Monday, August 3, 2008
Today, I prepared to celebrate the
Eucharist in Monroe City and Indian Creek this week-end by reading the
Scriptural passages for next Sunday. The
gospel tells the story of Jesus walking across the water and bidding Peter to
come to him. I knew immediately that I
would address the issue of trust in my homily, but I did not have a point of
entry.
This afternoon, I met with a woman who
poured out her fear that she is becoming bitter. As she talked, it became obvious that she was
struggling with an aching loneliness, a feeling of being abandoned, intense
anxiety over decisions she faces (including changing jobs), and perhaps most
crippling, a fear that she was not trusting God. Quite obviously, she believed that, if she
"really" trusted God's love for her, she would be at peace "in
the midst of the storm."
Her outpouring provided a point of entry
into the issue of trust. My response to
her fears issued from my own tortured efforts to trust the Father's providence
and the urgings of the indwelling Spirit, though I knew that such a trust would
enable me to experience Jesus' longing to face with me whatever I face, just as
I am at the moment. (To live in the
present, without good resolutions and without the "shoulds" and
"should nots" voiced by the committee in my head.) To help her to understand what trust
involved, I first suggested that she had let me into her life in extremely
vulnerable self-revelations because she trusted me. Then, since she was able to see how God's
love for others had come to them through her, I asked whether she experienced a
touch of God's love for her in the ways that, together, we sought to discern
how God's love was working in her life.
Looking back, I do not think that I was
consciously setting the stage for a particular response. At any rate, her assurance that we had indeed
shared graced moments evoked yet another question: Did she ever talk to Jesus as she had talked
to me, with vulnerable honesty and no expectations? Quite clearly, I could not resolve the crises
she faced (i.e., the turning points in her life which called for deeply
interior transformations) or make a commitment to face them with her in all the
events of her daily life. Still, for a
time, she wasn't alone, and the healing that came through my non-judgmental
involvement empowered her to face what she had to face. And this touch of Jesus' enduring presence
voiced a call to let him love her by sharing intimately in her life.
As we sat in silence, she realized that, in
her most personal conversations with Jesus, she could place those she was
involved with in God's care, since she had learned the hard way that she could
not change them. But when she brought
herself to Jesus, her outpourings were confessions of failure coupled with
pleas for strength or guidance. In
short, she had never talked to Jesus as she did to me.
Since her "good old Catholic
guilt" was acquired honestly, I could not resist the urge to share my
belief that, in the Consecration, Jesus renews his commitment to share fully in
the lives of all human beings and that, in Communion, he seals this commitment
by entrusting himself to us, for better or worse. In light of experiences like this, I have
little interest in reconciling this understanding of the Eucharist with a
theology which describes the Eucharist as a ritual re-enactment which applies
the merits won by Jesus' sacrificial death on the Cross in reparation for human
sinfulness to those who participate in it.
Instead, I find myself compelled to share an understanding (and
celebration) of the Eucharist informed by an incarnational theology which
traces the entry of the eternal Word into human history to an over-flowing
(infinite, creative) love.
The inner logic of this theology encodes
the passages in Hosea which compare God's covenant with Israel to a
marriage-union. In the biblical
tradition, this understanding of the covenant informs the vision inscribed in
the hymn in the Prologue of John.
And when this vision is supplemented by the understanding of the Trinity
centuries later, it places the eternal Word at the center of the life of the
Trinity, the act of creation, the course of human history and the lives of each
and every human being. In so doing, it
generates a rich understanding of both "love" and "covenant." Concretely, it depicts God's love as the
longing of each of the three divine Persons for intensely personal involvement
in the lives of all human beings. By
extension, it implies that, in the Incarnation, the eternal Word became fully
human as the only way that even God could share fully in our lives. And by yet another extension, it implies that
the Incarnation reveals that the covenant is and always has been a commitment
on the part of God to accompany unique individuals on their journeys through
life.
