On Turning Eighty: Autobiography in Search of Meaning
On Turning Eighty: By Walter J. Burghardt, S.J.
[Woodstock Report, March 1995, no. 41, pp. 2-11]
Copyright © 1995 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
Father Walter J. Burghardt, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, gave the following address at a Woodstock Forum on December 6, 1994. Having celebrated his 80th birthday in July 1994, he looks back on 63 years of Jesuit existence, 53 years of priesthood, a half century of research and teaching, writing and editing, lecturing and preaching. He reflects on what it all might mean from perspectives at once human, Christian, and Jesuit, with concluding observations on their significance for the apostolate of the Woodstock Theological Center. Father Burghardt is founder of Woodstock's national project, "Preaching the Just Word."
As I read the Psalms in the breviary, a blunt reminder of the Psalmist becomes increasingly pertinent to me:
Our years come to an end like a sigh.
The days of our life are seventy years,
or perhaps eighty, if we are strong. . . ;
They are soon gone, and we fly away.
(Ps 90:9b-10)
In that context I find myself remembering. And that, some tell us, is a disease of the graying and the balding. To go back is to bore, to praise "the good old days." To remember is to bask in the past, to enter an Eden that never existed, a paradise as legendary as Atlantis. To remember is to start dying.
But no, 'tis not so; quite the opposite. I recall Abraham Joshua Heschel's startling affirmation: Much of what the Bible demands can be summed up in a single word--remember! I discover in ancient Israel a community of faith vitalized by memory, a people that knew God by reflecting not on the mysteries of nature but on its own history. To actualize was to retain within time and space the memory and the mystery of God's saving presence. And Elie Wiesel, that remarkable Jewish storyteller who feels guilty because he survived the Holocaust, has reminded us that, for Jews, to forget is a crime against justice and memory. If you forget, you become the executioner's accomplice.
Importantly, Johannes Metz has distinguished our memories. There are memories that simply make us feel good, because they glide over all that is oppressive and demanding. And there are memories that are dangerous, because they make demands on us, reveal perilous insights for today, illuminate harshly the questionable nature of things with which we have come to terms. The most demanding type of memory for the Christian? The passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In this context, to remember is to start . . . living.
Life here will be my Jesuit existence. Not that the background of 16 years and six months are irrelevant; simply that my adolescence (actually quite prolonged) is rather grist for the psychiatrist's mill than fodder for a hungry world. From that period, however, I dare not disregard one man and one woman. I mean my father and mother. Immigrants from Europe, hard-working people with little formal education, they shared two remarkable graces that have hovered over, seeped into, my 63 years as a Jesuit. (1) My mother and father lived, literally lived, in many ways died for my brother and myself. (2) My father had a keen sense of justice, without ever being able to define it. Very simply, if you agreed to do something, by God you'd better do it. That is why, when I told him I wanted to be a Jesuit, all he said was, "If that's what you want, then be a good one." Pop died at 53, three weeks before my brother. Mom lived to be 80, probably had Alzheimer's, lost her memory but never her sense of humor. A young priest anointing her as she came out of a coma experienced it as he told her to relax and everything would be all right. "Do what you have to do," she said, "and get the hell out of here."
Two books in my first three Jesuit years predetermined my future. Each was authored by an Ignatius, The first, destined to anchor my spiritual life, was offered by my novice master, Leo M. Weber, S.J. That slender volume, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, is foundational for Jesuit spirituality. The product of profound experience, this deceptive book was not meant to be read but to be experienced. It is never exhausted by any commentary down the ages, always open to fresh insights. For, like other "classics"--Sophocles or Shakespeare, Scripture or Chopin--the meaning mediated by the text often exceeds the conscious intention of the author.
In large measure I have developed spiritually because I have been able to integrate decades-old experiences with ever-new insights. I am grateful to generations of retreat masters, though often they talked too much (much to our adolescent delight; we had less time to pray). From a distance of 60 years, I cannot forget an early retreat preacher, a former World War I chaplain, then a mission-band veteran, with a Pelagian thrust (you could do anything you really wanted to do), flailing us with Jovian thunder: "If you can't resist the bubble in the glass, the tinkle of the silver coin, or the smile on a woman's lips, tear that habit off and get out!"
