5. My passion for an ethics of intimacy – 9 pages

8-29-07 

    My visit this morning with a long-time colleague, Gerry Etzkorn, has been a gift to me.  Gerry brought up an intriguing question about my book, Christian Ethics:  An Ethics of Intimacy.  (That text would be more readable if I had written it as an answer to his question.)  The question:  My formulation of the ethics of intimacy seems to imply that we are called to intimacy with everyone.  Since that is clearly beyond our reach, what do I mean to say?

    My answer:  In that text, I argue that the three major strands of the western literary tradition - literature, philosophy and theology - are generated and governed by two foundational metaphors, the metaphor of power and judgment and the metaphor of intimacy.  I trace the misplaced debate between the Catholic and Protestant traditions to the fact that apologists in both camps were captive to a hermeneutical theory derived from the metaphor of power and judgment.  (Hermeneutical theories promise definitive readings of a foundational text.)  In my re-reading of the biblical and the theological traditions, I give full and fair voice to Scriptural passages which depict God as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge.  But I insist (1) that attention must be paid to biblical metaphors which compare God’s involvement with Israel to a marriage union and (2) that this understanding of the covenant reveals a passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvement of the triune God in the lives of individuals marked by every event in their personal histories.  And if that is so, no one can pretend that Scriptural references can be used to justify the pretense that the denomination they embrace, Catholic or Protestant, alone preaches the full and true gospel message.

    In an arena governed by the rule of the One, my ethics of intimacy provides a language which voices the longing of the Father, the Word incarnate and Holy Spirit for intimate involvement with each and every person.  Most importantly, it also incorporates a reading code which enables me to mine Scriptural passages which reveal the willingness of each of three Person in the Trinity to be involved with us passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully.  (NB:  A vulnerable and respectful involvement is incompatible with judgments, sanctions and manipulations in any shape or form.)  And since the language of intimacy is derived from a metaphor whose reach initially exceeded its grasp, the implications of the linguistic formulations it authorizes have been and continue to be subjected to the test of experience.

    For me, the paradigm test involved subjecting the implications of the formula, “Love one another as I have loved you”, to the implications of an incarnational theology.  And in every instance, I find that my intensely personal involvements with other unique human beings invite me to discern how each of the three Persons is involved with us in distinctive ways.

    Quite obviously, if I am to learn how to love others as Jesus does, I must first experience Jesus’ involvement with me.  (It is not enough to work from my image of Jesus, even if that image is scripturally based.)  And to experience this intensely personal involvement, I must have a language which enables me to process my everyday experiences in ways that reveal Jesus’ longing for ever-deepening person-to-person involvement with me and expose the woundedness that distorts my ability to trust.  I find biblical warrant for such linguistic formulations in the Johannine tradition’s insistence the we cannot pretend to love God if we do not love the flawed human beings we encounter on our journey through life.  To live in God’s love, therefore, we must process our everyday experiences in ways which reveal that God’s intensely personal love for us comes to us through one another.  And these experiences reveal that God is Love.

    Equally obviously, an incarnate Word who is passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with each of us differs radically from the Redeemer who, at the urgings of divine mercy, came to offer fitting reparation for the sin of Adam.  I suggest, therefore, that a meta-narrative which attributed the Incarnation to an interplay between divine judgment and divine mercy is quite incompatible with a meta-narrative which attributes both creation and the Incarnation to an over-flowing, creative love.

    Sadly, my appreciation of the inseparability of an incarnational theology and an ethics of intimacy was long in coming.  Thus, if I had been open to vulnerable self-revelations in my early years as a priest, I would have utilized a narrative voice which oscillated between confessions laden with good old Catholic guilt (which placed me in the role of the villain) and complaints which cast me as the victim and God as the villain.  Enmeshed as I was in a language intended to assign responsibility to one rather than both of the participants in an event, I disguised the harsh judgments I passed on myself and on God in self-talk which echoed passages from Jeremiah, a constant complainer.  In public, I often quoted Theresa of Avila’s dictum, “Lord, no wonder you have so few friends, given the way that you treat them.”  But I was not yet ready to question the deeply rooted beliefs and probe the emotional reactions that prevented me from letting Jesus, fully human as well as fully God, accompany me on a quest for a fully human existence, with its promise of more abundant life.

    Long before I became aware of the internalized judge responsible for the burden of guilt I carried, my habit of casting God as a villain in my story was challenged by events in which I saw how the Father’s love entered even tragic events in ways that brought new life to others.  Gradually, I began to see that the Father was active in the same way in my life.  Initially, that realization lent a semblance of authority to the internalized judge who blamed me for everything that did not turn out as I intended.  But the rule of this internalized judge was challenged when I encountered the Holy Spirit during my mid-life crisis.

    This crisis falsified the theological foundations of the formation I had received beyond repair.  Through an uneasy involvement with the charismatic movement, however, I was able to see that the indwelling Spirit was compassionately and respectfully active in the angry eruptions I tried so desperately to suppress.  Through people who were more familiar with the inner journey than I was, I came to see that it was the Spirit’s love for me that kept alive the pain, anger, anxiety and shame that I tried to bury until I was ready to allow it to find new life in my involvements with other wounded individuals.  Gradually, I became aware of the insidious ways that feelings I had controlled by burying them alive were now controlling me in hidden ways.  Then, as I entered a process of letting go and letting each of the three divine Person’s work in my life, I did so, in part, because I was ashamed of the ways I had used reactions of contempt, frustration, sarcasm, silent disapproval, and the like to control potentially angry outbursts.  Somehow, the times when I begged God to free me from these tangled reactions, I heard the voice of the Spirit informing me that God was too respectful to change me without my full involvement in the process.  And as I became capable of vulnerable self-revelations, I was able to trust that the transforming power of divine and human love can to me in and through interactions with others.

    Once I could no longer cast God as the villain in the story of my life, I began to hear the words of love spoken by the indwelling Spirit.  And as these words resounded in my tangled depths, I realized that the repertoire of emotional reactions I used to bury the pain experienced in wounding events in the past had done violence to my deepest feelings, that the Spirit’s love for me had kept these feelings alive, and that embracing them with honesty allowed each of the three Persons to work in my life.

         (I would gladly attribute the following quote to its author, but I cannot remember where I read it.  The quote:  “Any feeling that is buried will eventually become a weapon to be used against somebody.”  This quote is empirically validated in interactions between married couples who have not learned how to express anger vulnerably and respectfully.  As a straightforward example, teasing which was once warm, affectionate and playful soon has a barb in it, as buried anger finds hidden expression.  In a more complex dynamic, if a mother was deeply wounded by a lack of care and concern from her parents during childhood, she may be so determined that her children will not suffer as she did that she transforms her concern into a smothering care.  Such examples can be multiplied indefinitely.)

    Today, I supplement my conviction that there is no way through cross-situations except through them with the insistence that the inner journey is a process, not a series of events.  Once I yielded to the process, I discovered that personal encounters with Jesus in everyday events were inseparable from deepening involvement with the Father and the indwelling Spirit.  And as I began to trust their love for me, I found myself responding to other tangled individuals without judgment or agenda.  With some, the graced moment was confined to a single encounter.  In other instances, an initial encounter called me to accompany wounded individuals as they walked through the valley of death, with an empathic response to the excruciating pain that tempted them to embrace the suicide-option.  And in a few instances, I discerned a call to a long-term commitment that would tap all my buried pain, anger, fear and shame as well as my care and compassion.  In any instance, I became aware that I was called to let unique and complicated individuals into my life, vulnerably and respectfully, without knowing how deeply I was to be involved with them.

           (ASIDE:  I long believed that my judgments voiced a refusal to be vulnerably involved with other persons until they changed.  But a reflection written by Marianne Parker exposes the violence enshrined in judgments far more eloquently than anything I could say:  “Judgment is not interested in seeing its captive change.  Its demands, criticisms, protests and objections are not designed to re-direct, teach or guide.  Its function is to break one’s spirit and confidence.  Its livelihood is strengthened by the weakness of its prey, and its victory lies in the shattered hopes that gradually, yet inexorably crumble from the burden of its uncompromising weight.”)

Literary Origins of My Hermeneutical Theory

    My understanding of the workings of hermeneutical theories is more indebted to the hermeneutical theory encoded in Nietzsche’s archeology of knowledge and genealogy of morals than to the critical apparatus forged by the dominant strand in the Catholic theological tradition.

    Versed in the critical apparatus that governed scholarly discourse in German Universities, Nietzsche was aware of the work of German Protestant biblical scholars.  To support the Protestant commitment to Scripture alone, they had replaced the metaphysical and methodological inquiries favored by medieval theologians (and by Thomists today, including Pope Benedict XVI) with inquiries designed to yield a reading of the Scriptures which eliminated human interpretation from the translations and readings of the Scriptures, since this sprawling text had to be both self-interpreting and self-referential if it was to speak as the immediate Word of God in any age or culture.

    Nietzsche, of course, had a more ambitious aim than the Protestant biblical scholars.  Quite obviously, he believed that his Genealogy of Morals offered a definitive reading of the literary, biblical, philosophical and theological strands in the western literary tradition.  That belief underlies his confident proclamation that this tradition as a whole was propelled by an all-pervasive and impersonally operating will to power.  By his use of two distinctive literary forms designed for that purpose, he emerged as the first philosopher of the western literary tradition.  And in and through the reading code derived from these forms, he shifted the traditional focus on metaphysical, epistemological, methodological and ethical inquiries to analyses designed to reveal how experiences are textured by languages generated by this tradition.  (I am certain that he also sought to assert his authority over the effort by Protestant biblical scholars to present the Judaic-Christian Scriptures as a self-interpretative text and a self-referential Word of God.)

