayer both draw us onward along our inner journey; and on the risks of ‘quick fixes’. Two final chapters explore the basic themes of what it is to be a human person, and of how we might live in a manner which respects what is offered both by our Christian insights and tradition and by the understandings generated by counselling. This is not a handbook. While there is an abundance of case material which both opens up and grounds the discussion, Rose is not concerned to solve problems or answer questions. What she provides is a stimulating discussion of the key questions involved, made the more possible by her willingness to pin down the misunderstandings that have built up over time. Moreover, this is no abstract argument, but rather a down-to-earth exploration of experience that leaves us a clearer sense of where the questions might touch our own lives. 102 Recent Books
The image which, for this reader at least, is central is that of Jesus, understood by Maximos the Confessor as sharing in our struggle to hand ourselves over to the Father: the suffering which this struggle costs us has been experienced by one who was fully human as well as fully divine, and who in his human struggle brought our humanity back into its proper relationship with God. This is not a book just for counsellors or those involved in pastoral care. While each will find their understanding—and their living and practice— enriched by what Jessica Rose has to offer, so will anyone committed to allowing God to transform their lives: ‘We can only give away what truly belongs to us, and all too often we give away what we have not yet recognised as our own.’ Fraser Watts, Rebecca Nye and Sara Savage have produced a very different sort of book—the blurb describes it both as a handbook and as a textbook. Psychologists working at the Centre for Advanced Religious and Theological Studies in the University of Cambridge, the three authors are undoubted authorities in the field of the psychology of religion. This book, however, goes beyond that particular sub-section of psychology to take in other aspects of psychological work that fit its title of Psychology for Christian Ministry. I would see this book as becoming a standard text for those preparing for ministry in the UK and beyond, as well as by those who are looking for an up-to-date and copiously-referenced introduction to many aspects of psychology touching on religion. It is very carefully organized to be easy to use as a handbook as well as as a textbook. Clear headings guide the reader through an enormous quantity of reported research material, while sections entitled ‘Questions for Ministry’, ‘Summary of Key Themes’, and ‘Questions to Consider’ are dotted throughout the text, enabling the student to get to grips with the issues raised. Five parts reflect the range of material covered: Personality and Religion ranges from religious experience and spiritual direction through the psychology of church services to ‘unhealthy religion’. Development and Teaching includes, besides good mainstream material on developmental psychology, some stimulating ideas on ‘Godly Play’ (the Alpha Course as ‘Godly Play’ is a notion that itself is well worth playing with), and on preaching. Counselling and Pastoral Care deals well and clearly with life-cycle theory, bereavement and dying; it offers good introductions to such problems as depression and anxiety; and it explores (from a more objective stance than that adopted in Sharing Spaces) the ways which counselling and pastoral care in its various forms run parallel, differ, and interact. Recent Books 103
Organization and the Church looks at social processes in the church, and at the church as itself an organization, before examining the role, work and experiences of clergy. For some readers, this may be the most innovative part of the book, given how minimal has been the attention paid in clergy and ministerial training to what social psychologists know about the ways in which people and groups function. Psychology and Theology looks at the basic models of what it is to be human, and at the ways in which theology itself can be influenced by psychology. Both books share a respect for the different disciplines involved, as for the different individual world-views that will be represented among both practitioners/ministers and clients/congregants. While coming from very different areas of what can loosely be called ‘the psychological’, each touches on vital questions for those engaged in ministry of any sort within the Christian community. If you have to choose, Jessica Rose provides in Sharing Spaces a discursive and meditative approach drawn from individual practice, while the three authors of Psychology for Ministry draw together a wide range of material presented in textbook format. But if you can, read both. Brendan Callaghan SJ
Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe (London: SCM Press, 2001). 0-334-02864-7, pp. 249, £13.95.