For lack of time, one continuing regret and one ceaseless inspiration. I regret that relatively little attention was given by retreat directors to the role of the senses, to emotion and passion. Far too frequently the retreat was a head trip. I suspect that several factors were at work here: the predominance of the rational in our education; suspicion of the emotions as dangerous aspects of our sinful nature (no one bothered to tell us that intellect and free will are also perilous possessions); perhaps even the "Protestant" emphasis on that so subjective a thing called experience. More recent exponents of the Exercises are more holistic in their approach. I am convinced that Ignatius would react enthusiastically to a moving paragraph penned by that most rigorous of theologians Bernard Lonergan:
. . . feeling [that answers to what is intended, apprehended, represented] gives intentional consciousness its mass, momentum, drive, power. Without these feelings our knowing and deciding would be paper thin. Because of our feelings, our desires and our fears, our hope or despair, our enthusiasm and indignation, our esteem and contempt, our trust and distrust, our love and hatred, our tenderness and wrath, our admiration, veneration, reverence, our dread, horror, terror, we are oriented massively and dynamically in a world mediated by meaning. We have feelings about other persons, we feel for them, we feel with them. We have feelings about our respective situations, about the past, about the future, about evils to be lamented or remedied, about the good that can, might, must be accomplished. [Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 31.]
The ceaseless inspiration? The final meditation of the Spiritual Exercises, the Contemplation for Learning to Love Like God. Here Ignatius asks of me something quite surprising: "Consider how [Christ] works and labors for me in all creatures upon the face of the earth, that is, he behaves as one who labors." [I am aware that in this meditation Ignatius speaks explicitly of "God," not Christ. But, as Hugo Rahner states emphatically, "In full accordance with Ignatian theology, the 'creator and Lord' of this contemplation is Christ, the incarnate Word, who in virtue of what he is and of what he does, dwells in all creatures and 'behaves as one who works' . . ." Ignatius the Theologian (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 134.] What I discover in Ignatius is the ceaseless presence of Christ to our earth. In startlingly concrete language Ignatius compels me to revamp a narrow theology which implies that, when the risen Jesus rose to his Father, this earth somehow lost him, save for a vague something called sanctifying grace and a mysterious presence under the appearances of bread and wine. Ignatius forces me to surrender a spirituality that looks up to heaven for God's grace. No, "consider how Christ labors for me in all creatures."
And all this, Ignatius saw, Christ does not from some majestic throne he shares with two other divine persons. He reminds Ignatius of a skilled, enthusiastic worker. Christ is alive, not in outer space but in every single work of his loving hands, at each moment of each creature's existence. The world is charged with the presence of Christ, with the labor of Christ. Here, at its core, is my Ignatian spirituality.
The second book that predetermined my Jesuit future was suggested to me in the Jesuit juniorate. At the time I was entranced (as I still am) by the "classics," Greek, Latin, and English--their power, beauty, rawness, the seduction of syllables, the kingdom of the imagination. Sophocles and Demosthenes, Vergil and Horace, Shakespeare and Swinburne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins--here I touched the breadth of human creativity; here was molded my early yearning for the true, the beautiful, the good. But when my classics professor, Father Philip X. Walsh, put into my hands the seven letters of an earlier Ignatius, for whom Loyola had a special veneration, I was taken and held once and for all.
The letters were shaped about the year 110 by the third bishop of Antioch, as he was hustled in chains from Syria to Rome to be clawed by wild beasts in the Colosseum. The letters have been termed the most beautiful pearls of ancient Christian literature. What gripped Ignatius was a passionate love for his crucified Lord, a love so overpowering that it breaks through grammar; language is inadequate, ideas tumble headlong one upon another. I was captured especially by his plea to the Christians of Rome. He longs to see them, but he is afraid--afraid of their love. Their influence with civil authority may save him; and this he does not want. And so he begs them:
. . . do not show me unseasonable kindness. Suffer me to be the food of wild beasts, which are the means of my making my way to God. God's wheat I am, and by the teeth of wild beasts I am to be ground that I may prove Christ's pure bread. . . . Then only shall I be a genuine disciple of Jesus Christ when the world will not see even my body. . . Once I have suffered, I shall become a freedman of Jesus Christ, and, united with him, I shall rise a free man. Just now I learn, being in chains, to desire nothing. [Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans 4, tr. James A. Kleist, S.J., Ancient Christian Writers 1 (New York: Ramsey Newman, 1946), 81-84]
Captivated beyond release, captured beyond redemption, I was soon destined by religious superiors for life with the Fathers of the Church, the writers of the first six or seven Christian centuries. Original plans called for my four years of theology to be spent in Belgium, under expert patristics scholar Joseph de Ghellinck, who looked forward to directing a patrologist-to-be from our patristic wasteland. But in 1938 the war clouds were gathering over Europe, and from the experience of World War I it was clear that the name Burghardt would hardly sit well with the Belgian people. And so I remained at home. But the Lord was still working like a laborer in my regard. For the war led to Woodstock and John Courtney Murray, to Catholic University and Johannes Quasten.