    Since the Scriptures often speak to me as a living word, I gladly recognize that the early Protestant biblical scholars accepted the challenge voiced by Descartes’ methodical doubt.  As literary heirs of a well-developed critical apparatus, they hoped to devise a theory capable of exposing the violence done to the gospel message by theologies ground in an interplay between the metaphysical inquiries privileged by Aquinas’s baptism of Aristotle and a discourse which presented Tradition as an authorized interpreter of the Scriptures.  However, since they assumed that definitive readings of a text or a textual tradition were possible, they remained captive to the conception of an autonomous text generated by the rule of reason which was foreign to the authors of the texts stitched together in the Judaic-Christian Scriptures.

    Nonetheless, since even a bad theory is better than no theory at all, their willingness to begin with a categorical belief that the Scriptures were self-interpreting proved fruitful in ways they did not anticipate.  Thus, on the one hand, they recognized that, since the Scriptures preserved texts written in different literary genres and supplemented by a wide range of literary conventions, the redacted text could not be read literally.  And on the other, their efforts to use an understanding of the inner logic of a literary genre and the workings of literary conventions to show that the text was self-interpreting revealed instead that their project could not produce what it promised.

    In effect, their project collapsed from within, in a manner akin to the collapse of the ideal language program advanced by Logical Positivism.  And that failure exposed the impossibility of reading any text without interpretation and, by extension, of regarding any text as an autonomous text.

    In this vein, Nietzsche’s reach exceeded his grasp.  His insistence that the western literary tradition was propelled by an all-pervasive will to power cannot accommodate the fact that this tradition generated a distinctive form of life which enshrined intimacy as a realizable purpose.  Nonetheless, readings generated by his hermeneutical theory expose (1) the violence licensed by appeals to reason and (2) the arrogance of anyone who pretends that a text or language presents the whole of reality transparently.

        (FN:  One might say that Nietzsche used his hermeneutical theory to subvert the authority of any belief-system but his own.  In the Genealogy of Morals, he framed his conviction that the western literary tradition was propelled by an all-pervasive will to power with an evolutionary theory.  In this theory, he simply replaced the god-terms which lent coherence to competing interpretations of the history of the western literary tradition with his own conception of an all-pervasive will to power.)

    Decades later, Heidegger attempted to rescue the western literary tradition from Nietzsche’s worship of naked power by replacing Nietzsche’s god-term with a notion of Being forged by the so-called pre-Socratics.  This substation enabled him to insist that an authentically human stance called for open responsiveness to the workings of a creative and gracious Being.  On one level, his use of the pre-Socratic notion of Being as a god-term implied that truth lies in beginnings.  On another level, however, it replaced the search for definitive readings with an invitation to inhabit texts or textual traditions in ways that allowed their boundaries to function as horizons.

    Structurally, this reformulation encoded the Exodus-theme in a way that would forever subvert any pretense that an objective moral order could generate the creative responses called for by a journey into the unknown.  More importantly, as a response to the rationalist strand in the philosophical tradition he inhabited, Heidegger was the first to realize that Nietzsche’s hermeneutical theory deconstructed the literary foundations of the arena in which rationalists had contended with one another for a prize to be awarded to the theory which triumphed over all contending theories.     

    Once I read a number of Heidegger’s texts as sincere efforts to set forth ways of being human in a culture dominated by das Man (the One), I became less critical of his penchant for amorphous generalizations.  This, I suspect, prepared me to take seriously his use of a notion of Being projected prior to the emergence of significant distinctions among language, experience and reality as the god-term in his hermeneutical theory.  Once I did so, I found that the role he assigned this notion of Being enriched my appreciation of Ong’s work on the irreversible  restructurings of thought that accompanied literacy’s triumph over orality as the foundation of western culture and Wittgenstein’s analysis of the workings of everyday language.

    Regarding WITTGENSTEIN:  In my analyses of the workings of everyday English, I find repeated confirmations of Wittgenstein’s insight that everyday language incorporates myriad forms of life designed to realize distinctive purposes.  As a fruitful point of entry, this focus on human purposes differs radically from Aristotle’s correspondence theory of truth, Nietzsche’s fascination with the impersonal operation of an all-pervasive will to power, and Heidegger’s insistence that an all-encompassing Being is the signified of all signifiers.  Moreover, it provides a literary framework for my suggestion that the dominant forms of life generated by the western literary tradition are grounded in two foundational metaphors, a metaphor of power and judgment and a metaphor of intimacy.

        To supplement Wittgenstein’s analysis, I sometimes invoke Heidegger’s dramatization of the ways that cultures enamored with power and judgment do violence to the longing for a uniquely personal existence.  But Heidegger centered his hermeneutical theory in a distinction between Sein (Being), on one pole, and dasein (a bare “being there”), on the other, and dasein encodes a hollow metaphor of individuality which cannot generate a language capable of transforming the longing for a shared journey to deepening person-to-person involvements into a realizable quest.

       Consequently, as my disagreements with Nietzsche and Heidegger crystalized, I saw more clearly that everyday English can generate linguistic formulations which can be used to process experience in ways which promote that quest and expose the will to power and judgment enshrined in forms of life which abort or distort it.  And since I was searching for a moral discourse without foundations, the realization that everyday analyses of experience revolve around questions concerning realizable purposes accredited my conviction that everyday English transmitted a form of life capable of evoking the elusive longing for intimacy and of transforming that longing into a realizable quest.

    Quite obviously, this focus on realizable purposes differs radically from traditional efforts to ground moral discourse outside of human reality, in a single facet of human reality, or in the idealist and naturalist conventions forged by Plato and Aristotle.  As a matter of fact, forms of life designed to realize distinctive purposes remain alive in everyday language if and only if language-users use the linguistic formulations they generate to process their everyday experiences.  And this is particularly true of the quest for intimacy, since no one can be forced to engage in vulnerable and respectful self-revelations.

    As I probed this insight, I became aware that Wittgensteinean analyses of language and experience show, on the one hand, that the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence requires the ability to realize many purposes and, on the other, that judgments and strategies designed to realize purposes derived from the metaphor of power and judgment which serve one well socially do violence to interactions between individuals who have committed themselves to co-author a shared journey into the unknown.

    As a code for reading the Scriptures, therefore, a hermeneutical theory indebted to Wittgenstein’s insights into the workings of everyday languages raises two distinguishable yet inseparable questions.  First and foremost, its focus on purpose evokes the question, “What was God’s purpose in creating the universe?”  Secondly, if the vision of an incomprehensible God who entered human history in and through intensely personal initiatives toward unique individuals frames the Hebrew narrative tradition, the question concerning the response of individuals to God’s activity in their lives can be formulated as follows:  “Is there a distinctive form of life which enables believers to discern God’s initiatives?”

    In my search for answers to those two questions, my early readings of the Jewish Scriptures were dominated by the answers encoded in the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel’s prophets, not the violent misreading of the story of Adam and Eve inscribed in Augustine’s harsh doctrine of original sin.  Gradually, I became aware that the reformulation of the Second Great Commandment in the High Priestly Prayer in John, “Love one another as I have loved you”, echoed these metaphors of intimacy in ways that enriched the proclamation in the Prologue which attributed creation to an out-pouring of divine love.  Finally, I began to see that clear answers to both questions were inscribed in the meta-narrative which frames the incarnational theology indebted to Scotus.  And working backwards, I formulated the thesis which runs through runs through Christian Ethics:  An Ethics of Intimacy, namely, that an incarnational theology requires an ethics of intimacy, and vice versa.

    Now, in my personal life, I use a language generated by the interplay between an incarnational theology and an ethics of intimacy to discern how the Father’s providential activity is at work in my interactions with those I encounter on my journey into the unknown, how the Spirit moves in my tangled depths, and how both the Father and the Spirit seek to lead me to encounter Jesus as the way, the truth and the life.  But I also confess that I will never understand why the Father, Word incarnate and Holy Spirit long to be intimately involved with me.  I only know that conversing with each of them concerning my joys and sorrows, my moments of near-despair and of ecstatic gratitude evokes transforming moments in my life and in the lives of individuals whom I let into my life.  For I have learned that intimacy with these divine Persons, as with the tangled human beings in my life, can only deepen if I am honest with them and with myself about what I feel and think, real or imagined and that I cannot approach loving others as Jesus loves them if I am not willing to be passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with them, as Jesus is.

     In sum, an incarnational theology defines God’s creative purpose as a longing to share the intimate life shared by three divine Persons with human beings and defines the Incarnation as the full expression of that purpose.  Consequently, an ethics of intimacy provides a language capable of discerning the activity of each of the three divine Persons in the lives of all human beings and of voicing a call for a response in kind.  Quite obviously, since that activity is often hidden in confusing events, we need a language capable of discerning it.  Equally obviously, the call voiced by that language must speak for itself.  When it does, it can evoke the deepest longings of the human heart and expose the urge to closure inherent in codes derived from metaphors of power and judgment which depict God as a Lord, Lawgiver and Judge. 

4. Letting go and letting God – 4 pages

March 12, 2007

    I filled in for Fr. Mike Quinn this week-end.  The gospel was the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well.  I used Jesus’ assertion that the Father sought those who would worship in spirit and truth as the take-off point for a sermon on letting go and letting God. 