Here we have the long-awaited Gifford Lectures which Stanley Hauerwas gave in the University of St Andrews in 2001. In requiring that the lectures which he endowed should be dedicated to ‘promoting, advancing, teaching, and diffusing the study of natural theology’, Lord Gifford had the laudable intention of making belief in God more accessible to unbelievers. Rational arguments could provide a basis for believing in God, and for the foundations of ethics. Theistic belief could be shown, on grounds which unbelievers could share, to be in harmony with the natural sciences. The general project envisages a gradual approach to theistic, and eventually Christian, belief by way of the neutral use of human reason, in particular through philosophy and natural science. The core of Hauerwas’ lectures consists in a controversial and radical attack on this project, at least as Gifford envisaged it. Hauerwas does indeed accept the task of making Christian belief accessible to unbelievers. But in his view the route mapped out by Lord Gifford can lead at best to an 104 Recent Books
impoverished version of theism, and at worst to a totally distorted one, far removed from Christian faith. ‘The God we worship and the world God created cannot truthfully be known without the cross, which is why the knowledge of God and ecclesiology—or the politics called church—are interdependent.’ (p. 17) Hauerwas devotes two lectures to a discussion of William James, two more to Reinhold Niebuhr, and two to Karl Barth. He argues that both James and Niebuhr in their different ways try to approach theology in the way that Gifford suggests, and he then attempts to show that in each case their efforts distort Christianity. James, starting from an unbeliever’s analysis of religious experience, inevitably ends by reducing religious faith to the practice of prayer unilluminated by any of the Christian doctrines which might shock the modern world. Niebuhr, says Hauerwas, ‘sought to make Christian belief intelligible within the naturalistic presumptions that he thought were a prerequisite of modern science. His ethics sought to make Christian belief intelligible and even useful within the presuppositions of political liberalism’ (p. 137). In both cases, Hauerwas argues, the central feature of Christian faith—belief in the saving power of the cross and resurrection of Christ—is removed at the behest of secular reason. Karl Barth, by contrast, refuses to compromise with reason in this way. Instead, he narrates the Christian story, witnessing to it, encouraging unbelievers to read the world in the light of Christian faith. In this light alone are human beings and the world seen in their full meaning and truth. Hauerwas defends Barth against the criticism that merely to state one’s Christian beliefs is not to give any grounds for believing them. For in the end, he says, all beliefs must ultimately rest upon a way of seeing the world which cannot itself be further defended. It is the Christian faith which is the only true touchstone of how the world is before God. Witnessing to that faith in one’s life, in the way modelled by such figures as Barth, the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, and Pope John Paul II, is the only means through which that truth can be shared. Shared, not argued for. This book is a lively, well-written piece of theological coat-trailing, and as good a defence of a Barthian approach to theology as I have read. The question is, of course, whether this defence is good enough. If there is no further reason for looking at the world through a Christian lens, why adopt Christianity rather than, say, Buddhism or even atheism? Is it possible to return to an age (if indeed there ever was such an age) in which it is sufficient for faith to be adopted rather than argued for? Moreover, is there an unambiguous way of settling exactly which interpretation of Christian Recent Books 105 revelation provides the undistorted truth about the world, human beings, and God? These are the questions which Hauerwas’ lectures raise, and to which he provides such provocative answers. Lord Gifford may turn in his grave, but Hauerwas’ audience will surely sit up and take notice. Gerard J Hughes SJ
Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 0-631-20736-8, pp. xx + 172, £15.99.
Sarah Coakley is one of the most stimulating of the younger generation of British theologians. In this book she has gathered and ‘lightly edited’ together nine of the most important pieces she has published over the last decade or so. The result may not be a seamless web, more an ever- changing colourful tapestry. But the result is never anything less than absorbing and provocative. Divided into three sections—‘the contemplative matrix’, ‘philosophical interlocutions’ and ‘doctrinal implications’—the book’s purpose is to explore one of the abiding themes of Coakley’s recent work, what she refers to as the ‘paradox of power and vulnerability’. How to hold to the central truth of Christianity, that human empowerment comes through faithful submission to God, while giving space to feminist suspicions that the language of submission risks becoming abusive and manipulative? Coakley neither seeks to rewrite the tradition nor simply to fend off the feminist critique. Argue she does, with an enormously engaging intensity. But what makes this book so much more than another apologia is a daring suggestion: the most subversive of all Christian activities is the practice of prayer. The topics covered range from the body and creaturehood to the Trinity and the Resurrection; Coakley’s dialogue partners include Origen, Aquinas and Wittgenstein, as well as prominent feminist writers. The first chapter stands out for the sustained power of its analysis. Entitled somewhat forbiddingly, ‘Kenosis and subversion: on the repression of “vulnerability” in Christian feminist writing’, it distinguishes a number of different interpretations of Philippians 2. Coakley engages with the feminist critique of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, but her ultimate purpose is to question gender stereotypes—feminist as well as the irredeemably masculist. She returns to this theme in the last essay, entitled ‘The eschatological body: gender, transformation and God’. This piece enacts the unlikely partnership of Judith Butler, one of the more gnomic of 106 Recent Books