In postmodernist terms, an incarnational
theology deconstructs the literary foundations of the distinction between an
Old Covenant (a covenant of Law) and a New Covenant (which both abrogates and
fulfills the Old Covenant). To that end,
it reads the early stories in the Hebrew narrative tradition as ways of
proclaiming an evolving belief that Israel's God was involved in intensely
personal ways with Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs. From this perspective, it reads the stories
in the Deuteronomic tradition as accounts of the ways that the ancient
Israelites sought someone (e.g., Moses) or something (e.g., the Mosaic Law) to
mediate between them and God. These
readings, too, can speak as a revelatory word of God, but they do so as words
which expose the many and varied ways that Christians have fallen into the same
trap, including a strand in the Catholic tradition which insists that salvation
comes through a hierarchically structured institution, Luther's doctrine of
justification by faith alone, or the belief that the Scriptures speak as an
unmediated word of God. And as an
all-encompassing perspective, it exposes the violence done to the Jewish
Scriptures by a reading which reduces God's covenant with Israel to a Covenant
of Law.
From
this perspective, the debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians has
revolved around the question, "Is our relationship with God mediated or
unmediated?" The passionate
protests of both Calvin and Luther targeted the belief that the institutional
Church was the only path to God. (The
traditional dictum: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus [“Outside the Church, no salvation”].) But Calvin sought to replace the
institutional Church with a theocracy, while Luther insisted that Jesus was the
only mediator. Neither sought to
reconcile their reductive stances with the metaphors in Hosea and Isaiah
which invoke the metaphor of a marriage union to describe God's covenant with
Israel. As a result, they invoked
doctrines of exclusive election which did violence to passages in First Isaiah.
(The Deuteronomic strand of the
narrative tradition defines Israel's positive and distinctive identity in terms
of the Mosaic Law and supports a doctrine of exclusive identity. This strand implies that the Law relates the
whole of Israel's life to God and sets her apart from her idolatrous
neighbors. In First Isaiah, however,
Israel remains God's chosen people, but her election calls her to bear witness
to all human beings that God is involved with them in an intensely personal
way.)
A personal aside: For years, an incarnational theology has informed my prayerful participation in
the Eucharistic ritual as priest and as a member of the congregation. As a result, I am often saddened by rhetorics
which repeat a traditional emphasis on the Eucharist as a re-enactment of the
sacrificial death offered to God in reparation for the continued sinfulness of
the offspring of Adam. Those who agree
with this Augustinean-Thomistic theology long for a liturgy which casts the
priest as the mediator between a passive congregation and a wrathful God. To disguise the flight from intimacy inherent
in such liturgies, they bemoan a reputed loss of awe and reverence inherent in
the liturgical reforms introduced by Vatican II. But the way that they allow their personal
preferences to rule their rhetoric blinds them to awe that committed Christians
experience when they become aware of God's intensely personal involvement with
them in each and every event in their personal histories.
In this context, I am sometimes puzzled by
the fact that I do not react as negatively when I read theologies derived from
a metaphor which depicts the Eucharist as a meal designed to create and
celebrate life in a community centered in Jesus, the way and the truth and the
life. I am always grateful for the
opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist with a community of people who are
willing to let me into their lives as they build a community among
themselves. But sad experience has also
taught me that, without a commitment on the part of its members to share a
journey centered in Jesus, no Christian community can survive. (As with marriage, that commitment gives
voice to mutual cries: "Love me, warts and all.")
Consequently, when I attempt to share my
understanding of the Eucharist, I work backwards from Jesus' renewal of a
commitment to be involved with us in intensely personal ways in the
Consecration and Communion to the role of the Offertory in the Eucharistic
ritual. The offering of the bread and
wine symbolizes our willingness to entrust our lives as fully to Jesus as he
entrusts himself to us in Communion. As
such, it expresses a commitment to Jesus which respects the message in
Matthew's account of the Last Judgment.
Read as a parable which Jesus uses to stand a belief of his audience on
its head, this account offers an awesome insight into Jesus' intimate
involvement with us and others:
"Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to
me." (To belabor the obvious, Jesus
feels the pain of those I wound. So, by
entrusting himself to me, he entrusts them to me also.)
On a broader canvas, an incarnational
theology defines each of the seven Sacraments as a ritual renewal of the
covenant signed and sealed when the eternal Word became flesh. In effect, each of these rituals is intended
to evoke an intensely personal encounter with Jesus. Baptism is no exception. Since an infant cannot be aware of what is
happening, the encounter dramatizes Jesus' willingness to come to us through
one another. Ideally, the parents who
present their infant for membership in the Christian community are awed by the
fact that God entrusts this vulnerable little one to their love and care. To ritualize that awe in the hope that it
will endure, I invite the parents to renew their marriage vows before we begin
the Baptismal ritual, and I remind them that, in this ritual, they are to make
the same commitment to their offspring that they made to each other. If necessary, I point out that, if this
little person is to experience Jesus' love in a living way, it must come
through them. And if they are not
learning how to encounter Jesus in intensely personal ways in the everyday
interactions between them, the child will not know Jesus in that way.