Murray was unique among Woodstock's professors in the stress he placed on the Fathers of the Church. In three incisive paragraphs he presented two profound reasons for seeking a more vital possession of the patristic heritage--paragraphs that have been part and parcel of my existence.
First, such a study admirably serves to bridge the gap that has been created . . . between theology and spirituality. The Fathers of the Church are not only teachers of Christian doctrine but masters of the spiritual life; not only do their works give guidance to the mind in its search for the truth of God, but they also afford inspiration to the whole soul in its search for God Himself. In this respect, patristic study offers a valuable completion of, and possibly a necessary correction to, the more rigidly intellectualist mentality created by the student's immersion in Scholastic thought.
Secondly, the works of the Fathers present Christian thought in an earlier stage of its formation--a formation certainly not uninfluenced by the intellectual and spiritual problems of the ages in which the Fathers wrote. . . . In these works, therefore, the student may see theology . . . at work at the fundamental task of its own development, its vital assimilation of all that is true in human thought, its sensitive response to the problems and needs of the Christian soul, as these are created by man's inescapable necessity of living his Christian faith in the context of a particular age.
From this standpoint, therefore, their high value is that they introduce us to two problems that are indeed extremely delicate but that must be faced quite honestly--the problem of the development of Christian thought through its historical past, and the problem of the address we are to make to our own intellectual and spiritual world. . . . [John Courtney Murray, S.J., in Murray et al., "Sources chrétiennes," Theological Studies 9 (1948): 250-89, at 250-51. The observations were made in the context of a new series of patristic texts and translations.]
It was with the Murray vision as controlling inspiration that I moved with high enthusiasm to the Catholic University of America, specifically to work under Johannes Quasten, exile from Hitler's Germany. His pedagogical charism was his ability to fire the few with a fresh vision of the past. You began to believe and to live what Adolf Harnack had said to him: "You will achieve as much as you are willing to sacrifice for." Expert in ancient documents, monuments, and liturgy, Quasten made pillars and texts come alive as no other has ever done for me.
Quasten's fundamental assumption was that early Christianity cannot be intelligently understood without a thorough knowledge of classical culture. He leaned to W. Halliday's strong affirmation, "no one who is devoid of any sympathetic understanding of pagan thought and literature can have anything of essential value to tell us about the contemporary Christians." [W. Halliday, The Pagan Background of Early Christianity (Liverpool/London, 1925), 3.] He communicated to us a sense of history, an awareness of cultural contexts, a realization that Christianity is inescapably involved in the ebb and flow of time, that affirmations and doctrines, words and syllables cannot be interpreted in isolation from their original milieu.
For a quarter century I worked with Quasten on the series of translations Ancient Christian Writers. He was not only fellow scholar but dear friend. Not only did I profit from his private early-Christian library (11,000 volumes); I savored his dinner dialogue, his cognac conversation, as he ranged from Münster to Tripoli. from the Good Shepherd in art through ecclesiastical politics to warm concern for my mother's illness. The patrologist's passion for perfection allowed only a blessed handful to experience the warmth and humanity that gave him life, the priest who helped form community not only by liturgical research but by personal and communal worship, the heart that hid beneath the shy academic exterior, the loneliness that shadows so much of a scholar's existence, the love that must find its expression on the printed page.
A long word now on the Woodstock experience, 1946-74. Teaching patristics was a ceaseless wedding of joy and frustration. Joy in introducing young Jesuits to an area of theological literature completely unknown to them. Joy in seeing eyes light up as they came face to face with the Fathers, instead of just reading about them. Joy in their surprise, or even delight, as they accompanied Ignatius of Antioch on the rough road to the Colosseum, heard the first Christian apologists address themselves in writing to the outside world, watched Origen transform the catechetical school of cosmopolitan, cultured, sophisticated Alexandria into the first Catholic "university," listened to Ambrose and Chrysostom preparing converts for the rites of initiation. But frustration as well, because the patristic experience played so small a role in the education of seminarians; because the increasing decline of Latin and Greek in Jesuit high schools and colleges allowed only a handful of Jesuit scholastics each year to appreciate the rhetoric of an Augustine, a Chrysostom, a Leo the Great; because not once in 28 years was I invited into a dogma class to reveal the contexts in which early Christian doctrines were shaped.