feminist theorists, and Gregory of Nyssa. Coakley finds in Butler’s concept of ‘performativity’ as a way of overturning ‘gender binaries’ an echo of Gregory’s extraordinarily evocative concept of perfection as ‘never arriving’ and the ascetical practices which it promotes. Lest such dense and erudite engagements put off those unfamiliar with the thickets of academic theology, it is good to see reproduced also one of the gems of The Way’s series of Traditions of Spiritual Guidance: Coakley’s introduction to the wisdom of Dom John Chapman. This is a marvellous treatise on the nature of contemplative prayer which ought to be required reading for all spiritual directors. In this, as in almost all these essays, we are linked into the very best of the Western—and sometimes Eastern—spiritual traditions of Christian faith and practice. But to engage with the paradox through prayer is not to commend some easy withdrawal. Coakley’s whole approach—rich in learning and exacting in analysis—recognises that the only resolution is, precisely, the lack of resolution. Good theology leads us not to some facile formula but into the very mystery of God, there to contemplate a human vulnerability which is saved from being reduced to ‘mere’ victimhood by the abundant, yet never overwhelming, grace of God. Collections of essays and articles rarely make for satisfactory reading, if only because the variety of contexts and audiences often makes it difficult to discern a consistent theme. To that rule this book is something of an exception. The links and transitions from one topic to another are sometimes unclear; the style of writing is dense and complex; perhaps not quite enough has been done to make material originally written for specialists accessible to a more general reader. But there is a theme running through the whole collection, and perseverance in teasing it out will be rewarded. Coakley is a theologian who not only lets her theology arise from the Christian narrative, and from the liturgy and contemplative prayer to which it gives rise, but also leads her readers back into a spirituality of constant attentiveness to God. Contemplation in these terms consists in the willingness to find that space which only God can fill. Such an intense and often understated vision—rich, subtle, and refreshing in its integrity— makes this a most unusual and very welcome book. Michael Barnes SJ Recent Books 107
Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Eugene F. Rogers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). 0-631-21277-9, pp.xxii + 422, £16.99.
‘The happiness which children bring us is far outweighed by the grief which comes from the daily care, anxiety, and fear which they cause.’ This argument by the canonized monk John Chrysostom, defending the monastic life against its opponents, captures something of why this book is needed. Rogers addresses such questions as who can speak with authority about sexual matters within the church, and what evidence we have that the church should presume to say anything at all on these issues. He presents a surprising choice of readings, both classical and contemporary, and as a result invites the reader towards some interesting conclusions. For much of Christian history, at least within the Catholic tradition, it has been assumed that the principal purpose of sexuality is the procreation of children. Marriage gave the framework within which this was legitimately to occur, and any other employment of the sexual function (including, for example, intercourse between those past child-bearing age) was at best in need of further explanation, and in most cases forbidden. In the last century or so the church has begun to accept psychological ideas about the way that sexual expression unites a couple and furthers their mutual human development, but it often appears as if few official statements have moved far beyond this. The volume reviewed here wants to present a much richer picture of all that sex can mean for those who take Christian discipleship seriously. Two major questions are approached from a variety of angles. The first is that of ‘embodiment’. What is the significance of the fact that we are created as creatures of body and spirit, and not spirit alone? A number of the contributors argue that it is just because we are embodied that we come to realise our radical interdependence: our embodiment undermines, and so brings us to see the error in, the Enlightenment idea of the self- motivating and self-secure individual. Thomas Breidenthal’s article, ‘Sanctifying Nearness’, goes further and says that it is precisely the experience of sexual desire, which arises inexplicably and may well be unwanted, yet cannot easily be disregarded, that drives this message home. If the significance of bodies is an expected topic in a collection on theology and sexuality, the emphasis in the volume on homosexual experience, its second major question, may be less so. Eleven of the 23 ‘contemporary’ articles deal specifically with homosexuality, and a number of the others give part of their account to this area. Rogers believes (and makes a good case for the belief) that homosexuality presents the church 108 Recent Books
with a test case for what it will want to say about sexuality in general: what we say about homosexuality will bring out how far we are really moving beyond seeing sex simply as a means for procreation. Again, a range of opinions is presented. At the less ambitious end of the range, some simply suggest that the voice of homosexuals needs to be heard in ways that the prevailing culture within and beyond the churches scarcely allows. At the other end, Marilyn McCord Adams (one of only two women contributors in the book) holds that homosexuality has something to tell us about relations within the Trinity, something different from, although complementary to, what heterosexuality can reveal. It is a Benedictine, Sebastian Moore, who writes the article that will perhaps come closest to the heart of a reader interested in Ignatian spirituality. He claims that Christian sexual ethics should be above all about the honouring, not the denial of desire. The desire he speaks of is a felt experience rather than a philosophical abstraction. We will learn how best to live as sexual beings by reflection on the experience of sexual desire itself—a point that our fall from original grace in no way discredits. The question beloved of Ignatian directors, ‘What do you really want from God?’ is here put at the centre of the debate on sexual morality. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, manages in a dozen pages to weave together most of the themes which the book takes up. ‘God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the Trinity.’ Most people will best come to understand this through reflecting on the experience of being sexually desired by another. Celibates have a particular calling, to demonstrate this desire by God and for God more directly, and same-sex unions similarly underline the fact that the meaning of sexuality is more than biological reproduction. This thought-provoking essay has more to say, about the necessary riskiness of sexual commitment, and about its political implications, taking us far beyond the ‘who can put which tab in what slot’ debates that Rogers satirises. There is a strong line running through the collection, however, that warns of the difficulties in understanding this area of human experience aright, and recognises it as one in which we are particularly prone to self- deception. The final contribution, by James Alison, is a sobering reflection upon the way that theology at the beginning of the third millennium has to start from a recognition that the seeming certainties of the recent past are in ruins. Neither a conservative attempt to regain them nor a liberal hankering after the tabula rasa of a completely new start is adequate to move us forward. Like the Jews who twice witnessed the destruction of the Temple, and with it, of all that had seemed central to their relationship Recent Books 109 with God, we have the task of building anew amidst the ruins. Alison spells out something of the compassionate and empathetic stance this calls for from conservatives and liberals alike. Few would argue with Chrysostom today that one should choose celibacy because children are more trouble than they are worth. A recurrent ideal in this book is one in which both celibates and those in sexual relationships work to live out their commitments to others in ways which give us all a clearer sense of how God relates to those God has created. Neither celibacy nor sexual relationship (whether gay or straight) necessarily makes this task easier, and neither gives a viewpoint from which to speak authoritatively in the way that the other does not. The book pleads that we should listen with understanding to the experience of others, and provides us with a rich range of material to help us do so. As such, it is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to think through the fundamental question it poses: ‘What does God want with sex, anyway?’ Paul Nicholson SJ
Radical Christian Writings: A Reader, edited by Andrew Bradstock and Christopher Rowland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 0-631-2250-2, pp. xxvi + 350, £19.99.
To what extent does the Christian gospel pose a radical or subversive challenge to the world and its existing political authorities? The evidence for such a challenge seems to be at its strongest during the earliest beginnings of the Church, and thereafter during specific periods of crisis and upheaval in Christian history. The editors of this volume have brought together a daunting range of texts from different eras which illustrate what they take to be a ‘radical tradition’ of Christian restlessness regarding the political status quo. They write confidently, and are on familiar territory; Rowland has earlier traced this tradition in Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery (1988), and thus this present anthology may be regarded as a companion to the earlier study. The selection of writings, set out chronologically, is certainly a rich one. The editors have a central interest in Thomas Müntzer (1489?-1525) and Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1676), but the tradition being explored reaches back to Justin and Pelagius, and forward to English literary figures such as Blake, Bunyan and Milton. It takes in ecclesial movements as diverse as worker-priests, Anglo-Catholicism, base communities in Latin America and Europe, radical Methodism, and the contemporary recovery of the 110 Recent Books
Anabaptist tradition. Situations of protest or crisis include resistance to Nazism (The Barmen Declaration), to racism and apartheid (Luther King, Biko, the Kairos Document), and to imperialism (the collection includes two poems by Padraig Pearse). Women from the so-called ‘third world’ are also included, while the final entry from Thomas Hanks (2000) is entitled ‘Matthew and Mary of Magdala: Good News for Sex Workers’. Each of these extracts is accompanied by a short introduction and suggested further reading, while the collection as a whole is competently introduced by an initial essay, ‘Christianity: Radical and Political’. It is here that the editors set out what they understand by the ‘radical tradition’ or the ‘radical strand’ in Christianity. As the editors acknowledge, this is a paradoxical task, since movements of protest and resistance have by definition more to do with discontinuity and ‘rupture’ than with adherence to a tradition. Yet there are some common threads: the Introduction makes clear the persistent connection between the freedom to interpret scripture in a communal, participative way, and the yearning for a new world order. The Book of Revelation is the key biblical text in this connection, though the importance of political readings of the Gospel of Mark is also noted. An anthology will always provoke readers to draw up a list of grievances as to what should have been included or omitted. Just about all of these extracts are fascinating and worthy of inclusion, though in many cases it would be untrue to say that the writers have been ‘undiscovered’ or neglected. European political theologians such as Metz and Moltmann are omitted. Perhaps this is understandable, given that this is not a theological anthology as such, but nevertheless Metz’s messianic theology protesting against the ‘privatization’ of contemporary European Christianity would surely merit a place. It would also have been interesting, given the centrality of the Bible to most of the contributions, to have ventured a more explicit dialogue with sympathetic radical biblical scholars, such as Walter Brueggemann and Norbert Lohfink. More serious, perhaps, is the absence of dissident voices from the former ‘second world’: the Christian contribution to the revolutions of 1989 goes unmentioned, as do the radical voices of Asian Christianity. The chapter on sex workers notwithstanding, there is little here on the burgeoning theological literature from sexual minorities. A central hermeneutical problem remains largely unaddressed: what are the grounds on which this radical tradition is judged to be more authentic than its alternatives? Pharoah too, has his ‘radical tradition’, and a glaring difficulty remains as to why apartheid, patriarchy, imperialism, and so on, have been able to draw so easily and for so long on precisely the same biblical texts as the subversives. To cite Blake, one of the writers close to Recent Books 111 the heart of the editors: ‘Both read the Bible day & night, But thou read’st black where I read white’. But this is to go beyond the present volume and what it purports to be: a ‘small, faltering step’ toward remedying what Bradstock and Rowland believe is an omission from the theological map. This perception may be exaggerated; what may be nearer the mark is that this tradition needs continually to be recovered, and the force of its challenge felt anew. I have suggested above that simply identifying a radical tradition is merely the beginning of the discussion; one which the editors hope will be stimulated ‘in the seminar room, the pew, the house-group and the pub’. An ambitious project indeed, but one which this accessible, thoughtful and provocative collection of key texts will indeed help realise. Michael Kirwan SJ
Ian Boxall, Revelation: Vision and Insight (London: SPCK, 2001). 0-281-05362-6, pp. x + 166, £12.99.
