Being Radically Religious in Public Life
Dorothy Day and Osama bin Laden are hardly two of a kind. But a recent
Woodstock forum aired the provocative thought that the pacifist Catholic Worker
founder and the patron terrorist offer examples of uncompromisingly public
religious lives, and are manifestations of religious militancy. Could the
originating motivations of both religious killers and religious peace-builders
be construed in some way as "authentically religious," in R. Scott
Appleby's phrasing? Are all claims to possess full certainty of God's
revelation "religiously idolatrous," as Father Leon Hooper, S.J.,
suggests? And what does the postmodern attack on Christian truth - Gil Bailie's
concern - have to do with it? The March 14, 2002 forum featured presentations by
Appleby, Bailie, and Father Hooper, and was moderated by Sue Morris, a Catholic
social-action leader and spiritual director. Following is an edited transcript
of the discussion.
INTRODUCTION
Sue Morris currently ministers at the Oblates King's House
Retreat and Renewal Center in Belleville, Illinois. She has worked for over 25
years in religious education, social ministry, and directed retreats
specializing in spirituality and peace and justice.
Tonight's forum, "Being Radically Religious in Public Life,"
grows out of September 11th concerns. We live as a people who believe in the
Second Vatican Council's universal call to holiness and its embrace of the
many different ways of life. At the same time, awareness of God in our world of
business, finance, and politics can be difficult. We find ourselves admiring
people who live with such total dedication.
At the same time, we can be troubled by the clarity and the certainty of some
"true believers." But we might be repulsed by the fact that both pure
pacifists, such as Dorothy Day, and terrorists such as Mohamed Atta, do claim
the sense of being closely involved with God in their life and attuned to God's
intention for the world. Tonight's discussion will examine two forms of
radical religion in public life: the uncompromisingly non-violent, such as
Mahatma Gandhi and Dorothy Day, and the unflinchingly violent, as represented by
Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh. By way of contrast, we shall also discuss
how God may be found along more moderate paths we find ourselves in, amid the
ambiguity and the compromise of public life today.
RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE AND RELIGIOUS PEACE BUILDING
R. Scott Appleby is director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. With Martin E.
Marty, Scott served as co-director of the Fundamentalism Project, an extensive
study of public religion conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
which has produced five volumes to date. Appleby is author of The
Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation and Church
and Age Unite! The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism.
My assignment is to talk about religious violence and religious
peace-building and see to what extent we can understand the two as related, and
in fact as coming from, in some sense, the same religious dynamic while making
distinctions between those who do religious violence and religious
peace-building. How can we say that both deadly violence and self-sacrificial
healing and compassion are both "authentically religious?"
Two mistakes are often made. One is to say that the young Palestinian suicide
bomber or the Jewish settler, or the Christian abortion clinic bomber, because
they do violence, because they murder and kill, and maim and torture and commit
acts of terrorism, of course cannot be religious. They are either manipulated by
secular, Marxist, or other ideological agents. They are in no way motivated by
authentic or genuine religion. This just can't be true. That's a mistake. We
have to separate, make a distinction between normative judgments about these
great religious traditions and what counts for appropriate reading of those
traditions, on the one hand, and the vast array of people who read them in
different ways but who are living according to the patterns, dynamics, and
motivations of the sacred. So fellow
Muslims might say, about that young Muslim suicide bomber, fellow Jews about
the Jewish settlers, fellow Christians about the abortion clinic bombers -
"that's not Islam, that's not Judaism, that's not Christianity."
And everyone has the right and the authority within these traditions to say
that. But that doesn't help us understand why that person believes it to be
Islam. Or why devotion to self-sacrifice in the cause of killing others is
construed as Islamic in a way that is different from other kinds of motivations
or acts of violence.
The other mistake about religion in international affairs and in deadly
conflict is the notion that all religion is inherently intolerant, violent,
extremist, and deadly. I can give many examples of this. But when the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences won a huge grant to study religious fundamentalism,
I sat on the committee as a young 30-year-old because Martin Marty couldn't be
there. And the other committee members were incensed that we gave any money to
religion at all. Some of these are Nobel Laureates, people who had worked on the
Manhattan Project, and they said: "Young man, if we're giving one damn
penny to religion, you better eradicate it." Not fundamentalism, religion.