    I invited members of the congregation to reflect honestly on their tendency to respond with repeat performances to individuals and situations that trigger pain, anger, fear, shame, frustration, irritation, confusion and the like.  Focusing on anger, I noted that my often desperate efforts to be more patient lead me to bury pain and anger alive.  I assume that I am controlling them, but future eruptions reveal that they controlled me.  I also indicated the ways that dulling pain feeds the pain in the long run.  Against this background, I suggested that the process of “letting go and letting God” involved four distinguishable steps.  But since I wanted to focus on the fourth step, I noted how I came to an understanding of the first three long before I understood the fourth.

    Thus, when I used the formula, “Let go and let God”, to process my own experiences, I had little difficulty in formulating the first step as the call to identify (name) the deep feelings that triggered my repeat performances, and this formulation suggested an assignment which enabled students to experience the process.  To frame the assignment, I provided a working model of nine basic feelings:  Pain, anger, shame, sexuality, care, compassion, joy and playful spontaneity.  Then, in classes leading up to the assignment, I involved my students in analyses which sorted out the basic feelings woven into standard emotional reactions.

    To set the stage, I suggested that we acquire a repertoire of emotional reactions through the process of socialization and that each emotional reaction incorporates a distinctive judgment and strategy.  E.g., I still struggle with the urge to deal with pain by transforming it into a hidden grievance against someone.  I also struggle with the temptation to react with open contempt.  Whether I go one way or the other depends on a judgment I pass at the moment.  And since both these reactions are so long-practiced that they seem spontaneous, I am not even aware that I am making a judgment and adopting a strategy.  But once I see these reactions as repeat performances, I see how they enable me to avoid vulnerable self-revelations.

    To show students the futility of efforts to overcome the reactions triggered by tangled feelings, I used such obvious examples as a young mother whose efforts to be more patient only set her up for an emotional eruption.  Then, to mark a distinction between deep feelings and emotional reactions, I used jealousy as an example of how deep feelings get tangled.  In their analyses of this common emotional reaction, most students suggested that jealousy revealed a deep-seated insecurity.  Initially, they tended to resist my suggestion that talk of insecurity objectified an intense fear of abandonment or betrayal which had to be faced and felt before its hold could be broken.  They failed to see that such an objectification implied that someone could give them a strategy for minimizing the consequences of wounds experienced in childhood.  And they failed to see that the objectification enshrined a judgment which absolved the jealous person of responsibility for disguising a despicable possessiveness as a moral judgment.

    From a philosophical perspective, jealous individuals provide paradigm examples of individuals who pretend that their accounts of events that upset them offer objective descriptions of themselves and the individuals they supposedly love so passionately.  To undermine this pretense, I dramatized two points.  First and foremost, once the fear of abandonment or betrayal is identified, the experience can be used to show how all emotional reactions have roots in one’s personal history.  Then, by extension, the analysis can be used to show why no one can pretend that the way they consign an event to a story tells the authorized version of the event. 

       (To show how deep feelings were evoked in tangled involvements, I also analyzed the outrage that a step-mother felt when she could not prevent the natural mother from wounding her step-son again and again.  In this situation, despite a profound sense of helplessness, a genuine care and concern for a boy she loved would not allow her to harden her heart.  Compassion fueled her anger.)

    Since feelings we bury alive continue to exert a hidden hold on us through long-practiced emotional reactions, the second and third steps call followers of Jesus to embrace their human condition fully, as he did in the Incarnation.  In Jesus’ words, those who trusted the Father’s providence and the Spirit’s urgings would find a more abundant life in the world and deepen their personal involvement with him, the way, the truth and the life.  In this context, the call to “Let go and let God” plunges us into a journey of discovery.

    On that journey, I discovered that a deepening involvement with Jesus, fully human and fully God, called me to identify, feel and own my deepest feelings with the knowledge that there is no way through either long-buried or raw pain, anger, fear and shame except through them.  So, when I moved from the first to the second step in the homily, I sought to show how judging ourselves sets in motion a process designed to dull the pain, mask the fear, control the anger and transform shame into guilt.  In this step, the call to “let go and let God” reminds us that, whenever we judge and condemn ourselves, we fall into the trap that this second step is designed to avoid.  -  I.e., whenever I tell myself that I should do something, I set myself up for going it alone, without God.  In effect, since I pretend that I should be able to change myself, my prayers of petition become hidden prayers of direction in which I tell God how to help me.  And in my reactions, I assign myself the villain-role in a drama revolving around victim-villain relationships.  In all these ways, I avoid feeling my feelings just as they are.

    The third step, to own the feelings I feel, focuses on letting go of judgments in which I cast others in the villain-role.  In some instances, they may be abusive brutes.  But I cannot change them, and blaming them will not heal my wounds.  So, unless I own the feelings I feel as my own, I cannot place them in the care of the Father’s providential activity, the urgings of the indwelling Spirit, and the intimate presence of Jesus, the wounded Healer.

    At this point in the sermon, I noted that I understood the dynamics of these three steps long before I grasped the dynamics of the fourth step.  I tried to weave these steps into honest conversations with the Father, the Holy Spirit and Jesus, and I involved individuals who came for spiritual direction in the process.  More often than not, however, nothing changed, within or without.  Often, others tried to explain the absence of transformation by judging that they must not be trying hard enough to let go, but I always sensed that trying hard to let go had to be counter-productive.  As usual, it took a particular event to reveal what prevented the process from bringing new life in God’s love and in the love of others.

    The event:  I was giving a week-end Serenity Retreat to members of Al Anon.  A recently divorced woman, the mother of eight children, came to the retreat.  I had known her for years, and I was always amazed at her trust in God.  In one of the talks, I sketched the first two steps of letting go.  In conversations with other women after the talk, she found herself violently angry.  Since such eruptions were uncharacteristic, she was shaken.  For the rest of the week-end, she complained that she had come seeking serenity, but found only uncontrollable rage.  And for the first time, I saw that letting go involved letting God work in God’s own way.  From my own personal history, I could see how she had coped with abuse by burying anger until she was filled with an ocean of anger.  On this retreat, faith-sharing with other women opened the flood-gates.

    My understanding of what was happening was crystalized when I heard one of the women tell her that the eruption was the work of the devil.  Suddenly, I saw clearly (1) that she was letting the Holy Spirit move in her tangled depths and (2) that the Holy Spirit had to bring to the surface the wounds that needed healing if she was to live fully and freely in God’s love.  And with that insight, I realized for the first time how letting go also involved letting God work in God’s way to foster the transformation in me.  In effect, I discovered the fourth step.

    As usual, I wondered why I had not seen the dynamics of this step earlier.  In the course on marriage, I argued (1) that vulnerable self-revelations required me to honest with myself, with God and with my loved ones about what I felt and thought and (2) that respectful self-revelations required me to leave my loved ones free to respond in their own way and time, since they might have to go through the grieving process (denial, anger, bargaining and depression) before they could respond vulnerably and respectfully.  Since I wanted an intimate involvement with Father, Jesus and Spirit, I might have seen that I did not communicate with them in this way.

    I began to understand why I had failed to understand the fourth step in letting go and letting God through my involvement with a woman who asked to talk with me.  In our first meeting, it became obvious that her husband was an alcoholic.  At the time, I would agree to be the spiritual director to someone in her situation only if she would give serious consideration to attending meetings of Al Anon, and she was the first person who went to a meeting before our next appointment.  In that first meeting, she heard the call to detachment.  As we processed that call, I suggested that it invited her to identify two inter-related strategies he had used to involve her as an enabler while facing honestly her willingness to be an accomplice to this sad game.  Thus, on the one hand, she had to admit her role in perpetuating the struggles that he used to excuse his next drunken bout, and on the other, she had to let go of any effort to change him, including those designed to make him as miserable as she was.  As she did so, she came to realize the need to observe the Al Anon slogan, “Keep it simple, stupid”, to ensure that honest  assertions of what she felt and thought were vulnerable self-revelations, not disguised efforts to change him. 

    In the following weeks, she recounted events in which her detachment involved placing herself and her children entirely in God’s care.  She could not believe that God called her out of the involvement, yet staying involved the possible loss of all financial security.  But after each such account, she would sigh and repeat a formula she had heard, “But I know that you have to wait on God because you don’t know how much work God has to do in you or in others before you are ready to receive the gift.”  -  After that, I knew that the Father’s providence had worked in the network of our mutual friends to send her to me for my sake, not hers.  And I could admit that the fourth step in letting go and letting God sometimes involved seeing how the Father’s providence and the Spirit’s urging entered into events that brought the worst out in me.

    Looking back on events that brought out the worst in me, I saw clearly that I initially reacted with denial, anger (at God as well), bargaining and the sort of depression that is mostly anger gone underground.  In the denial, I played God.  I.e., I implied that, if I were God, I would not work in this way.  I also saw that I often reacted as his Majesty, the Baby, when I brought the pain, anger, fear and shame that I had identified and owned to God.  I wanted God to pluck it out, like weeds in a field, and to do immediately and painlessly.  And when I could appreciate the need to wait on God, I discovered that I had identified, owned and brought to God only a few of the many emotional reactions I had used to bury pain, anger, fear or shame or absolve me from calls to love others as Jesus loves them.  In effect, I saw how many judgments and strategies I still used to take back control of my life.  And I had to admit that I was often blind to the gift God sought to give in the midst of these cross-situations in my life.