Ian Boxall’s phrase, ‘this apparently impenetrable book’, is a fair description of the last and most enigmatic book of the Christian Bible. Yet on reaching the end of this brief but comprehensive study any reader is likely to feel that he or she has been in the company of a wise, reliable, and conscientious guide, a worthy successor, in fact, of those ‘interpreting angels’ who frequently perform the very same function in apocalyptic writings of the Jewish and Christian traditions. Most commentators on biblical books are guilty of bewildering their readers by hurling at them an ill-assorted jumble of information of every kind, literary, historical, geographical, exegetical, archaeological, even numismatic. Yet the truth is that much if not all of this information is necessary for a proper understanding of the book. One of the greatest merits of Ian Boxall’s work is the unobtrusive skill with which he picks out unerringly just the right kind of information to illustrate each stage of his exposition. What, for instance, is signified by the great harlot Babylon in Revelation 17-18, who appears in a dream seated on a beast with seven heads, representing, we are told, seven hills and seven kings? To answer this question, Boxall turns not only to history but to numismatics, and specifically to a number of first-century coins with a female figure (Roma) on the obverse, depicted as seated, like Babylon, on seven hills. No first- century reader of this book would need the lesson to be spelled out further: Babylon is Rome. One of the many interesting pictures that help to enliven this excellent book is a woodcut by Luther’s friend, the artist Lucas 112 Recent Books
Cranach. In this the great harlot is seen perched uncomfortably on the back of the seven-headed beast, with a papal tiara on her head and a ciborium in her hand. The first chapter is about ancient books, how they were written and how read, and deals with questions of genre, authorship and the nature of apocalyptic writing. It also questions directly how a modern reader can make sense of the more disturbing elements of Revelation: the violence of many of its images, its sense of satisfaction in the destruction of enemies. The second chapter argues plausibly that whilst Revelation is undoubtedly the fruit of careful reflection upon earlier biblical books, notably Daniel and Ezekiel, it is also in all probability a record of actual visionary experiences. The title of the third chapter, ‘Viewing the Whole Tapestry’, is inspired by an extraordinary tapestry on display in a gallery in the castle of Angers. Drawing on the tapestry metaphor, Boxall gives a succinct yet remarkably clear analysis of each of the six sets of seven into which, so he argues, the book should be divided. As he does so, he informs us, in two valuable asides, of the significance of its colours and of its numbers. This chapter, so much more readable and comprehensible than the more detailed treatment of the commentaries, belies the author’s modest disclaimer that he is attempting no more than to offer ‘a guide to an initial reading’. The fourth chapter, which is concerned with historical questions both small and large, includes a discussion of the identity of the Great Beast and the meaning of the number 666 (Revelation 13:18). Equally interesting is the treatment of the significance of the seven heads, one of the main pieces of evidence in an argument leading to the conclusion that the traditional dating of Revelation (some time in the reign of Domitian, A.D. 81-96) must be rejected. A much more likely date, so the argument runs, is a time in the brief reign of Nero’s successor Galba (though a similar argument might point to the even briefer reign of Galba’s successor Otho, who committed suicide in April 69, only three months after he had been hailed as emperor). Boxall is well aware that most people will be more interested in questions such as the legitimacy of futuristic interpretations of the book and any message it may have for the present day than in the innumerable knotty little problems it poses for the scholar, and he faces this challenge squarely. In the fifth chapter he treats of interpretations, both old and new, that rest on the conviction that John was given a vision of the future. In the sixth chapter, boldly entitled ‘Leading into the Heart of the World’, he makes the surely incontrovertible point that even a highly politicized reading of the book can legitimately claim to stand in a tradition of Recent Books 113 interpretation going back to John of Patmos himself. ‘John’s apocalyptic unmasking of the satanic nature of the great Empire of Rome’, he continues, ‘surely calls forth in every age a similar unmasking of the godless and oppressive Empire, by a Church which continues to regard the text as Scripture rather than an obscure writing of merely antique curiosity.’ In the seventh and final chapter, ‘Revelation in the Life of the Church’, Boxall considers the role of the book in the life of the worshipping Christian from the earliest times up to the present, arguing that it is best read in the context of eucharistic worship. No one with any kind of interest in the book of Revelation could fail to be impressed by or to learn from this penetrating study. John Ashton
Noel Dermot O'Donoghue, The Angels Keep Their Ancient Places (London: Continuum, 2001). 0-567-08813-8, pp. 128, £9.99.