It's all irrational, barbarian. It is superstitious. It lends itself to
intolerance and prejudice. I found myself babbling about St. Thomas Aquinas,
reason and revelation. But there are many examples of this kind of secular
prejudice.
Religious Violence and Peace-Building
How do we understand these two
expressions of religion within a range that is authentically religious? We could
go back to a book written in 1924 by a historian of religion named Rudolph Otto.
The book was called The Idea of the Holy. And I will use the words
"holy" and the "sacred" interchangeably. Otto made the claim
that I think is still valid, that religion is rooted in experience, a
distinctive kind of experience, the experience of the holy, of the sacred. And
it's an experience across cultures that leads one to community - "religare"
means "to bind together," to live in community. This experience does
something to bring people together, somewhat like say, the experience of
ecstasy, falling in love. You communicate it. You want it to be known. You want
to bind yourself together to others. Well, for this experience of the sacred,
which is community forming, he used the memorable phrase, "mysterium
tremendum, et fascinans."
Mysterium means this is an experience of something radically other than
myself or my community. It's not a tingle in my toes. It's not a kind of
intuition. It is something that is not me. So it's radically other. It is
mysterious. Profoundly other. And yet, it's also tremendum, i.e., tremendous
in the sense of soul-shaking. In the presence of the sacred, in the presence of
the holy, we recognize ourselves radically to be creatures, to be finite, to be
contingent, to be unable to exist on our own. But there's also "et
fascinans." It's also fascinating, intriguing, compelling, and in a
sense, seductive. It draws us to it.
The important insight here, however, in this phenomenology of religion is
that the experience of the holy, of the sacred, is pre-moral. It does not come
with its own program, where you tell the players apart, and know what is good
and bad, what is the right thing to do, how to interpret it. So religion itself
is an interpretive exercise. And it's an interpretation not just of anything,
but of this awesome, tremendous, mysterious, soul-shaking reality, that in fact
evokes in us our spiritual reality. Paul Tillich said we have a passion for the
infinite. We are finite creatures who are drawn beyond ourselves. And so we are
capable of giving ourselves, not only our own lives and livelihoods, but even
our children, our loved ones' lives to a cause we decide or we consider to be
sacred or holy.
The Varieties of Religious Militancy
Therefore, militance [sic] is a
religious norm. I use the word "militant" to refer to the religious
dynamic that binds together those who move into modes of violence and those who
move into modes of compassion and healing. One could use the word
"extremism" or some other word, but the word I use is "militance."
Gandhi said: "I am a militant." One of the representatives of St.
Egidio, the lay Catholic community in Rome that does peace-building around the
world, pounded his fists on the table a few years ago and said: "I am a
militant for peace!" By militance, I mean a dynamic within religion that
calls forth or evokes self-sacrifice, a willingness to give oneself entirely to
a cause unto flying a plane in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or
whatever other kind of extreme and outrageous acts but also unto leading a
non-violent movement to liberate India from the British. You can go across the
spectrum and see that this kind of militance is part of a devotion to the
sacred.
Then there are extremists - those religious militants who are dedicated to
violence. They believe violence to be a religious obligation. It's not an
option for them. It's not something they can choose or reject. There are two
kinds of extremists to talk about. One would be the ethno-religious type of
extremist. And here we have examples of weak religion. These are often
ethno-religious conflicts where the conflict is not primarily to defend or
protect or expand or enlarge religion. Instead the conflict is an ethnic,
territorial, nationalist conflict that recruits religion to sacrilize the
killing, that brings this devotion to absolutism, and to self-sacrifice to the
service of nationalist claims. In the conflict in Northern Ireland, the IRA is
not fighting for Catholics to attend Mass more regularly or to be better
Catholics. In Bosnia, when Serbian soldiers were raping and torturing Muslim
women, they were singing Christian hymns. But they were not fighting to increase
Serbian orthodoxy as such. In their folk religion, orthodoxy and Serbian
identity are intertwined. The internal pluralism of orthodoxy, the resistance to
nationalism, is underdeveloped. And so, you could ask those Serbian soldiers who
were singing hymns while they were doing atrocities a few basic theological
questions that are likely to fail. Because the religion is weak but it's
powerful in the sense of being fused with ethnicity.