The theology which describes the Sacraments
as repeated renewals of a commitment to a passionate, vulnerable, respectful
and faithful involvement with Jesus and with loved ones is implicit in Hosea's
comparison of the covenant with a marriage-union. (Quite obviously, Hosea could not anticipate
the role this metaphor would play in an incarnational theology enriched by the
development of the belief in a triune God whose love overflowed into the
creation of the universe.) Consequently,
those who believe that the incarnation signed and sealed such a covenant can
see the reception of Communion as a response to Jesus' longing to share
intimately in the joys and sorrows triggered by everyday events in their
personal journeys through life. And it
is this understanding which presents the Offertory as a renewal on our part of
a commitment we made to let Jesus into our lives as the tremendous Lover and
the wounded Healer. Consequently, if we
bring to the Offertory our tangled responses to loved ones and to events in our
day, we commit ourselves to moments in which we listen to the words of love
which the indwelling Spirit speaks to us in the tangles created by our flights
from intimacy, as a way to discern how we are to respond to anyone we encounter
on our journey.
In intricate ways, therefore, the
comparison of the Covenant with the commitment made by couples who marry in
Christ calls for honesty with ourselves, with God and with those we let into
our lives and for openness to the urgings of the indwelling Spirit. Learning to listen to these urgings is a
process which begins when we become aware that the judgments and strategies
embodied in our habitual emotional reactions hide our deepest feelings from
ourselves and from others. Then, an
awareness which allows buried pain, anger, fear and shame to surface reveals
that we came by the mistrust of the urgings of the Spirit at work in our
deepest feelings honestly, yet urges us to face the trust-issues that have
crippled us for far too long.
To expose the mistrust at the core of
futile struggles, I offer a formula for processing our flaws and failures:
"We sin because we are wounded, not because we are wicked." Thus, since we are made in the image of a God
who is love, we long for intimacy. But
even for those of us who experienced a certain intimacy with a mother in the
womb, birth plunged us into a journey into the unknown which reveals that
intimacy is the deepest, yet most elusive longing of our hearts. It is elusive, because we must integrate a longing
for a uniquely personal existence with the discovery that there is no instant
intimacy between unique individuals.
In sum, the process of separation from
parents is natural and inevitable. They
cannot forever make us the center of their lives, and, on their journey into
the unknown, they were wounded in ways they do not yet understand. Inevitably, when we experienced a painful
separation, we feared abandonment or interpreted their flaws as betrayals of a
commitment. Then, to avoid such painful
experiences in the future, we became willing accomplices in a process of
socialization which endowed us with a repertoire of emotional reactions. In most instances, this repertoire serves us
well socially. But in intimate
involvements, the judgments and strategies at the core of emotional reactions
abort the grieving process which plays a crucial role in genuine
forgiveness. And since reactions are not
creative responses, they soon become dull and lifeless repeat performances.
To address this process, the metaphor which
depicts even unconscious breaks with intimacy as a woundedness illuminates the
contrast between emotional reactions and vulnerable self-revelations. Intriguingly, when we become more deeply
involved, not less, we experience our woundedness as a terrifying emptiness and
aching loneliness. To fill the
emptiness, we are tempted to cling to reactions which promised to fill the
emptiness with gratified desires, to confer control over potentially disruptive
feelings, to legitimate strategies designed to control the reactions of others
which might otherwise trigger vulnerable eruptions, and the like.
As an added complication, since the longing
for intimacy is a longing to love and be loved, we may fear that honest
revelations of our tangled depths would make us somehow unacceptable to and
even unlovable by others. (I am saddened
whenever a prayer that we might become acceptable or pleasing to God occurs in
the missal. I substitute awkward
replacements.) Consequently, before we
can trust that the indwelling Spirit speaks words of love designed to cast out
fears, we must learn how to be honest with ourselves, with God and with our
loved ones about what we feel and think, real or imagined. (Fears are at the root of failures to trust
God and others).