The still growing interest in the subject of Celtic Christianity is producing a variety of books, both popular introductions to the subject (of very varying quality), and books of a more academic character. The Angels Keep Their Ancient Places spans the divide between the two, being both popular and learned. It combines deep learning with poetic imagination, and careful theological reflection with penetrating insight into particular texts and particular sites which hold a special place in the Celtic Christian world. One of the principal themes of the book, as its title suggests, is the world of angels. This is a realm which the author defines as ‘the imaginal world’. Of it he says, ‘in general it can be located between the world of the senses and the world of ideas, and it has one of its main properties common to each. In common with the world of the senses, it has particularity or concreteness; in common with the world of ideas, the intelligible world, it has incorruptibility or permanence. This is why it is the world or realm of the physical incorruptible, and this is perhaps as near as we can come to a definition or an idea of it.’ Starting from this general view of the subject, the author explores its relevance to the basic places and texts of the Celtic Christian world in a variety of ways. Some of these places are well known, like Iona or Skellig Michael, but some are scarcely known at all, like a famine village in south- west Ireland, familiar to the author since his childhood, and a little church in the Scottish highlands commemorating ‘some of the victims of the 114 Recent Books
infamous Scottish Clearances’. The writer is constantly showing us joy and beauty on the one side, grievous pain and loss on the other. ‘Joy and grief are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine’: William Blake’s words suggest themselves more than once as one reads these pages. When we come to Celtic Christian texts, we find again a variety of interpretations and approaches. The first two chapters of the second section, ‘The Light of Other Days’, seem outstandingly important to me for this reason. They deal with two basic texts from the Carmina Gadelica of Alexander Carmichael—the very first hymn in the whole collection, and an equally precious but less well-known Christmas hymn, ‘Behold the Lightener of the Stars’. It is difficult to know what gives these two chapters their particular resonance. Perhaps it is a combination of the writer’s wide- ranging knowledge of the Christian mystical tradition as a whole, and his profound and detailed knowledge of the Gaelic originals which lie behind Alexander Carmichael’s translations. At any rate it is a great advantage to read a commentator who can penetrate beneath the surface of the English translations, however fine, and it would be wonderful to have more commentaries of this quality on other texts from that great collection. In his commentary on these verses, Noel Dermot O’Donoghue makes a great and all-inclusive claim for the Carmina: ‘What the Carmichael collection does is to give a kind of centre and earthedness to a way of life and a vision of the width and depth of creation that connects Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as parts of England and France, a vision that, more than anything else in the whole world, Christendom needs to regain for the building up of a new world, at a time when all the lights that have guided us over the past few hundred years have gradually grown dim and almost disappeared.’ In the context of these pages, such a claim does not seem to be altogether unreal and exaggerated. These chapters are followed by three shorter and less substantial discussions of particular authors and topics. The first looks at George MacDonald, handling his writing with great sensitivity. ‘MacDonald’s God did not stand for a closed, dogmatic, impenetrable heaven, but for an open horizon, like dawn on the hills or across the sea, full of invitation and full of promise.’ In the second, the author looks at ‘the mystery of lamentation’, and moves easily from the keening of Irish popular tradition to the quiet reflectiveness of Gray’s ‘Elegy’. This is followed by a chapter on the understanding of the spiritual senses, based on a comparison of passages from The Confessions of St Augustine and The Confession of St Patrick, which provides an effective comparison of two such different authors. The book concludes with a discussion of Pelagius and the concept of heresy. Recent Books 115
There is so much of interest here, that the last chapter hardly seems to provide a conclusion to the book; at the end we are left asking for more. This is a book which will appeal to different people in different ways, a work of exceptional, if variable, quality, for which the reader can only feel extremely grateful. A. M. Allchin
N. G. Costigan, Defining the Divinity: Medieval Perceptions in Welsh Court Poetry (Aberystwyth: University of Wales, 2002). 0-947531-85-8, pp. xix + 219, £14.95.