I have never forgotten the evening after my first exams as a professor. At early dinner for examiners, I mentioned my surprise that a young Jesuit examinee, after citing the Council of Florence for proof of a thesis, did not know when the council had met. "Was it before Trent [1545-63] or after?" "I don't know." "Was it before Nicaea I [325] or after?" "I don't know." A much older colleague, an Old Testament scholar, broke into my jeremiad: "You had no right to ask him that question. He's not responsible for it." Dogma then hung in midair, unaffected by history.
But Woodstock was more than class. The 28 years of Woodstock- in-Maryland and Woodstock-in-New York were in large measure an experience of change: change at Vatican II, change in priesthood, change in theology, change in me. A word on each.
In the late 1960s I came to a broad conviction about the significance of the Second Vatican Council. The council was significant, I concluded, because it inserted (or reinserted) the Catholic Church into history, into Christendom, and into the world.
The council inserted Catholicism into history; for on the whole it reveals a shift from classicism to historical consciousness. What do those two expressions mean? John Courtney Murray captured the difference with admirable lucidity. Classicism designates a view of truth which holds that objective truth, precisely because it is objective, exists "already out there now." Therefore it exists apart from its possession by anyone, apart from history, formulated in propositions that are unchangeable even in language. Historical consciousness holds fast to truth as something objective, but is concerned with the possession of truth, with our affirmations of truth, with the conditions that affect our understanding of truth, with progress in the grasp and penetration of what is true.
In the case of the council, historical consciousness means an acceptance of the fact that in no single facet of her existence is the Church of Christ a sort of Platonic idea serenely suspended in mid-air; a recognition of the fact that in every phase of her pilgrim life the Church is inescapably involved in the ebb and flow of history. Not only in the external forms of her worship, but in her inner grasp on God's revelation; not only in accidentals and at the outer edge of her life, but in essentials and at the inner core of her being. It is a rejection of the council's most insidious enemy--not Curialism or triumphalism, not Romanism or reactionism, but what Michael Novak called "nonhistorical orthodoxy." I mean the claim to be the wholly perfect, absolute expression of the faith. It encourages loyalty to the ideal Church, without worrying how to make the actual Church efficacious in the present world.
I am convinced that in large measure the council moved from the mentality of classicism that has dominated the Church's past to a historical consciousness that will be her irreversible future. The proof? Primarily the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World and the Declaration on Religious Freedom. The Freedom decree had for achievement, as architect Murray delighted to phrase it, that it brought the Church into the 19th century, "abreast of the consciousness of civilized mankind."
Second, Vatican II inserted the Catholic Church into Christendom. It set Catholicism squarely within the ongoing movement towards unity. Here two documents were crucial: the Constitution on the Church and the Decree on Ecumenism. In both the basic theological insight is Vatican II's explicit recognition of non-Roman congregations as churches or ecclesial communities. No longer is it sufficiently Catholic to say "Some of my best friends are Protestants." No longer is it adequately theological to admit that God's grace is active within individual non-Romans. The grace of Christ is at work, richly and incessantly, not only within Protestants but within Protestantism, not only within Anglicans but within Anglicanism, not only within the Orthodox but within Orthodoxy.
This development affected my priestly/theological existence. Once I recognized such grace-filled communities, I could disregard non-Roman theology only at the risk of impoverishing my own. Not simply because of the charismatic element so evident in more prominent prophets, in the Barths and Brunners, the Tillichs and Niebuhrs. I dared not disregard these prophets precisely because their prophetic voices echoed from within a graced community. It was the communities I had to take seriously, in the totality of their ecclesial existence: the graced word from the pulpit and the graced faith in the pews, the graced life of the housewife and the graced mind of the theologian--and all these as vital facets that fashion and are fashioned by a community of grace and of salvation.
Little wonder that Vatican II advocated dialogue not merely between Christians but primarily between the churches--dialogue (hold your Catholic breath) "where each can deal with the other on an equal footing." [Decree on Ecumenism, no. 9.]
