The Courage of Faith Some Philosophical Reflections

The Courage of Faith Some Philosophical Reflections Steven T. Ostovich LITURGICAL PRESS Collegeville, Minnesota www.litpress.org Cover design by Ann Blattner Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New Revised Standard Ver- sion Bible © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. © 2009 by Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, micro- film, microfiche, mechanical recording, photocopying, translation, or by any other means, known or yet unknown, for any purpose except brief quotations in reviews, without the previous written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint John’s Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America. 123456789 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ostovich, Steven T. The courage of faith : some philosophical reflections / Steven T. Ostovich. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-8146-1872-1 (pbk.) 1. Christian life—Catholic authors. 2. Courage—Religious aspects— Catholic Church—Meditations. 3. Faith—Meditations. 4. Political theology—Meditations. I. Title. BX2350.3.O588 2009 241'.696—dc22 2008047358 In memory of David R. Ostovich, my brother, a man of courage and faith. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 The Courage to Believe 17 2 The Courage to Promise 37 3 The Courage to Hope 60 4 The Courage to Love 81 5 The Courage of Responsibility 100 6 The Courage to Think 114 Conclusion 139 Acknowledgments any people have helped give me the courage to write this Mbook. First among these are my students. They have pushed me to consider these issues and to do so in a way that is accessible to a general audience. These students include the un- dergraduates at the College of St. Scholastica, but I also have taught in a variety of settings outside the college, including courses and lecture series for clergy, in churches and synagogues, and in more secular venues. I want to thank in a special way the men and women I have encountered in the Diaconate Formation, Lay Ministry, and Teacher Institute Programs of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin. You have been a source of both inspiration and renewal for me for many years. Thank you, Archdeacon Tim Kuehn for inviting me to northern Wisconsin. This book began to take definite form while I was on sabbatical at the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at Saint John’s University in Minnesota. My colleagues there were a source of joy as well as collegial inspiration, so thanks to Peter and Mary Huff, Bob and Chantal Hurley, Carol Neel and John Horner, and to Steven Chase. The staff was not only friendly and helpful but stimulating, especially Donald Ottenhoff, the current director and superb question-asker; Carla Durand- Desmarais; and Elisa Schneider. Thanks also to past director of the Institute Patrick Henry who remains a kind of superego mov- ing me to get my ideas out in public. It was while I was at the Collegeville Institute that I connected to Liturgical Press through vii viii The Courage of Faith Hans Christoffersen, and I am indebted to him and the staff there, especially my editor Lauren L. Murphy. Thank you as well to Rev. Kilian McDonnell, OSB, Rev. Wilfred Theisen, OSB, and the monks of Saint John’s Abbey whose hospitality was more than simply a traditional Benedictine value. Praying with the monks on a regular basis in the perfectly spiritual space of the abbey church was a gift beyond understanding. Much of what follows reflects my training and continued thinking in terms of political theology, a perspective to which I have been brought by studying with Johann Baptist Metz and working with John K. Downey. As ever, I depend on the support and love of my family, my wife Karen and our daughters, Marta and Rachel. Introduction “ ait a minute.” Do you ever hear a little voice inside asking Wyou to do this? Even if not, this is what I am asking you to do with me here. I want you to take a timeout to give yourself the chance to think, to feel, to be open, to pray. What follows in this book is a series of what I have called “meditations” but could just as well be labeled “reflections.” I want us to do this together, and so I ask you to make a brief stop (really a series of brief stops) in your life. There are traditions of meditative practice that teach us the discipline to empty our minds of everything. This is hard work and takes much training and practice. Fortunately for us, I am not asking you to do something this rigorous. All I am asking you to do is to empty out some time and space so we can think about some things together. And when I say “think” I am not talking about mastering new techniques or learning new content. No, thinking here will be more a matter of listening to yourself, to your experience, and allowing your own deep images, ideas, and insights to surface. What do I want us to think about? The title of the book pretty much gives this away, does it not? Let us meditate on courage as it comes from and leads to faith. You know about our need for courage already. There are challenges in living a good human life, and sometimes the difficulties involved in this can be overwhelm- ing. We want to do the right thing, but it is often hard to discern what that is, let alone do it. We are pulled in so many directions in our busy lives that we, like the poet William Butler Yeats, are convinced “the center cannot hold.” Deeper still, we need answers to our questions about the meaning of our lives, for we cannot 1 2 The Courage of Faith live with constant questioning and doubt as the basis for our being. We know it takes courage to act, to think, and simply to be. And so we turn to faith. Faith is the hope that encourages us. Faith gives us answers to our questions, direction for our lives, the promise that those lives make sense somehow. This is where we get into trouble. Faith may give us courage as we respond to the challenges of acting, thinking, being. But what are we really looking for in faith? Do we want encourage- ment or escape? We are tired of the demands of life today, and so we turn to faith for peace. Our culture makes this easy—we treat faith as a private matter in a place apart, removed from the demands of everyday life. It is as if religion has been turned into a service industry. We go to church or synagogue when our spiritual tanks are low and we want to fill up. We look to our faith com- munities for the emotional support that makes us feel good about ourselves again. Here in church or synagogue, at least, I can feel at home and I can rest. Even God rests on the Sabbath. But then we forget what the Sabbath is about, that rest for us is about renewal and about having the strength and courage to start again. At some level we realize this. We know our faith traditions place demands on us as well as provide rest and support. And this is one of the reasons why we stay active in our com- munities, for we know we need the challenge of faith. There is a lovely phrase, for example, in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, part of a eucharistic prayer, in which we come to the Lord’s Table asking God to “deliver us from the presumption of coming to you for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.” We know we need—and we want—strength, renewal, and courage. But what exactly is courage? We think we know, or at least we think we know it when we see it. But can we get a little more precise than this? After all, the clearer our thinking about a seem- ingly simple concept like this, the better. We identify actions as courageous, or to put this another way, courage is a characteristic of things we do. And usually these actions involve overcoming obstacles and threats or at least what most people would recognize as threatening. But courage also can be used to describe attitudes, Introduction 3 how we approach the challenges and difficulties we encounter in our lives. Think of people you know whom you would call courageous not because they have done great deeds or scaled great heights but because they have endured chronic conditions or wasting diseases with humor and good grace. Sometimes courage in others surprises us as we watch ordinary (even shy) people like us “get up and do what needs to be done,” to paraphrase Garrison Keillor and his Powdermilk Biscuits. But usually we call someone courageous based on repeated actions over time—courage is not a one-time affair. Think about yourself in your relationship to courage and those things in your life that have called forth a courageous response from you. We are strong and brave in defending those we love, our families and friends. Some of this may be a matter of biology, of protecting our genes in the case of family—we too can be she-bears defending our cubs against any threats.

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