In studies of Celtic Christianity, the Gaelic element, Scottish and Irish, generally has a more prominent place than the Brythonic element, whether Welsh or Breton. There are many reasons for this, not least that the Welsh material is less copious than the Irish, and that it tends to have been less thoroughly examined. Moreover, even when Welsh poetry has been the subject of careful study, the religious element within it has not often been given much consideration. This book studies the religious vocabulary of the Poets of the Princes, a notable school of Welsh poets who flourished for about a century and a half from the early twelfth to the end of the thirteenth century. It is therefore in many ways a pioneering work, exploring a territory which has been as yet little studied in English. The book is based on the critical edition of the work of these poets, seven large volumes, which was produced by the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, in Aberystwyth, in the years 1991-1996. This was one of the Centre’s first major projects, and Sister Nora Costigan was herself part of the team which worked on these volumes. Out of her deep and detailed knowledge of the material she has produced this remarkable book. The book falls into three parts. The first is a section giving English translations of the thirty or so directly religious poems to be found in the work of this school, together with biographical notes on the poets themselves. This is followed by a section containing brief commentaries on each of the poems taken one by one. Thirdly, there comes a section which looks at the terms for God and for the things of God to be found in the work of these poets as a whole. This section concludes with a long appendix giving a wealth of detailed references to the poems, the passages in Welsh accompanied always by English translations. 116 Recent Books
The book is at first not easy to use; one needs to become accustomed to the way in which the writer has ordered her material. But it is worth overcoming this difficulty, because the book provides so much valuable material which would otherwise be altogether inaccessible to a reader unfamiliar with medieval Welsh. We discover, for instance, the poet’s assurance of the sovereignty of God, who rules in the affairs of this world ‘on account of his victory’, that is, through Christ’s triumph over death by dying. We become aware of the poet’s longing to enter into cerennydd with God, a wonderfully rich term which implies both friendship and familial kinship, a relationship which binds friend to friend together in this world, precisely because it can be according to the Trinity, in other words, rooted in the eternal relationships of the three divine persons amongst themselves. Above all we discover the great variety of ways in which the poets understand their poetic gift itself as coming from God’s inspiration, as being itself a direct gift of God, which the poet is obliged to use in return, in God’s praise and in God’s service. Here, as in other areas, pre-Christian Celtic convictions seem to have been taken up and baptized into the service of God, Three-in-One. Here too we are faced by unanswered questions about the relationships between some of these poets and the monastic communities of their time, communities themselves undergoing rapid transformation through the growing influence of the Cistercian Order. Here are subjects which need further exploration and which will surely reward such exploration. For Costigan, the fear of God’s judgment, and the cruelty and violence of the descriptions of hell which we can find in some of the poems, cast a ‘pall of gloom’ over the whole work. With some hesitation—given the author’s vastly superior knowledge of the material—I would suggest that this judgment, though understandable, is mistaken. This early Welsh poetry has a remarkable theological quality, both in trinitarian and christological convictions, and in its sense of the poet’s divine calling. It will be interesting to see, however, as more people are drawn to the study of these texts, what impression, in the end, they produce. For the present, all of us who are not experts in early medieval Welsh must be deeply grateful to Nora Costigan for this remarkable book. Without the material which she provides for us, we should not be able even to begin to disagree with her. A. M. Allchin Recent Books 117
Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002). 0-232-52425-4, pp. 180, £10.95.
European secularisation provides inspiration for mainstream political, social and even religious leaders worldwide; twentieth-century Catholic theology has largely conceded the point. These days, the notion of a single model of secularisation is under attack from all sides and this slim volume is a contribution to its deconstruction. Davie argues that the European experience should not be taken as normative; to do so is both to misunderstand non-European cultures and to ignore the particular parameters of European religiosity. Anyone interested in the sociology of religion will benefit from reading this book, as will those of us who come into contact pastorally with Christians of different cultures. Davie writes densely, drawing on an impressive bibliography. This is because she covers not only the European context but also, and perhaps unnecessarily, those of North and South America, Africa and the Far East—no mean feat for a book ten times the size. Davie’s concept of ‘vicarious religion’, her take on the specificity of European religious practice, seems at once insightful and over-blown: ‘. . . Europeans are content to let both churches and churchgoers enact a memory on their behalf, more than half aware that they might need to draw on the capital at crucial times in their . . . lives’ (p. 19). A valid point, but does it actually define European religious experience? Damian Howard SJ
Affirming the Light (London: Quaker Books, 2002). 0-901689-52-1, pp. 77, £3.
Faithful Deeds (London: Quaker Books, 2002). 0-901689-47-5, pp. 57, £3.