Third, Vatican II inserted the Catholic Church into the modern world. For the first half of my life, a widespread Catholic attitude was a "fortress mentality": Catholicism was an island beset and besieged by the modern world. The pessimistic outlook was not utterly unreasonable. Not if you recall, in the 19th century, the movement in politics away from the sacral conception of society and state to the secular conception, terminating in states of rationalist or atheist inspiration. Not if you recall the movement in Scripture away from the historical Jesus, away from the historicity of the Gospels, away from the inerrancy of the Book. Not if you recall, in the sciences, an evolution that seemed to negate the creative activity of God. Everywhere, in economics and the arts, in education and psychiatry, all the significant movements appeared to threaten or to disregard the one true God and the one true Church.
What the Church (with the exception of a handful of individuals) did not do was the very thing that was demanded: to discern the signs of the times, to discover, beneath the transitory historical forms assumed by each new movement, the valid dynamisms that were at work. In 1962 the time was ripe for two singular developments:
No document affirmed this development more forcibly or more emotionally than the last section of Paul VI's address opening the second session on September 29, 1963. He was addressing himself to the fourth aim of the council: "the Church will build a bridge to the contemporary world." He confessed he was tempted to be frightened, to be saddened, to defend and condemn, to dwell on the spread of atheism, on the emptiness, sadness, and despair in so many human hearts. Instead, with love flooding his heart, he wanted the world to know that the Church looks at the world with profound understanding, desirous only to serve it. He addressed some categories of persons with particular solicitude: the poor and needy, the suffering and sorrowful; men and women of culture and learning, scientists, artists; workers and the leaders of nations; the young so anxious to express themselves and the new peoples coming to self-awareness, independence. To all he presented the Church as a servant.
It was in harmony with this vision that the council fashioned its Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, the document that opens with the anguished sentence, "The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men and women of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ." [Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, no. 1.]
In brief, Vatican II can claim responsibility for three profound realizations that have influenced my research, my productivity, my outlook on reality.
This leads into a second area of critical change. In the aftermath of World War II, with its stress on freedom, the abandonment of certitudes, the relaxation of traditional morality, the priesthood could not live on untouched. In my case, how relate change and permanence? The changes were clear, striking, at times frightening. Priesthood was no longer the highly desirable vocation that the immigrant Church had prized, that my own mother and father had reverenced; the world increasingly had more attractive choices to offer. Vatican II had literally turned us priests around: We had to face our people. Paradoxically, they came to us less frequently for reconciliation, Eucharist, spiritual direction, and solutions, yet demanded more of us: to be awfully close to them, and still chaste and celibate; to be passionate preachers and community leaders; to live a life that reminded them of Christ the priest.
For our part, untold thousands were questioning what it means to be a priest. Scripture did not provide some eternal role, an immutable essence of priestly existence. History showed us a number of models: jurisdictional, cultic, pastoral, prophetic, monastic. And all too many priests rested their priesthood on roles, on functions. They defined an ordained priest in terms of what he could do which an unordained person could not do. And here the crisis of identity tore the guts of countless priests. They were searching for priesthood in terms of something specific to themselves, powers proper to priests, functions that distinguished them from the laity. And though they did discover what they alone could do ("This is my body," "I absolve you"), it seemed so narrow in scope that it took little of their life. The rest of their existence was lived in the suspicion that some man or woman in the pews could do it better. At any rate, in one ten-year period, 10,000 priests left us in this country alone. Priestly existence did not satisfy--too lonely perhaps, too isolated, too confusing, too harsh, little appreciation, whatever.
I was fortunate. What I came to realize with increasing clarity, with progressive delight, was that limiting priesthood to a handful of clearly defined roles or functions, for all their importance, would never do. How explain the priest in a chemistry lab or in Congress, dean of a business school or stargazer in Arizona, secretary to a bishop or processing a marriage annulment? Through sacramental ordination I was empowered, I had engaged myself, to shape my life to the needs of the gospel as the Church sees them at any given moment in history. Every activity of mine is priestly if it responds to the Church's call at this moment in the story of salvation. Every activity--with the exception of sin and possibly subpar golf.
Indeed, some tasks will always lay special claim on priesthood: proclaiming God's Word, building up the Christian community, presiding at Eucharist, serving the human person. But in the last analysis what matters most is this: How do I respond to Christ calling me at this moment through his Church? That is why I refused to see Robert Drinan's ten years in Congress with episcopal permission as a leave of absence from priesthood. As a columnist wrote for the Boston Globe after Drinan was ordered by the pope to leave Congress, "Father Drinan is doing wholesale what Mother Teresa is doing retail."
True, I've been uncommonly blessed. The Church's call to me, with rare exceptions, has been what I would have chosen myself! How would I have reacted if ordered to run soup kitchens in the District of Columbia? I'm afraid to ask. But the principle remains intact, vital for priestly existence, for sacerdotal joy:
"Whatever you ask of me, Lord, through your Body, the Church."
For the past several decades I have witnessed the death and burial of the theology that first nurtured me. That Scholastic theology should crumble, that the perennial would prove impermanent, this now has all the aura of the inevitable. Inevitable because a new man, a new woman, had been born, had shaped and been shaped by a new world, the effect in large measure of World War II and its aftermath. The tragedy is, few Catholic theologians saw the cloud when it was no bigger than a human hand. One who did, back in the 60s, was a perceptive Dominican, Fergus Kerr. His analysis of "Theology in a Godforsaken Epoch" [Blackfriars 40 (1965): 665-72] began with a presupposition: Doing theology depends on hearing God's word; God must be allowed to speak to us before we can begin to speak about God.
But the way God was speaking to the new man, to the new woman, was radically different from the way God had spoken to me. A new epoch had come to birth. The genius of a new epoch? Consensus about ideals and standards in human experience; consensus about what is meaningful at all, what counts as sense, is relevant, is worthwhile and significant, or pointless and ridiculous.
In this new epoch God seemed far less accessible than before to Catholic categories of experience. Examples? Our institutions, from papal pronouncements through corporate liturgy to private confession--institutions that in almost unprecedented fashion did not mediate to many a sense of God's presence. Our traditional theology, which not only failed to make God more intelligible, more visible, more palpable, more available, but often hid God's face, made it more difficult to discover divinity. And so fresh theologies were a-borning, where the moving forces were person and community, commitment and action, responsibility and response, encounter and experience, liberty and love, and so on and so forth.
Again, I was fortunate. The Scholasticism that fell from the pen of Aquinas still had the power to thrill me. One remarkable paragraph still lives in me:
"There are two ways of desiring knowledge. One way is to desire it as a perfection of one's self; and that is the way philosophers desire it. The other way of desiring knowledge is to desire it not [merely] as a perfection of one's self, but because through this knowledge the one we love becomes present to us; and that is the way saints desire it."
What we love becomes present to us: God's creation, God's people, God's very self.
I was fortunate in discovering contemporary thinkers who balanced my traditional stress on abstract essence with an even greater emphasis on human existence. I mean Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin with his seductive global vision that found all of reality united in Christ. I mean Danish Lutheran Soren Aabye Kierkegaard defining my self as freedom, yet dependent on God; stressing decision and choice, fear and trembling, dread and despair. I mean philosopher Gabriel Marcel with his claim that "to be" is to participate in being; I must avoid transforming being into having. I mean Jewish Martin Buber emphasizing the dialogue between man/woman and the Eternal Thou; God is not primarily an object of knowledge. I mean Alfred North Whitehead with his insistence that the living organ of experience is not simply the five senses but the living body as a whole. I was edging onto 50 before I began listening to what the Spirit might be saying outside the formal structures of Catholicism: through the Protestant and Jewish communities, through the university and the arts, through the black community's struggle for freedom ("Let my people go"), through untold millions standing mute and unresponsive before a God who did not weep when they bled.
All this plus a humbling experience: After four decades of theology, I had to struggle with (a big word) methodology. Very simply, how do you go about doing theology? It brought me face to face with Bernard Lonergan's four transcendental precepts: Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible--a series of conversions, intellectual, moral, and religious, culminating in the experience of love of God. I touched Karl Rahner imaging and reimaging our human situation; liberation theology insisting that theology comes after involvement, from an experience of poverty and oppression; feminist theologians using the experience of women as a source for religious and theological reflection, changing once and for all the face of Scripture and theology.
I suspect I shall not die with a glorious theological synthesis--all the above, and more, in one magnificent paragraph dominated by intelligible monosyllables. No matter; it has been a fascinating journey of discovery.
A short word on several changes that meant extraordinary personal loss. I shall not dwell on the loss of father and only brother within three weeks of each other. I have to confess, however, that their deaths, both of cancer, have played a significant role in my development as a state-of-the-art hypochondriac. No one in human history, to my knowledge, has experienced as many fatal symptoms as I. Be that as it may, let me focus rather on two other persons, on one place, and on a single event.
The persons are John Courtney Murray and Gustave Weigel. Both died much too young: Weigel 57, Murray 63. For years I shared the same third-floor corridor with them at old Woodstock College in Maryland. Similar they were, but hardly the same. Kindred spirits indeed: fascinated by life and in love with ideas; at home in an impressive number of intellectual disciplines and at ease with non-Romans and unbelievers; powerful rhetoricians and profound but witty conversationalists. Still, quite different: Gus of the peasant frame, John of the distinguished gait; Gus the "quick read" and intuitor, John the tireless scholar; Gus the descendant of Plato and fascinated by Paul Tillich, John the heir of Aquinas and captivated by Bernard Lonergan; Gus the more earthy, John the eagle soaring. Gus dead in a bathtub, John in a taxicab!
To live with them was to share a Christianity of high intelligence and profound love. More than anyone I knew in mid-century, they bridged the gap that divided Protestants and Catholics--and this largely by what Murray called "civilized conversation." Murray is enjoying a vigorous reincarnation, for many of his ideas on church and state and on religious freedom are coming alive in unexpected ways. Weigel the ecumenical pioneer is largely forgotten, save by Protestants like Carl Henry, who asserted that no Protestants "ever demonstrated as effectively as Gustave Weigel that the pursuit of truth must never be disengaged from the practice of love." [Christianity Today 8, no. 9 (Jan. 31, 1964): 412.]
The place of significant loss was Woodstock. Not simply the move from rural Maryland to the sidewalks of New York (arguably demanded by the times); more the decision to close the Manhattan project after several years of experimentation (arguably the loss of a unique theological beachhead). Woodstock claimed my mind and heart, my flesh and spirit, for 28 years. My single consolation? God's imaginative plans for my life-after-sixty.
Loss that stemmed from a single event: I mean my public disagreement in 1968 with Paul VI's encyclical on birth control. Agonizing reflection preceded that disagreement. Baltimore's Cardinal Lawrence Shehan asked only whether in the pulpit, in the confessional, and in counseling I could present the doctrine of the document as official Catholic teaching; of course I could and did and do. And Paul VI himself, a year after my disagreement, appointed me to his first International Theological Commission, 30 scholars from across the world to advise the pope in doctrinal matters. Still, it has cost me dearly, has distanced me from some friends and still more strangers. Among much else, I was banned not in Boston but in Owensboro; a colleague who discovered my disagreement this year has for conscience' sake broken off a collaboration of several decades; a monsignor in the Midwest in a recent letter has linked me with "dissenting Modernist maggots." And there are the uncounted Catholics for whom to question official doctrine on whatever level is to be less than Catholic.
Twelve years at Georgetown (1978 to 1990) as theologian in residence proved a providential prelude. I enjoyed the university situation: the exchange of ideas, the refreshing presence of the young. I was still editor-in-chief of Theological Studies, a position, believe me, of frightening theological power. I was preaching locally and across the country, with (as one wag put it) not a single unpublished homily. But now with two increasing stresses:
It was in 1990 that I had my dream. I felt that a decisive change was imminent. At 75, what might I do with however many years God had in store for me? Those years should, ideally, engage my background, my talents, my interests. Background? Theology. Talents? Communication: preaching, lecturing, writing. Interests? People.
I was then, had been since 1974, a fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center. The Center was, and is, doing splendid work putting theology to work on social, political, and economic issues through books and articles, conferences and workshops. Indispensable indeed, but reaching directly a relatively small number of people. How could we expand the Center's influence, stimulate American Catholicism as a whole to live and spread our social gospel?
It was then that lightning struck. Where do American Catholics gather regularly in largest array, even more than for pro football? At weekend liturgy. A captive audience, millions of potential listeners Fox might sell its soul for. The Liturgy of the Word, but focused on an emerging reality: The whole of Scripture is social, oriented to community, bent on effecting a fidelity to relationships with God, humans, and earth that stems not so much from ethics as from a covenant.
But the dream had a nightmarish aura: Catholic preaching is often dull as dishwater, what the president of the University of Rochester called "Saturday Night Live, Sunday Morning Deadly." If our homilies are to instill new life in the social gospel, our homilists must be set aflame. Not only information, data, skills, important as these are. Even more importantly, a spirituality, a conversion that turns the preacher inside out, puts "fire in the belly." The method? Retreat workshops, five days in length--the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola in the context of justice issues. Teams of five or six, experts in Scripture, social justice, preaching, spirituality, contemporary culture, liturgy. Not to solve complex issues in a homily; rather, to raise consciousness, stimulate awareness.
We have directed 25 such retreats, from Maine to California, with 16 already scheduled for 1995. The results are mind-blowing: close to a thousand participants, most freshly aflame. As for me, just about every hour that remains will be given to Preaching the Just Word, helping preachers, clergy and lay, to transform each parish into a community of energizing love, to light hope in countless empty eyes, make untold thousands of the marginalized feel that somebody cares, that they are genuinely loved.
"Just about every hour that remains." These days I confront a reality for which we have only a dreary expression: old age. Bones become brittle, joints jab, energy is low octane, and sauerkraut makes for diarrhea. Not a desirable state in a country that glorifies youth, beauty, and strength, that wonders what to do with that growing populace that doesn't "do" anything. It is a time for contemplation--what Carmelite William McNamara defined as "a long loving look at the real." It is a time to see one's life in its totality.
What do I see? A Lord who has graced me with Erikson's integration, the ability to grasp my life as something whole. Oh yes, I am aware that facets of my existence have been flawed, that the old Adam has never quite died in me, that I have much over which to repent (not to be revealed even to Oprah). But overriding all this, in fact including all this, I see myself, in Gerard Manley Hopkins' phrase, "wound/ With mercy round and round/ As if with air." [Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe," in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (London/New York: Oxford University, 1970), 93-97, at 94.] I see that divine mercy, God's hand, everywhere in my existence, Christ "working and laboring for me in all creatures upon the face of the earth." For all its mystery, it all makes incredible sense to me--in one favorite image of mine, God shaping me through God's Spirit in unexpected ways to the image of God's Son.
Here the crucial realization is the breath-taking declaration of St. Paul to the Christians of Colossae in Asia Minor: "Now I am rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church" (Col 1:24).
I would love a decade or two more of earthly existence; for the opportunities and invitations to touch the richness of Catholic tradition to contemporary issues keep multiplying. This year alone: the prestigious Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale and the Brown Lectures on the Just Word in Dallas; addressing Surgery Grand Rounds at Georgetown Medical Center on "Healthcare 2000" and the Catholic bishops assembled in San Diego on how to preach hope today; coediting an ecumenical journal on the art and craft of preaching.
How sum it all up? Where focus its meaning? I suggest an age-old Jesuit educational ideal hardly heard today: eloquentia perfecta, effective communication. In my case, proclaim God's good news as perfectly as possible. What greater privilege is there, what more frightening responsibility?
More of this, the integrating synthesis, on some other occasion. Let me close with a prayer composed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a prayer that means more and more to me with each passing day:
It was a joy to me, O God, in the midst of the struggle, to feel that in developing myself I was increasing the hold that you have upon me; it was a joy to me, too, under the inward thrust of life or amid the favorable play of events, to abandon myself to your providence. Now that I have found the joy of utilizing all forms of growth to make you, or to let you, grow in me, grant that I may willingly consent to this last phase of communion in the course of which I shall possess you by diminishing in you.
After having perceived you as he who is `a greater myself', grant, when my hour comes, that I may recognize you under the species of each alien or hostile force that seems bent upon destroying or uprooting me. When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all at that last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.
The more deeply and incurably the evil is encrusted in my flesh, the more it will be you that I am harbouring--you as a loving, active principle of purification and detachment. The more the future opens before me like some dizzy abyss or dark tunnel, the more confident I may be--if I venture forward on the strength of your word--of losing myself and surrendering myself in you, of being assimilated by your body, Jesus.
You are the irresistible and vivifying force, O Lord, and because yours is the energy, because, of the two of us, you are infinitely the stronger, it is on you that falls the part of consuming me in the union that should weld us together. Vouchsafe, therefore, something more precious still than the grace for which all the faithful pray. It is not enough that I should die while communicating. Teach me to treat my death as an act of communion. [Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life (Harper Torchbooks; New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 89-90.]