The second kind of extremist religion is "radical fundamentalism."
Here we are talking about religious extremists who are fighting primarily,
although never exclusively, for religion. They believe that the reason the
grievances are there, the injustice is there, is precisely because they believe
that religion has been displaced. And here we find a variety of Islamic
movements. The problem for the Osama bin Ladens is that the people they're
recruiting have a knowledge and a literacy of their religious tradition and
understand that the mainstream tradition does not teach brutal violence. So they
have to say: under certain conditions, we're threatened with death, the
tradition is about to be annihilated. And in fact, you can find in the New
Testament, if you want to, in the Torah, in the Koran, emergency clauses. In
case of this assault, pick up the sword.
At the other end are the people who are committed to non-violence and just
peace-building. They are, of course, woefully under-recorded, often
under-organized, not staffed, and not funded. There's a fellow named David
Steele, a United Church of Christ minister, who works on reconciliation
workshops in the former Yugoslavia, does wonderful work, painstaking, long-term
work with the religious communities there, bringing them together. First, he had
to spend years letting them talk about their suffering before they could even
talk about reconciliation. Furthermore, his budget is on such a shoestring that
you couldn't even paint one of our warheads with the amount of money he has.
So it's a great inequity. The resources of these people who are working in
non-violence, justice, and peace-building are tremendous because they are local.
These are people working in and of the communities. They have great integrity,
also in some cases, like Catholicism, have a transnational presence they can
draw upon in conflict mediation. And they have a record, as I say, of integrity,
which is parenthetically one of the really painful things we're all undergoing
in the Catholic community with the scandals in Boston, because what's being
eroded is one of the great advantages of local peace-building and justice, which
is trust, integrity. People who are turning to religious peace-builders are
willing to risk themselves in battle for reconciliation.
Saturation Peacemaking
To conclude, there are three different models
of religious peace-building. One is what I call the saturation model in which
religious peace-builders have worked over a long term at the elite level, at
middle management in the societies, and in the grass roots to foster
reconciliation. It's difficult to prove how important these people are because
it's difficult to prove a negative. In Northern Ireland, there are more
peace-builders per capita than anywhere else in the world. The cynic will say,
"Well you still had over 3,000 deaths since 1970." And the correct
answer is: "You should see what it would have been like if we hadn't had
thousands of people dedicated to peace- building." Saturation is one model,
and then I should mention the conflict mediation model of St. Egidio and other
religious movements. They recognize that the religious actors devoted to
peace-building can't do this on their own. And so they work with governmental
agencies, non-governmental organizations, with the U.S. Catholic Conference or
Catholic Relief Services, or the CIA (if they have to). But my point is, the
religious peace-builders, the non-violent, are no less devoted, and I think no
less potentially effective, than the extremists.
SECULAR FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE TRUTH QUESTION
Gil Bailie is president of The Florilegia Institute of Sonoma,
California. For many years he taught a wide variety of courses at the Institute,
including courses on Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and a great
number of other Biblical themes and topics. Bailie's book, Violence
Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, received the 1996 Pax Christi USA book
award. He spends his time traveling the country and the world giving talks on
issues of justice and violence.
I want to talk about ideologies, which were invented in the post-Christian
world, beginning in the 18th century, and in ways too complicated to try to
explore right now. Each of them was designed to in some way neutralize and
marginalize the Gospel tradition. They have all failed. We were in desperate
need of a post-ideological ideology and wouldn't you know it? We found one. It
might be called secular fundamentalism. It's sometimes called post-modernism.
And, by the way, like so many of these other things, post-modernism is like a
broken clock. It's right twice a day. So I'm not here to completely
dismantle it or attack it, but I do want to tell a parable.
I could turn, as Henri de Lubac and others have, to Nietzsche. Nietzsche is
naturally a madman, and he's sown incredible poison, but he understood
Christianity better than most Christians. He wanted to get rid of it, but he
understood it at least. Or at least he understood its cultural and historical
impact, and he wanted to eliminate it. If de Lubac can turn to Nietzsche, I want
to turn to Virginia Woolf. She has a prophetic anticipation of the spiritual
plight of modern intellectual life in the West in her novel, The Waves.