The Quaker testimony to peace is known to all and honoured by all. That testimony is not, however, always understood. These two brief booklets explain what are the distinctive emphases in the Quaker commitment to peace and illustrate how that commitment is being put into practice in a world where swords have yet to be beaten into ploughshares. We are reminded that Friends do not separate the spiritual from the political; that their concern is as much about how we deal with violence as about how to avoid it; that violence is present when I drink from a plastic cup destined 118 Recent Books
for a landfill site as well as when I fire a gun; that pacifism is not a doctrine but a way of life; that refraining from violence is what we owe to ourselves as well as to our world. Faithful Deeds is designed as a resource for group study. In Affirming the Light, ten Quakers recount the practical ways in which they have sought to live in peace and for peace. Their stories would also serve as material for groups to ponder. Words are not wasted in these few telling pages. Such is the way of the Friends. John Pridmore
Louis Roy, Self-Actualization and the Radical Gospel (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2002). 0-8146-5107-0, pp. 72, £9.95.
The sharpest paradox in the moral teaching of Jesus is that I must lose my life to find it. This paradox invites scrutiny. More seriously it demands a radically sacrificial life-style. Louis Roy’s essay examines the tension between self-denial and self-fulfilment as moral norms of the Christian life. His analysis of the apparently conflicting goals of the giving and the gaining of life is meant to help us to understand. But Roy’s purpose is not to solve a conundrum but to make the path of discipleship plainer. This sober, earnest essay is less a work of moral philosophy, more a call to holy living. Roy’s method is first to expose what he sees as false patterns of self- denial and self-fulfilment, the martyred service of others which masks a deep self-centredness, and the greedy pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and power which ever seeks and ever fails to assuage defective self-esteem. He goes on to argue that we are delivered from these ruinous misconceptions only as we are confronted by reality. That reality we call the Kingdom of God. In the light of the kingdom there is given a radically new vision of the fulfilled life but also of our own finitude. John Pridmore Charles E. O’Neill, S.J. Joaquín M.a Domínguez, S.J.
DICCIONARIO HISTÓRICO DE LA COMPAÑÍA DE JESÚS BIOGRÁFICO-TEMÁTICO
In 1977, the Jesuit Historical Institute began the project of a historical dictionary of the Society of Jesus. In 1979, Fr General Pedro Arrupe approved the project, and it has now been published in Spanish. It consists of 4 volumes, with 5,637 biographies, 138 articles surveying the Society’s work in different countries, and 158 articles on the Society’s structures and ministries. Some 700 authors have contributed to the encyclopedia, which has been jointly published by the Jesuit Pontifical University in Madrid (Comillas) and by the Jesuit Historical Institute. The cost is € 300, postage and packing extra. Orders can be sent to:
Institutum Historicum S.I. Universidad Pontificia Comillas Via dei Penitenzieri, 20 28049 Madrid 00193 Roma
LoyolaHall is situated in large,beautifulgrounds near Rainhill village,Merseyside, U.K. It has a modern, prayerful chapel, many smaller prayer rooms, two spacious conference rooms, meeting rooms,an art room,and a leisure room with sauna, Jacuzzi,and basic exercisemachines. All accommodation is in single en-suite bedrooms.
NTERNSHIP PROGRAMME 2004 I A three-monthinternship programme in spiritual accompaniment within the Ignatian tradition, suitable for a sabbatical. Units (most of whichmay also be taken separately)include: • The full Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola • Abasic introduction to spiritual accompaniment • A seminar dealing with a single issue at greater depth– see below • Abrief courseon theology for prayer guides • A supervised experienceof working on a parish week of guided prayer • Advanced courseonaccompaniment in the tradition of the Exercises In 2004 the internship programme runs from January 5 to March 29
PIRITUAL EXERCISES OF IGNATIUS LOYOLA S The full Spiritual Exercises offered as a 30-day individually-guided retreat, withdays of reflection before and afterwards. Dates for 2003/4: Jun 26 – Jul 31 2003 Sept 1–Oct 6 2003 Jan5–Feb 9 2004
EMINAR FOR SPIRITUAL GUIDES S This year the seminar takes the formofaconsultation allowing for sharing and exchange among thoseinvolved in offering training in Ignatian spirituality. There will be an opportunity tohear about some of the courses on offer in different centres,and to comparenotes withothers engaged in this ministry. Fri February 28–Mon March 3 2003
ETREAT PROGRAMME 2003 RFor details of all of these,and our full range of individually-guided, preached, and themed retreats, writefor a programme to: Retreat Secretary,LoyolaHall,Warrington Road, Prescot,Merseyside,L35 6NZ, UK.
Or see our web-site at www.loyolahall.co.uk ~On-line booking now available