3. A philosophical excursion (March 7, 2007) – 2 pages

March 7, 2007

   

    I have been reflecting on the differences among the rationalist tradition, Heidegger's re-reading of that tradition, and Wittgenstein's analysis of the workings of everyday languages.  

   1.  The rationalist tradition wrestled with the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance and versions of the metaphorical One designed to transform endless questioning into focused inquiries.  In the process, its adherents wove the detaching power of literacy and the totalizing thrust of continuous prose into metaphors depicting totalitarian forms of government and metaphors of individuality designed to subvert totalitarianism in any shape or form.

       a.  At a time when orality and literacy still vied for authority over the prevailing culture, Socrates utilized a moral discourse which was taking on a life of its own as the framework for a distinctive metaphor of individuality.  To wed the interrogatory stance with the totalizing thrust of language, he coupled a dialectically structured conception of reason with the assumption that no one could knowingly choose what was evil as the framework for a method of analyzing moral notions which promised self-knowledge and self-mastery.  But Plato could not be satisfied with the open-endedness of dialectically structured analyses of language and experience.  To justify a moral closure on the potentially endless questions licensed by an interrogatory stance, he posited a timeless realm of interpenetrating Ideal Forms.  And since the workings of reason could presumably generate judgments grounded in such Forms, Plato became the progenitor of the use of literary conventions derived from this posit to accredit a conception of the ideal human being, society or form of governance.     

    b.  Aristotle, the empiricist, simply transformed the idealist conventions which supported Plato's vision into naturalist conventions designed to support his metaphysical theory.  Logically, this theory replaced the dualism inherent in Plato's distinction between a realm of changeless Ideal Forms and the flux of experience with a hierarchically and teleologically structured universe.  But this structure was in turn replaced by Descartes' geometrization of the universe.

    c.  In this on-going dialogue of text with text, Descartes encoded the interrogatory stance at the core of the conception of reason in his methodical doubt.  On its part, the rigorous application of this methodology transformed a distinction between subjectivity and objectivity into an unbridgeable chasm, thereby condemning individuals to a solipsistic existence.  Later, Kant forged an abstract conception of the autonomous individual which supplemented the Cartesian metaphor of individuality with Socrates' promise that an ever-expanding self-knowledge would confer self-mastery.  Without abandoning the solipsistic import of the Cartesian metaphor, he filled the hollow center of his conception of the autonomous individual with a voice of reason which enabled reasonable beings to dictate categorical imperatives to themselves.

    d.  Today, postmodernist critics insist that Descartes' methodical doubt situated both descriptive and moral inquiries in a nihilistic framework and that metaphors of individuality designed to provide an exit from a solipsistic, purely subjective existence fail miserably.  But their fear of re-inscribing authority in critiques designed to subvert authority forces them to avoid any reference to an extra-mental reality and any notion of personal responsibility.

    e.  If they were so minded, postmodernist critics could point out that Kant treated reason as a fictive voice.  In his Critique of Pure Reason, he readily acknowledged that Hume's empirical critique of rationalism had awakened him from a "dogmatic slumber."  In short, Hume's critique insisted that any experience revealed only how entities interacted in a particular set of conditions, not how they would react to even the slightest change in conditions.  To recover rationalism from this critique, however, Kant argued that the literary conventions enshrined in Aristotelian logic and Newtonian mechanics were the only possible way to make sense of the flux of experience.  But the rationalism he sought to save used logical categories inherited from Aristotle and spatial conventions indebted to Newton's Laws of Motion to ground a radical distinction between nature and reason.  Then, in his Metaphysical Foundations of Morality, he argued that this framework, and this framework only, enabled moral agents to use reason in a way that liberated them from the natural necessity of desire and passion and thereby endowed them with a self-mastery which is true freedom.

        Presumably, the detaching, yet compelling power of reason provided (1) a dispassionate and disinterested perspective on the inner turmoil evoked by passion and desire and magnified by the norms designed to perpetuate the prevailing culture and (2) analyses of language and experience which liberated autonomous individuals from the necessity of nature and endowed them with the power to create their own unique identities.  I suggest, however, that Kant wanted to have his pie and eat it.  On the one hand, he used an abstract conception of reason as a tool which enabled autonomous individuals to create their own unique identities.  On the other, he accepted reason as a master which endowed categorical imperatives with a compelling moral authority.

    f.  In the twentieth century, Heidegger replaced the sterility of the dispassionate existence fostered by classical rationalism with a participatory existence of a sort.  In this context, he insisted that an authentic reading of the western literary tradition had to be framed by the pre-Socratic notion of Being.  Historically, this notion was designed to facilitate the transition from orality to literacy as the foundation of culture without loss of the participative component of human existence.  As such, it was projected prior to significant distinctions among language, experience and reality.  And this fact played a crucial role in Heidegger's replacement of Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth with an analysis of the workings of language which described prose as "a used up poem from which a call hardly resounds."

    g.  Ong and Wittgenstein offer radically different analyses of the workings of language.  First and foremost, since they regard the triumph of literacy over orality as irreversible, they have no difficulty in believing that languages generated by literary traditions take on lives of their own and that words laden with many meanings provide a fruitful medium for metaphors which initially exceed their grasp.  As a result, their analyses of the workings of everyday languages respects distinctions among language, experience and reality.

        The analyses of language and experience generated by a metaphor of intimacy are a case in point.  First and foremost, the testable implications of this metaphor offer a very different description of the process of individuation than the implications of metaphors of individuality forged by Descartes, Kant and Heidegger.  Most significantly, they show that judgments and strategies accredited by the forms of life enshrined in metaphors of individuality abort or distort the quest for deepening person-to-person involvements.

         In a marked contrast with the postmodernist fear of offering a description of human reality or a delineation of human existence, the metaphor of intimacy describes human beings as passionate, imaginative, linguistic and purposive beings.  In place of the misplaced debate among Descartes. Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, it shows that interactions which foster deepening person-to-person involvements are inherently individuating.

2. Abortion (January 19, 2007) – 15 pages

January 19, 2007

     I often wish that I was not tempted to critique deviations from my understanding of the workings of the Sacramental system.  This understanding is the result of 49 years as a priest and 55 years as a person committed to respond to the Gospel message in a pale semblance of Francis of Assisi’s embrace of the call.  But I find that I must investigate whether or not I agree with the reservations which Fr. Joe Zimmerman expressed concerning the political agenda (and rhetoric) of the Pro-Life movement.

    To indicate the source of my uneasiness, I note that, in Christian Ethics:  An Ethics of Intimacy, I worked from Walter Ong’s scholarly readings of texts which indicate how and why literacy triumphed over orality as the foundation of western culture and from Wittgenstein’s analysis of the workings of everyday language.  The interplay of the two yielded two theses, (1) that, as linguistic beings, we are naked pronouns in search of fruitful metaphors, and (2) that, as Nietzsche argued, cultures transmitted by the western literary tradition privilege forms of life generated by the metaphor of power and judgment over the form of life generated by the metaphor of intimacy.

        (Academics, please note that my critiques of the literary foundations of ethical theories is inspired by my search for a moral discourse without foundations.  As a postmodernist, I am convinced that arguments concerning foundations are designed to justify a claim that judgments accredited by some ethical theory are devoid of arbitrariness, conventionality, rationalization, assumptions or a will to power.  Or, from another perspective, they are designed to clothe an ethical tradition with moral authority over judgments concerning past, present or future responses to events in the personal history of any and all moral agents.)

    In this context, Ong’s analysis evoked an awareness that claims to authority rested on literary conventions designed to diminish the anxiety of authorship generated by the interiorization of the detachment inherent in literacy as an interrogatory stance.  Decades later, the import of Ong’s imaginative reconstruction of the gradual triumph of literacy as an enduring foundation of western culture enabled me to appreciate the ways that the postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion generated reading codes designed to deconstruct the literary foundations of the rationalist and ethical strands in the western philosophical tradition.

    Consequently, when I sought to expose the influence of the triumph of literacy on the Christian tradition (Catholic and Protestant), I argued three theses:  (1)  Any theological tradition which reads the Scriptures through a code derived from a metaphor of power and judgment must assume that the eternal Word would not have entered human history if Adam had not sinned, while the tradition which reads the Scriptures through a code derived from a metaphor of intimacy places the eternal Word at the center of life in the Trinity, the act of creation, the course of human history and the lives of all human beings.  (2)  When either an incarnational theology or an ethics of intimacy is distorted, the other suffers.  (3)  Any recourse to power or judgment on a journey to deepening intimacy with the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and other human beings aborts or distorts that journey.  But I did not immediately attempt to apply this ethics of intimacy to the abortion issue.

    Fr. Joe’s concerns challenged me to find out where I stand on the issue.  Since so much of my quest for intellectual, moral and personal integrity has occurred in an academic setting, I sort out my tangled responses to issues by writing.  And when I write, I must find my way into an issue through a tangle of personal convictions, concerns, frustrations and ingrained prejudices.

    1.  Somehow, many of my students sensed that I would not be judgmental, no matter what personal issues they shared with me.  On my part, I never felt the need to be judgmental, because they came so vulnerably open and so obviously in pain.  At any rate, during my many years of teaching, a number of coeds came to me overwhelmed with anguish and anxiety because of an unexpected pregnancy.  In each instance, I felt obliged to explore all options with them, including abortion, marrying the man involved, keeping the baby as a single mother, allowing the father to take the baby, putting the baby up for adoption, involving her and his parents in the decision, and whatever else might surface.  Though I addressed the question of an abortion with a great deal of anxiety, I had to explore the option non-judgmentally.  I prayed that they would choose another option.  But, if they ended up as a single parent, I wanted them to remember a conscious decision to refuse an abortion whenever they might later be tempted to resent what a needy child demanded of them.