Bernard, a character in the novel, is a "wannabe" writer and poet. In
fact, he is a scribe, a man completely preoccupied with textuality.
Early in the novel, Bernard says: "I have made up thousands of stories.
I have filled up innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found
the true story, the one story to which all the phrases refer, but I have never
yet found that story." Like his later post-modern descendants, Bernard is a
man without a meta-narrative. Unlike them, he still at least claims to be
looking for one, in the absence of which, he tries to breathe life into the
eviscerated text with which his study is now strewn, his own life story in a
perfectly comfortable state of amorphous incoherence. As Virginia Woolf makes
unmistakably clear, the question that haunts these pages is the question of
truth, the post-modern question. Bernard is awash in narratives and in
the verbal and grammatical spare parts out of which they are constructed, but
from none of this literary abundance can he fashion a reliable story. The
untruth which infects his stories is explicitly related to the fact that he is
unable to situate them in "the" story, the true story, the one story
to which all the phrases refer. It is the absence of this one overarching
unifying story that has rendered the stories that might have been its
constituent parts untrue.
With an almost breathtaking literary economy, Virginia Woolf shows us the
real nature of the post-modern spirit. The Waves is a novel written in
1930. She shows how utterly ad hoc is Bernard's objection to the truth claim,
precisely the Christian truth claim, for that is what she is no doubt here
exploring. And those like Bernard, imbued with that passive-aggressive resentful
post-modern spirit, will instantly glance around for something, anything, to
which they can plausibly point as an exception, something to which the claim
does not apply, for it is precisely the universality of the claim that arouses
resentment.
What Woolf shows, however, is how ludicrously arbitrary are the objections
thrown up against the truth claims of Christianity. Does Bernard offer
philosophical objections or counter-arguments based on comparative religion, or
science, or the unedifying history of the Church? No. Virginia Woolf has engaged
in such polemics and she knows herself well enough and is honest enough to tell
us the truth about them. What she shows us here is what underlies all these
seemingly rational objections is an irrational one. Pure resentment at the fact
that a universal truth claim is still being made. No self-respecting person
would lower himself to countering truth claims with allusions to something as
utterly arbitrary and accidental as a cat which one has just happens to have
seen stealing a piece of fish. No. One would counter such claims with
philosophically or politically or scientifically respectable arguments.
What Virginia Woolf knows from firsthand experience, however, is that these
more respectable arguments camouflage often even from those who advance them,
the real source of the antipathy. The greater the intellectual respectability of
the counter claim, the less apparent it will be that it is driven by pure
resentment. That is why we need the Dostoyevskys and Virginia Woolfs and
Nietzsches of the world to reveal the truth about such things to us. Virginia
Woolf has substituted a philosophically absurd counter-argument in place of an
intellectually respectable one, in order to reveal a motive that infects even
the intellectually respectable one, namely resentment felt towards any and all
truth claims, but felt with especial vehemence towards the truth claims of
Christianity.
The heart and soul of post-modernism's attitude toward truth here stands
exposed. The most important thing to recognize, however, is what Virginia Woolf
reveals with such skill, that Bernard's stories are also untrue because, as
Bernard himself tells us, they were written for the very purpose of obscuring
truth, precisely the Christian truth, the truth represented by the crucifix.
Bernard tells us that he made up thousands of stories in order to obliterate the
angels of the crucifix, eliminating thereby the story which Christianity
proclaims to be the one true story, the story in which Christians find both the
truth about God and the truth about humanity. The narrative Rosetta Stone for
all substantive theological and anthropological thought, the story of Golgotha.
The Peace Stake in Christian Truth
The Gospel's
deconstruction of the myths of sacred violence happens implacably. The cross
shows us the innocence of the victim, the madness of the mob, it begins to
deconstruct all the myths that require us to believe in the guilt of the victim
and the sanctity and rightness of the mob.
Yet, even while it deconstructs those myths, it can also unleash the violence
that those sacrificial regimes existed to minimize. So, it's in an incredibly
paradoxical world, but the Gospel does two things. It destroys the old sacred
system, and it does this other thing. It teaches us how to live without it. If
it just destroys the old sacred system, we will eventually, like a lot of people
who have turned to fundamentalism, try to get it back. Unless we learn how to
live without it. Learning how to live without the old sacred system is what the
Gospel is teaching us to do. And so the Gospel is destroying the old sacred
system and the myths that justify it faster than we're learning how to live
without it. And that's why people say to me: What are we gonna do? I say:
evangelization. And when I say evangelization, it means the christianizing -
if you want to use a small "c," fine - of our world, to bring it
precisely into a dialogue, to connect us with others and to exhibit the God who
is the God of everybody.
RELIGIOUS IDOLATRIES AND ABSOLUTIST CLAIMS
Leon Hooper, S.J., is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological
Center. He has written extensively on the public theology of John Courtney
Murray, edited two volumes of primary Murray texts, and co-directed a Lilly
Endowment study of Murray and the American church, resulting in the volume of
secondary essays, John Courtney Murray and the Growth of Tradition. He is
currently working on a comparative study of Dorothy Day and Murray, anchored in
recent studies of the rhetorical analyses of the way mystics talk about God.
Three years ago I was one of 25 participants, from a dozen different faith
traditions, gathered at the Aspen Institute's Wye River Center. Our topic was:
why we heterodox believers talk with each other, given our obvious
disagreements. The response that both a Muslim Imam and I gave to the question
evoked strong disagreement from each of our co-religionists. Surprisingly we
found ourselves reduced to encouraging but wan smiles, and even a surreptitious
wink, across the embattled conference room. The proposition we both subscribed
to, which was rigorously denied by others, ran as follows:
God's revelation to us all - of who we are and who God is - is not
closed. In this post-Cold War and post-modern age, God is trying to teach us
something new. None of our pasts contain all that God is yet to reveal.
Murray and Day as Models
Here I will suggest - and suggest is all I
can do here - that any claims to exclusive moral and religious truth are
empirically false, socially deadly, and religiously idolatrous. My models for
this claim are John Courtney Murray and Dorothy Day, and the moves they made as
they faced their mid-twentieth century.
By most estimates, Murray was a moderate, a Rockefeller Republican who hung
around with Henry and Clare Booth Luce. Day, the radical, associated with, even
lived with, the poorest of our poor in Catholic Worker houses. In the early
1940s, Day nearly buried the Worker movement with her insistence that
Christianity demanded non-violence in the face of Hitler's atrocities, while
Murray was arguing, from papal sources, that no Catholic could be a pacifist.
Both characterized the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, in Murray's
terms, as "atrocities," as "savage ... paroxysms of
violence." In the early 1950s, though, Day was jailed for actively
demonstrating against nuclear bomb shelter drills, while Murray was arguing that
we should use strategic nuclear weapons along the Chinese/Korean border. And in
the mid-1950s, in his defense of a moral core at the heart of America, Murray
argued from the premise that, in principle, we had solved the problem of
poverty. With the Catholic Worker, Day was letting us know what our economy was
doing to the poor, to blacks, and to farm-workers.
We, of course, think of Day as the more religiously radical. We judge that by
what her living with the desperate and uneducated cost her, and would cost us.
She claimed with all the realism she could muster that the poor "are the
Christ," and she added, "When we meet people who deny Christ in his
poor, we feel, 'Here are atheists indeed'."
And yet, I suggest, this is not Day at her most radical. She was her most
radical when she would not allow her moral and religious values to exclude
anyone from God's redeeming presence. Day accepted church teaching, including
what the church said about atheists, communists, and non-Catholics. Yet she
herself insisted that she learned of God's love for the poor from a communist
college friend. Similarly, God as Creator became known to her through the loving
of the man who fathered her child, an adamant atheist who adored nature. Amid
the excluding demands of her faith, Day found a way to think of those outsiders,
those aliens, as redeemed. She prayed that they, in the last second of their
lives, would realize God's love for them.
For Day, acknowledging Christ in the poor was relatively a piece of cake.
Much more difficult was acknowledging the Christ among totalitarian dictators or
capitalist managers. In this she became truly challenging. While she bluntly
condemned brutality and praised kindness wherever she found them, she refused to
squeeze God into the narrow confines of even her best moral categories. God was
and is fully present to all God's creation.
Now, to Murray. While he is tamer than Day, