a. I believe in a Triune God who is Love. Since I understand love as an intimate
involvement, I believe that the three Persons in the Trinity share so
intimately in each others’ lives that there is only one divine life.
b. I believe in the Incarnational theology
inscribed in the hymn in the Prologue of John.
This hymn (1) places the eternal Word at the center of the life of the
Trinity, the act of creation, human history and the lives of each and every
human being and (2) attributes creation to an outpouring (overflow) of the
creative love of the Triune God.
c. I believe that the life of the Word incarnate
reveals that each of the divine Persons longs to be intimately involved with human
beings on their journeys into the unknown.
And since they are distinctive Persons, they long to be involved with us
in distinctive ways.
d. Because I believe that passionate,
vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions are the only way to deepen
person-to-person involvements, I believe that Jesus is passionately, vulnerably,
respectfully and faithfully involved with me and every
other human being.
e. Since I process my involvements with others
from this perspective, I trace my many breaks with intimacy with each of the three
divine Persons and with other human beings to a fear of being fully human and
of living with personal integrity. I do
like things about being human, but there
are others that I want to avoid. In the
same vein, I am often arrogantly self-assertive, but I often lie to protect my
backside. In his love for me, Jesus keeps
confronting me with the call to intimacy with him, fully human as well as fully
God.
f. Since Jesus no longer walks about this earth,
I believe that his longing to love us into wholeness also comes to us through one
another. That longing speaks in and
through two passages in the Gospels, "Love one another as I have loved
you" and "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters,
you do to me." And my belief is
reinforced when loved ones share the pain my breaks with intimacy evoke in them
vulnerably and respectfully and I respond in kind.
g. Given my conviction that each of the three
divine Persons longs to be intimately involved with us on our journeys through life,
I believe that the Scriptures must be read through an interplay of many
biblical themes. The Exodus-theme
depicts our lives as perpetual journeys into the unknown. On this journey, Jesus assures us that, since
the Father’s providence extends to the fall of a sparrow, the Father is ready
to lead us through cross-situations into new life in God’s love. This assurance is encoded in the Covenant-theme,
with its promise that God’s everfaithful love will be with us each step of that
journey. In the same vein, the Cross-Resurrection
theme promises that, if we learn how to discern how each of the three divine
Persons is active in cross-situations in our lives, each of the crises can lead
to deepening intimacy with the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and our loved
ones. And Francis of Assisi’s life bears
witness to the inseparability of three symbols – the Crib, the Cross and the
Eucharist – for those who seek the sort of intimate involvement with Jesus that
he had.
h. I believe that Jesus instituted the
Eucharistic celebration at the Last Supper to express his willingness to
entrust himself passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully to anyone
who comes to him in this re-enactment of the Last Supper.
i. As other reflections attest, I believe that
the Agony in the Garden is far more revelatory of Jesus’ saving activity than the
Crucifixion. When Jesus instituted the
Eucharist as a ritual re-enactment, he implicitly entrusted himself to anyone
who
received him in communion. In the Agony, he was initially overwhelmed by
a dawning awareness that the command to re-enact this ritual in memory of him
had committed him to share the pain of all human beings throughout the
ages. His acceptance of this commitment
was immeasurably more difficult than the willingness to undergo the admittedly
excruciating pain of the Crucifixion. In
this context, Francis’s focus on the Eucharist rather than the Resurrection
celebrated the Risen Lord’s faithfulness to the commitment encoded in the
Eucharist.
j. I believe that tangled moral issues lie,
inextricably, at the core of human actions and assertions. Consequently, I believe that the moral
discourse we use to resolve these moral issues must be framed by the metaphor
of intimacy which Israel
k. This approach to moral theology is framed by
my belief that each of the three divine Persons is involved in our lives in
ways designed to love us into wholeness.
Since we cannot know what it is
to be fully human, we do well to trust the insistence of Israel’s great
prophets that the call of God can be heard in the cries of the oppressed, the
abused, the marginalized, the silenced and the stranger, since these cries
reveal how our responses to them are dehumanizing and depersonalizing. In sum, if we are open to the urgings of the
Spirit at work in our tangled depths, these cries evoke intensely personal
responses to those we might otherwise ignore or actively exclude from our
worlds. For the Spirit will not allow us
to forget that what we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to
Jesus, since he is intimately involved with them.
l. I believe that most of us must hit some
bottom before we can encounter the Holy Spirit in intensely personal ways. Usually, we are plunged into these bottoms
when cross-situations with loved ones expose traces of smug self-sufficiency
and reveal that we are not in control of our lives. Invariably, these events tap tangled feelings
that we buried alive in the mistaken belief that we were thereby mastering
them. And once I realized that the
Spirit’s love for me was involved in bringing these feelings to the surface, experience
taught me to believe that I break with intimacy because I am wounded, not
because I am wicked. And experience also
taught me to bring my flights from a fully human involvement with others to
Jesus, the Wounded Healer.
m. And as philosopher whose dominant interest is
moral discourse, I believe that only those who have met the indwelling Spirit
in intensely personal ways can come to discern the moral center which allows
them to bear witness to the love of the three divine Persons without judgments
or agendas.
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