        When I learned, after the fact, that one of these women had had an abortion, I was heartbroken, but I found myself more concerned about her than about the baby.  In my reflections on the implications of an incarnational theology, I had long ago rejected the theological construct which consigned unbaptized infants to limbo.  I knew the baby was with God.  But I also knew that, for the rest of her life, this event (like every other significant event in her life) would influence the woman’s own inner journey and any and all of her interactions with males and children.

        In my usual fashion, I find myself wanting to say something that I dared not say at a gathering of people of all faiths and none at the house of close friends of mine.  A woman who had been a Catholic referred to the “good old Catholic guilt” that still evoked anguish over an abortion she had had thirty years ago.  The bitterness with which she spoke implied that, if the Catholic tradition had not made an essentially personal decision into a moral issue, she would not have carried this burden all these years.  Everyone looked at me, but I was paralyzed.  Her bitterness grieved me, but I said nothing.  If we had been talking person-to-person, I would have responded compassionately.  As it was, I feared that she wanted to turn this into a debate in which we would both have been losers on multiple dimensions of personal experience.  I could only regret that I have never known how to probe my tangled feelings in a public forum.

        Looking back on the event, I suspect that those tangled feelings included the urge to respond compassionately to the revelation that she had carried the abortion as a burden of guilt for all these years.  The straightforward expression of that compassion was choked off by an outrage at God and at the Church.  The outrage found expression in two questions, “Why didn’t the providence of the Father put her in contact with someone in Project Rachel?” and “Why is Project Rachel one of the best kept secrets in the Catholic Church?”.

   

        Today, when I apply the ethics of intimacy to this event, the outrage has a different target.  I now trace the fact that this wounded individual was captive to a burden of guilt to recent efforts to situate the issue of abortion in a moral discourse grounded in a metaphor of power and judgment rather than a metaphor of intimacy.  Somehow, the moral discourse she acquired through her early indoctrination in the dogmatism of the Baltimore Catechism did not invite her to meet Jesus as the wounded Healer, to hear the Spirit’s word of love for her, or to see the Father’s providence at work in her contacts with others.  Instead, it condemned her to process her grieving in terms of a moral discourse which imposed an implacable judgment rather than one which called her to weave this event into her personal history in life-giving ways.

     

        Today, I suspect those present would have been grateful if I had defused the situation by framing the discussion with three theses:  (1) We are linguistic beings whose uniquely personal identities are to a large extent the product of the formative power of the everyday languages we use to process and respond to events in our personal histories.  (2)  Consequently, we may use everyday English in fruitful, sterile, counter-productive or destructive ways.  (3)  In any case, the meaning of any event in our life depends on how we respond to it in the future, not how it entered our personal histories.  -  By the time I had led the group down this garden path, I might have defused their uneasiness with the bitterness I sensed in the woman’s self-revelation and opened the way for examples which illuminated the differences between forms of life derived from metaphors of power and judgment and the metaphor of intimacy.  In that context, I could have introduced my conviction that the heuristic principle encoded in a hermeneutics of suspicion echoed the insight of Israel’s great prophets that moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of every human action and assertion.

         At the time, however, I left the conversation suffused with shame and consumed by grief over my inability to respond directly to the woman’s pain.  As it is, the memory reminds me that I must grieve over such interactions in the past if I am to weave them into my life in fruitful ways.

    2.  My sheltered childhood and the superficial contacts with women during my years in the seminary had not provided me with a language capable of processing eruptive sexual urges.  If I had left the seminary in my mid-twenties, I might well have fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman I hardly knew and didn’t love.  But I know, beyond a doubt, that I would have wanted to raise any child I fathered.  Naive as I was, I might even have supposed that I could enter a life-giving marriage with the child’s mother.  Given the number of annulment proceedings that I have been involved in, I now view that supposition as a formula for tragedy for all concerned, but that only confirms my sense of the complexity of the issue.

    3.  I will be forever grateful for the women involved with Project Rachel who helped me to understand how abortions had wounded them, even if the wound did not surface for years (or even decades) after the abortion.  With this understanding, I was able to respond with compassion rather than condemnation when past abortions surfaced in my interactions with women who came to talk about other issues.  I wanted to be involved in a way that enabled these women to experience the intensely personal involvement of Father, Jesus and Holy Spirit in their lives.  On their part, the anguish of these women showed me how important it is for them to engage in healing and life-giving conversations with their aborted infants.

    4.  A few years ago, I was outraged by a letter sent by the Bishop of my diocese to be read at every week-end Mass during the last presidential campaign.  To frame his pronouncement on the issue of abortion, the Bishop posited a distinction between the laity who were to carry the gospel message into secular environments and the bishops who defined that message.  I was cynically amused by the fact that this distinction ignored the role of priests like me whose years of pastoral involvement might be worth hearing.  But I was stunned by the Bishop’s assertion that the abortion issue trumped all other moral issues in the up-coming presidential election.  In effect, he decreed that I should support the re-election of George W. Bush as president and vote for members of a party which supports huge expenditures of funds for the military, but ignores the cries of the poor and marginalized and allows Texas oilmen to frame its policies on the environment.

        If a student had brought up that letter in one of my classes, I would have discussed the issue at length.  In this instance, since there was no opportunity for an interactive discussion, I sat stone-faced while the letter was read at all the Masses.  But I reacted with moral repugnance to the pretense that this letter spoke with moral authority.

My Critique of the Bishop’s Pronouncement

                        

    Rhetorically, the Bishop’s pronouncement made abortion the paradigm example of a violent denial of life.  A case can be made for this abstraction, since a fetus is surely helpless and vulnerable.  But I am equally horrified by the violence done to children by parents who had themselves been abused in unspeakable ways, by the lack of concern for children who are starving, by the lack of concern for children who are sold into sexual slavery, by ways that Iraqi children have been traumatized by war, and the like.  Try as I might, I cannot understand how members of the hierarchy can pretend to rank these obscenities on a moral scale.

From the perspective of the moral discourse I set forth in my work in progress, however, the most disturbing feature of the letter was the way that it politicized a moral issue.  This moral discourse articulates an insight first voiced by Israel’s great prophets and recently recovered by the postmodernist movement: a tangle of moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of every human action and assertion.  And since the postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion is designed to expose violence in any shape or form, its critical apparatus is worth considering.  This apparatus is framed by three insights, (1) that we dwell within linguistic formulations forged by a literary tradition, (2) that it is quite impossible to escape entirely from the formative power of language on longings, passion, desire, perception, imagination, motivation, intentions, thought, action and aspirations, and (3) that moral judgments based on a claim to speak from a god-like perspective on language, experience and reality disguise the will to power on the part of those who seek to impose their judgments on others.

Regarding (2) and (3), the ethical theory forged by Aquinas is grounded in the assumption that the use of reason can reveal an objective moral order which the use of right reason can identify.  From a postmodernist perspective, Aquinas’s theory disguises the arbitrariness inherent in any claim to occupy a god-like perspective and rationalizes the violence inherent in judgments which fail to consider the many moral issues entangled in any human action or assertion.

As far as I can see, Thomists still invoke the metaphysical theory used by Aquinas to ground his ethical theory to justify the assertion that there is an objective moral order.  To deflect attention from their inability to justify this theory philosophically, they use the emphasis on an objective morality to frame an argument which asserts that morality collapses if authoritative (definitive) moral judgments are beyond reach.  In its own right, this argument implies that there are only two possibilities, an objective moral order or a sheer relativism which legitimates whatever an agent wants to do.  In my work in progress, however, I weave the insight of Israel’s great prophets into a moral discourse which privileges issues encountered in person-to-person involvements over issues encountered in relationships between and among detached individuals.  And I privilege intellectual integrity over -isms designed to rationalize belief-systems of whatever sort.

With profound sadness, therefore, I confess that I have more respect for postmodernists who speak in a hollow voice of prophetic protest than I have for Catholic moral theologians who maintain that Aquinas provided the authoritative description of human nature and, thereby, of human reality.  From a postmodernist perspective, Aquinas’ ethical theory is one of the weakest among contending theories which ground moral discourse outside of human reality, in some reductive conception of human reality or in a fictive voice of reason.  But I also suggest that the postmodernist insistence that moral pronouncements speak in a hollow voice of prophetic protest is clearly false, since everyday English transmits a moral discourse which can speak for itself.

In the same vein, I trust the literary forms forged by Nietzsche—the archeology of knowledge and the genealogy of morals—more than I trust a literary form that promises the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  But I also trust (1) that the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel’s prophets generated a form of life conducive to a realizable purpose and (2) that this form of life provided a positive center for their moral protests against the depersonalizing violence hidden in any moral discourse grounded in a metaphor of power and judgment.

My critique of ethical theories is sharply focused.  In Christian Ethics:  A Ethics of Intimacy, I offer analyses of everyday English designed to unpack the implications of a language designed to transform the longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence and for intimate involvements with other unique individuals into a realizable quest.  In this project, I used reason as a tool.  But the only claim I would make for an ethics of intimacy is that it subverts Kant’s thesis that morality resides in judgment.  For a moral discourse capable of promoting the quest for a fully human existence requires many purposes derived from the metaphor of power and judgment as well.

 

    (SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  Since judgments must be supported by reasons, deconstructive readings of rhetorics grounded in a metaphor of power and judgment subvert the authority of such judgments by showing that the reasons advanced to support any judgment rationalize a conception of human reality favored by the judge in question.  In usually understated ways, these readings expose the benefits conferred on the powers-that-be and the violence inflicted on dispossessed and marginalized individuals by the distinctions and boundaries privileged by the language at hand,  In so doing, they voice a moral protest against the violence enshrined in any everyday language in a way that speaks for itself.

    On a positive note, these readings recover the empty literary space projected by the Babylonian epics as a place where the oppressed, abused, marginalized, silenced and excluded can be heard.  But the hermeneutics of suspicion is a literary ploy designed to absolve postmodernist readers from any need to state what they stand for.  In marked contrast, I do not hesitate to assert (1) that I stand for the elusive longing for intimacy and (2) that this longing is inseparable from the longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.

    To frame the point at issue, I sometimes invoke Heidegger’s metaphorical description of everyday languages as abodes in which we dwell suspended over the abyss.  (Heidegger used this metaphor to subvert the rationalist promise of an ideal language that would present the whole of reality transparently and to bridge the chasm between subjectivity and objectivity generated by Descartes’s methodical doubt.)  This depiction of ordinary language illuminates the difference between readings generated by the hermeneutics of suspicion and Wittgenstein’s analysis of the workings of everyday English.  On the one hand, the hermeneutics of suspicion is designed to show that the formative power of the languages we inhabit enshrine an ineradicable violence.  On the other, a Wittgensteinean analysis of everyday English lays bare the workings of a form of life which evokes vulnerable self-revelations which transform the longing for ever-deepening intimacy with loved ones into a realizable quest.  For those who commit themselves to the journey delineated by this form of life, even individuals whose voices were initially silenced can learn how to translate respect for their deepest longings into protests against the ways that their voices were silenced.

    Sadly, their poignant accounts of their personal journeys may reach only a small audience who grasp the import of a moral discourse derived from a metaphor of intimacy rather than a metaphor of power and judgment.

    At risk of repeating myself once too often, I note that the metaphor of intimacy is the product of powerful sympathetic imaginations rather than of a fictive voice of reason.  As such, it can generate linguistic formulations which enable the cries of the oppressed, the dispossessed, the abused, the marginalized, the silenced, the outcast and the stranger to voice their elusive longing to be heard by those who would silence or ignore them.

         

                   -------------------

A CYNICAL ASIDE

      

    Recently, I was backed into a corner by a Catholic woman whose life is centered in protests against abortion.  My efforts to transform our encounter into a conversation were futile.  (She even ignored my attempts to tell her that she was preaching to the choir.)  Try as I might, I could not escape from a judgment that I was hearing echoes of a Christian fundamentalism in her self-righteous indignation.  These Christians center their lives in two beliefs, (1) an incoherent doctrine of biblical inerrancy (the Protestant version of the format of the Baltimore Catechism, with its implicit promise of definitive answers to every moral and theological question) and (2) the belief that the only way to be saved was to accept Jesus as one’s personal Savior (with its overtones of exclusive election).

    To understand her obsessive need to rant and rave against abortion, I was tempted to judge that she somehow supposed that a passionate opposition to abortion ensured her a place among the elect.  To all appearances, she assumed that her righteous commitment to the abolition of abortion entitled her to tell the world how God is involved in the lives of everyone.  Tragically, it also enabled her to partake in public protests while avoiding personal involvements with wounded individuals.  In Bonhoeffer’s terms, however, she embraced a doctrine of “cheap grace,” since her narrow commitment allowed her to focus all her compassion on a fetus with whom she would never have to be involved in intimate ways on a perilous journey into the unknown.

    Sadly, this encounter evoked memories of my reaction to the letter in which our Bishop asserted that abortion trumped all other moral issues in the recent presidential election.  If I had followed his admonition, I would have voted for a President who refused to enter into international treaties designed to address global warming, who licensed torture, refused to put his reputed moral authority on the line over the issue of immigration, advocated capital punishment, pushed through a tax-code designed to perpetuate Reagan’s baptism of an economic system in which the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, disguised his appeals to self-interest with a program of “compassionate conservativism” which promised government support for faith-based programs but refused to include money in the budget to supply food to religious institutions dedicated to providing food to those in need, and appealed to fear and self-interest to justify his war in Iraq.  (I have only contempt for anyone who denies that Bush played on the fears evoked by 9-11 in ways that would have won applause from Machiavelli.)      

    My reference to Reagan’s bastardization of the gospel message is grounded in an article by Robert Bellah on the American secular religion.  In this article, Bellah pointed out that the inaugural addresses of every president prior to Reagan universally offered secular versions of biblical themes.  (1) All echoed the doctrine of Election:  Americans were the Chosen People.  (2) All echoed the Exodus theme:  to escape some form of religious persecution or from oppressive social structures, our ancestors crossed the ocean (the Red Sea) to enter the promised land.  (3)  The land they entered was a land “flowing with milk and honey”, an endless frontier which could accommodate an indefinite number of journeys into the unknown.  (4)  The covenant-theme emerged in the social contract which established the form of government celebrated by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to the promotion of equality.  (5)  And because the citizens of the United States were so favored, they were divinely commissioned to bear witness to the blessings of democracy to the whole world.

    Reagan’s inaugural address replaced these themes with a celebration of Locke’s version of the social contract.  This version can be succinctly stated.  Freedom is an inalienable right.  Consequently, the social contract which citizens enter can only constitute a form of government designed to protect their freedom and enforce freely entered contracts.  As a result, a government which is concerned with the social welfare of all of its citizens becomes the problem, not the solution to disruptive protests.  And elected officials must not forget that the power to tax is limited to money needed to support an army needed to protect them from other nations and to support a judicial system needed to enforce freely entered contracts.  On their part, Republicans must insist that this limitation is not arbitrary, since individuals know how to enhance their personal welfare better than a faceless bureaucracy could ever do.

    In the end, the motivation for constituting such a form of government is simple:  enlightened self-interest.  More recently, Bush has taken the inner logic of Reagan’s rhetoric to an obscene extreme in his justification of his unilateral invasion of Iraq.  Stripped of shifting rationalizations, this rhetoric extended Locke’s legitimation of enlightened self-interest to include a rhetoric which justified actions designed to protect American interests anywhere in the world.  And Bush added insult to injury when he wove echoes of biblical themes into hidden appeals to Christian fundamentalists who were all too inclined to believe that American interests trump the interests of nations we exploit because we are a chosen people, an elect.

    From a postmodernist perspective, Bush’s rhetoric echoes the dictum, “Might makes right.”  The war in Iraq is a case in point.  As moral justification for unilateral action, he insisted that, as President, he was entitled to use force to defend American interests.  Callously, he used a biblical theme to suggest that, as the guardian of democracy, we invaded Iraq in order to liberate its suffering citizens and bring democracy to the whole area.

    Since my father, whom I respected, was a committed Republican, I had in the past resisted the conclusion that, on the national level, the Republican party remains committed to the gospel according to Reagan.  Today, I cannot vote for a Republican candidate for the Senate, the House or the Presidency, and I am appalled by the bias of the Catholic judges appointed to the Supreme Court in recent years.  They pretend to be strict constructionists.  In fact, they read the Constitution through a code indebted to a strictly juridical understanding of the social contract.  In so doing, they impose political positions adopted by the Republican party.  And from a Catholic perspective, they use an interpretative code that is strikingly similar to that used by Fundamentalists who pretend to read the Scriptures literally.  Somehow, they can find no room for the principles of social justice which are so constitutive of the gospel message.

    The reference to the gospel according to Reagan was deliberate.  Tragically, the way that Reagan framed political discourse in the United States still sets the terms of debates in campaigns.  As a result, I seldom find a democratic candidate who voices my concerns and my understanding of the American dream.  But I continue to hope for a politician who will appeal to the prophetic insistence that God’s moral will can be heard in the cries of the oppressed and dispossessed rather than in the dictates of an economic system supposedly regulated by an “invisible hand,”

A LENGTHY DIGRESSION WHICH CAN BE SKIPPED WITHOUT LOSS

                                               

    I am indebted to a number of postmodernist authors (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes and LeMan, in particular) for my understanding of the anxiety of authorship and the issue of authority.  They provide a critical apparatus for protests against the violence implicit in the distinctions and boundaries favored by anyone who pretends to speak with authority.  Since I align myself with those who believe that the Gospel message speaks for itself, I suggest that anyone who wants to accuse me of being a cafeteria Catholic need only peruse earlier installments of these reflections which suggest that Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address reveals that he, too, is a cafeteria Catholic.  And in my worst moments, I cannot help but compare the deceit fostered by the totalitarian rule that prevailed in Russia with the self-deception needed to blind ecclesiastical authorities to the violence inherent in the cover-up of the sexual abuse of minors that persists to this day.  The strategies adopted by cardinals, archbishops and bishops to prevent the faithful from being disillusioned with and outraged by their stewardship reveal how radically they fail to understand an ethics of intimacy and how thoroughly they have been formed (and corrupted) by the power-structure of an hierarchically structured institution.

    I do try to understand why the Pope, curial officials and American cardinals and bishops are so committed to perpetuating the prevailing ecclesiastical structure.  Since I have often craved validation by the reigning authorities, I can imagine a system which inculcates that craving in those who are accepted for ordination.  In the end, however, I return again and again to the texts which preserved the utterances of Hosea, Micah, First and Second and Third Isaiah, and Jeremiah.  These texts speak to me with moral authority because they speak for themselves, and they also provide a detached perspective which enabled me to critique both voices which pretend to bind the future and the voices of adherents of the postmodernist movement who pretend that, to avoid re-inscribing violence in their critiques, they can only critique texts and utterances at hand.  (At the present time, I have no interest in exploring which pretense grieves me most.)

    In passing, I confess that the above reflections are triggered by two remarks continually voiced by ecclesiastical authorities and lay-people who are ever-ready to report any act or utterance of priests who fail to conform to their distorted version of a pre-Vatican II orthodoxy.  (1)  The Church is not a democracy.  (2)  One cannot be a cafeteria Catholic.  But the arbitrariness of these either-or formulations can easily be exposed.  The Church is neither a pure democracy nor an institution ruled by an imperial papacy.  Between these polar opposites, there are countless alternatives.  From the perspective encoded in these alternatives, both John Paul II and Benedict XVI are cafeteria Catholics.

    On his part, Pope John Paul II assumed that the application of his personalist philosophy to moral issues spoke with moral authority.  From an analytic perspective, however, his personalism was a futile effort to derive an emphasis on the inherent dignity of each person from enlightenment metaphors of individuality.  This personalism could generate penetrating critiques of the totalitarian import of Communism, but it blinded him to the totalitarian import of his stewardship of the Church.

    Structurally, personalism echoes the metaphor of individuality which Luther used to transform a traditional distinction between the sacred and the secular into a polar opposition.  And for those who hear a voice in every linguistic formulation, that echo can be heard in the way that Pope John Paul II used this -ism to legitimate both prophetic protests against violence in the secular domain and harsh condemnations of theologians who questioned his authority, including the authority to bind the future.

    Tragically, John Paul II’s failure to remain involved in the philosophical dialogue which contributed significantly to his personalism led him to appoint cardinals, archbishops and bishops willing to perpetuate the pretense that he spoke in a timeless voice.  And since those appointees included a cardinal who functioned as his Grand Inquisitor, it is likely that prophets who ground their protests in the metaphors of intimacy forged by Israel’s prophets will continue to be marginalized or silenced.  

    Since that cardinal is now Pope, I must question the frequent journalistic references which portray Benedict XVI as a world-class theologian.  Again and again, he pretends to speak as the authentic interpreter of the dialogue between Scripture and Tradition that distinguishes the Catholic from the Protestant tradition.  Like John Paul II, however, he avoids an honest engagement with the incarnational theology generated by the Franciscan tradition or the critical apparatus which propels the postmodernist movement.   Instead, he derives his critique of secularism from a misplaced debate whose structure continues to center ecumenical dialogue in a polar opposition between revelation and reason, Scripture and Tradition, faith and certainty, faith and works, and the sacred and the secular.

    I suggest, therefore, that the belief-system and the moral discourse which Benedict XVI seeks to impose on the Church is grounded in the medieval metaphor of the Two Books.  Both inscribe the supposition that a rational and purposive God authored an autonomous Book of Nature which can be read by a natural light of reason and a Scriptural text which reveals God’s response to a transgression committed by the father of the entire human race.  Historically, this metaphor generated both a moral discourse which asserted that a rational and purposive Creator inscribed an objective moral order implanted in an autonomous Book of Nature authored by a rational and purposive Creator, and a claim that the Scriptures were an autonomous Book authored by a God whose justice demanded a cruel and humiliating death of the incarnate Word as fitting reparation for the sin of Adam.  But the foundational status of this metaphor has been thoroughly subverted by philosophical criticism and biblical studies.

    From this perspective, I trace Benedict XVI’s fear of secularization to an inability to escape from the dualism inscribed in Augustine’s doctrine of original sin.  Among his easily identifiable ploys, he couples an emphasis on truth with his insistence that he is guardian of the truth.  Less obviously, he seems to believe that an emphasis on Jesus, by taking on human sinfulness, functioned as a mediator who erased all dualisms. 

    My critique:  A focus on sin implicitly devalues the longing for ever-deepening person-to-person involvements between and among unique individuals which has haunted both the literary, philosophical and theological strands of the western literary tradition.  For those who commit themselves to this quest, honesty, not truth, is the issue.

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    In sum, focusing on abortion as the paradigm instance of violence obscures critical issues.  The fault lies in the belief that a Thomistic conception of reason can compel assent and consent from all people of good will to the moral judgments which satisfy it dictates.  By definition, purportedly authoritative judgments are limited to narrowly focused inquiries.  But this narrow focus cannot be reconciled with the prophetic insight that tangled moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of any human action or assertion.

    This prophetic insight, I suggest, concerns the longing for intimacy.  At the very least, a moral discourse derived from the metaphor of intimacy reveals that judgments dictated by reason are ultimately dehumanizing and depersonalizing.  (Since I cannot take the Bishop’s decree seriously, I have no desire to expend the energy needed to expose its dehumanizing and depersonalizing import.)

    To frame this insight in my now abandoned work in progress, I develop three points in considerable detail:

    1.  The gradual triumph of literacy over orality as the foundation of western culture generated significant distinctions among the natural, social, personal, political, economic, aesthetic, moral and religious dimensions of life.

    2.  The powerful sympathetic imaginations of Israel’s great prophets inspired metaphors which exposed the violence done to the oppressed, the abused, the dispossessed, the marginalized, the silenced, the outcast and the strangers by the powers-that-be.  Because these metaphors privileged the personal dimensions of experience over all others, they revealed that moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of every human action and assertion.  This insight was suppressed by an ethical tradition generated and governed by the rule of the One, but postmodernist critiques of the myth of Modernity recovered it.

        These critiques also revealed the dehumanizing and depersonalizing import of any moral discourse derived from a metaphor of individuality.  These metaphors were designed to detach individuals from the oppressive hold of totalitarian forms of governance.  But a form of life designed to foster and protect detachment cannot generate a language capable of transforming a longing for deepening person-to-person involvements into a realizable quest.  (For a prime example of the sterility of any metaphor of intimacy, see the inability of Pope John Paul II’s personalism to escape from a stance toward detached Others which respects their inherent dignity.)

 

    3.  Ethical theories designed to validate definitive moral judgments are grounded in a metaphor of power and judgment.  In the Modern Era, these theories fill the hollow center of a Cartesian metaphor of individuality with a fictive voice of reason, with the promise that this voice speaks from a detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective which human beings can occupy interchangeably.  As the postmodernist critique shows, however, a god-like perspective is quite impossible.  Consequently, those who pretend that they alone speak from such a perspective are insufferably arrogant.

    These three points informed my interactions with pregnant college students who faced issues in the personal, familial, social, economic, moral and religious dimensions of their life.  Offering them a prohibition grounded in a dubious ethical theory would have been both disrespectful and counter-productive.  Consequently, the Bishop’s letter increased my suspicion that the hierarchy seems determined to center the distinctive identity of Catholics in their willingness to obey norms governing sexuality, with little regard for issues of social justice.  And this suspicion was further enhanced when one of the few pronouncements agreed upon by the American bishops at their recent meeting was an insistence on the prohibition against the use of contraceptives.  To support the argument, they appealed to a so-called natural-law theory which supports implacable judgments, but does nothing to illuminate how people in love are to integrate their sexuality with all their other passions.

    To dramatize the point at issue, I suggest that the only way to address sexual issues effectively is to foster an understanding of genuine person-to-person involvements.  From this perspective, it is obvious (1) that individuals who engage in casual sex must dissociate their sexuality from other deep feelings, (2) that passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions are the only way to integrate sexuality in deepening person-to-person involvements, and (3) that the inability of members of the hierarchy to treat women as equals and their obsession reveals that they have not so integrated their sexuality in their lives.

    In a less obvious way, the liturgical decrees designed to mark a clear distinction between the priest and other members of the Eucharistic community reveal a sad fear of personal involvements.  A liturgy which nurtures personal contacts calls for open expressions of a shared commitment to love one another as Jesus loves us.  By contrast, a liturgy which is designed to protect a hierarchically structured institution fosters detachment.  I suggest, therefore, that liturgical issues cannot be divorced from a Catholic response to the fact that the percentage of Catholics who have abortions does not differ significantly from the over-all percentage of women in the United States.

    In sum, many pregnancies outside of wedlock result from the fact that we acquire a repertoire of emotional reactions through a pervasive process of socialization.  These long-practiced reactions reduce interactions between individuals to transactions (akin to economic exchanges).  And though they may serve us well socially, they are obstacles to intimacy.  I.e., if intimacy is to deepen, those involved must learn how to sort out these tangled reactions, identify the deep feelings they distort, and share their discoveries honestly and vulnerably with those targeted by the reaction in question.  (To understand how emotional reactions work, try to identify the many and varied reactions you use without reflection to express anger.)

    A critical consequence of emotional reactions is seldom recognized.  But experience confirms that, if we cannot express all feelings honestly in a genuine person-to-person involvement, soon all are distorted.  And nowhere is this more evident than in instances where sexuality is detached from a willingness to face anger, fear, shame, caring, compassion, joy and playfulness honestly.  Sex, then, is reduced to a desire for pleasure or distorted by sexual politics.  But since nothing is simple in person-to-person interactions, sexual intercourse between individuals marked by every event in their personal histories is never merely “doing what comes naturally.”

    A somewhat cynical formula expressing the conventional wisdom exposes the way that socialization uses an economic model to process experience between detached individuals:  “Women give sex to get love, while men give love to get sex.”  In a culture which celebrates the liberation of sexuality from personal inhibitions and moral restraints, this suggestion may illuminate hidden motivations, but the sort of sexual encounters fostered by the strategies it inscribes are incompatible with a commitment to the passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions conducive to deepening person-to-person involvements.  Consequently, the sort of “love” it refers to is a blatant counterfeit which cynically prostitutes the language which transforms an elusive longing for intimacy into a realizable quest.

    In Christian Ethics:  An Ethics of Intimacy, I did not extend my analysis of Jesus’ call, “Love one another as I have loved you,” to concrete analyses of the Catholic tradition’s difficulties with sexual issues.  But my concern with the relationship between an incarnational theology and an ethics of intimacy was inspired by a conviction that we fail to provide our young people with a language which enables them to process their interactions with one another in ways conducive to deepening intimacy.  As a result, they easily succumb to an urgent sexuality detached from other profoundly human passions in intensely personal interactions.

    From a moral perspective, therefore, the pretense that an objective moral order authorizes a categorical “No!” is both an exercise in futility and an abdication of responsibility on the part of those who present themselves as the authentic expositors of the gospel message.  Indeed, as a purportedly definitive judgment, the “No” cannot pass the test encoded in a juridical dictum, “Ought implies can.”  Though Kant was the first modern philosopher to emphasize this dictum, Catholic moral theology transmitted a principle, Ad impossibile nemo tenetur, which is accurately paraphrased as the insight that individuals cannot be held to do what they cannot do.  In both traditions, this dictum was used to generate an understanding of factors which might justify a plea of diminished responsibility.  But adherents of both traditions continued to argue that theories of diminished responsibility must be grounded in an ethical theory which provides an authoritative definition of personal responsibility.

    When I attempted to apply this dictum to the issue of abortion, Fr. Joe Zimmerman reminded me that I would be in for a “hard sell” if I hoped to be heard respectfully by those who refuse or fail to recognize the moral import of the postmodernist critique of authority in any shape or form.  I can only respond:  I am often forced to identify with the poignant cry voiced in Romans 7:  “The good that I would do, that I don’t, and the evil that I would not do, that I do.”   How could I possibly identify with a moral discourse which fostered a stance grounded in a dictum, “Just say No!”?  And how could I merely repeat pronouncements of members of the hierarchy in response to the vulnerable self-revelations of individuals who come me with tangled feelings and concerns?

    To frame my refusal, I gladly invoke a formulation of the question by a young biblical scholar (whose name I forget) who framed his lecture on Israel’s prophets with three questions:  (a)  What does the prophet stand for?  (b)  What does the prophet stand against?  (c)  Who does the prophet stand with?  And I suggest that their metaphors of intimacy speak so authoritatively across cultures because what they stand against is derived from what they stand for and because they call for sympathetic involvement with those who inflict and those who suffer violence.

     Tragically, once the issue of abortion entered the political arena in the United States, it was framed by a language of rights.  In my work in progress, I invoke Wittgenstein’s insight that the meaning of a word in everyday language is determined by its use in a form of life.  From this perspective, a language of “rights” is designed to protect detached individuals from concentrations of power in institutions and from violence inflicted by other individuals.  In this context, those who regard “rights” as possessions to be jealously guarded and fiercely defended assume that their use of this language fosters and protects personal dimensions of existence.  In point of fact, this use is derived from Descartes’ posit of solipsistic individuals and Locke’s supposition that these individuals are endowed with an inalienable right to freedom from coercion of any sort whatever.  And in the end, this form of life must degenerate into a litigious society with echoes of Hobbes’ war of all against all.

    But invocations of “rights” have a very different meaning in a form of life designed to foster person-to-person involvements.  Such involvements evoke a shared vulnerability.  In this context, I support your right to say what I violently disagree with so that you will support my right to counter what you say.  (In my work in progress, I argue that political discourse remains moral if and only if it evokes a sense of shared vulnerability which calls all concerned to protect freedom and promote equality.)

   From the latter perspective, the rhetorics of Pro-Choice and Pro-Life advocate a stance grounded in a metaphor of power and judgment rather than in a metaphor of intimacy.  Concretely, the rhetoric of Pro-Choice advocates invokes Locke’s supposition that freedom is an inalienable right.  It is supplemented by the assertion that a woman’s body is her own.  In its own right, this assertion implies that those who seek to prohibit abortion want to dispose of women’s bodies in a way that amounts to ownership over them.  But from an analytic perspective, it invokes a metaphor of individuality which implies that rights are possessions that must be jealously guarded and fiercely protected.  In so doing, it defines the controversy as a power-struggle.

    In the same vein, when Pro-Life advocates present themselves as defenders of persons who cannot speak for themselves, they echo the moral discourse centered in a shared vulnerability.  But their single-issue agenda devalues the vulnerability of many women who see abortion as the only option.

    Even the most passionate among individuals committed to the Pro-Life movement bear witness to the flaws in their obsession.  Their commitment implies that those who perform or undergo abortions are objectively murderers.  When asked if they would advocate prison terms for women who have abortions, most demur.  They want only to target those who provide abortions.

        (ASIDE:  Though many Pro-Life advocates have no such qualms, leaders in the Pro-Life movement shy away from talk of “murder”.  To avoid the appearance of being harshly judgmental, they seek ways to retain the insistence that abortion is objectively murder without passing judgment on those involved in an abortion.  E.g., in the Prayers of the Faithful at Eucharistic celebrations, many Pro-Life advocates pray “For an end to abortion and its atrocities.”  In an effort to be positive, others pray instead “For a respect for life from conception to natural death.”  Please note:  There is a considerable gap between advocating prison for abortion providers and a desire to respect the often anguished decisions of women who are surely accomplices in the act.)

    On this issue, then, I advocate a moral discourse designed to evoke the longing for intensely personal involvements and delineate a quest which transforms the longing into a realizable purpose.  Clearly, a moral discourse grounded in a metaphor of individuality cannot not evoke such a longing.  As a result, I am convinced that both the political process and the proclamation of the gospel message have been disastrously distorted by the polarization provoked by the prominent role acquired by the issue of abortion in recent elections.

    The damage to the political process can be seen in the support of the Christian right for politicians who couple a stance against abortion with a determination to promote an economic system in which the gap between rich and poor is becoming obscene.  However, since I have always viewed the political process with a suspicion bordering on cynicism, I am unable to offer a strategy capable of refocusing the issue.  I can only suggest that the disastrous prostitution of the gospel message inherent in the politicization of the issue of abortion can be illuminated by a “thought-experiment” of the sort used by scientists and philosophers to illuminate issues which seemed to defy resolution.  This thought-experiment is my version of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”, without its eloquence.

        1.  To set the stage for the thought-experiment, I note that everyday English transmits many forms of life, including a form of life which transforms the longing for intimacy into a realizable quest.  This language enables Christians to hear the gospel message in a distinctive way.

        2.  To formulate an experiment which can never be performed, I wonder how committed Christians who use the language of intimacy to process their interactions with others would respond to the issue of abortion in a society in which they had no hope of influencing the political process.  I cannot imagine that they would attempt to politicize the issue.  If they hoped to prevent an abortion, they would have to find a distinctively Christian way to do so.

       3.  To focus of the question of a distinctively Christian response, consider Jesus’ call, “Love one another as I have loved you”, understand Communion with him in the Eucharist in light of his words, “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me.”, and embrace the insistence of Israel’s greatest prophets that God’s voice is heard in the cries of the oppressed, the dispossessed, the abused, the marginalized, the silenced and the outcast.   

          (a)  The call to love as Jesus loves implies that Jesus is intimately involved with women contemplating an abortion, responding to their anguish and anxiety with compassion.

          (b)  His intimate involvement with them implies that we increase his pain when we wound them with judgments passed without concern for their crises.

          (c)  The insistence of the prophets implies that Jesus comes to us through one another, and, by extension, that he depends on us to translate his compassion into effective care and concern.

        In this context, the paradigm experience is that of married couples who vow to enter a marriage in Christ which will soon reveal that they are strangers to each other and to themselves.  If they live the vow to allow Jesus’ love for the one they love to comes through them, they soon discover how little they understand or trust Jesus’ love for themselves.  And as the involvement taps deeply buried tangles, they lapse into emotional reactions which provoke dramatic confrontations or silent struggles.  But sooner or later, if only from exhaustion, lovers come to realize that intensely personal involvements call for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions with one another.  And from this new perspective, they learn how to identify the judgments and strategies enshrined in emotional reactions.

    Nonetheless, if married couples were the only ones who could discover that intimate involvements call for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvements, I would be excluded from the elect.  In fact, I have heard the call in countless experiences.  One such transforming moment was triggered by a letter from my beloved niece who noted that her three children had deprived her of any semblance of control over her life.  In countless ways, this letter has been the literary foundation for my analysis of intimacy as a form of life and for my gratitude to the many people who have deprived me of control over my life.  In each instance, they called me to plunge in over my head and to listen for the word which voiced the love of the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit for them and for me, however that word came to me.  And in almost every instance, they exposed temptations to bring an abrupt halt to the involvement by passing a judgment, with full knowledge that such a reaction would announce “Case closed!”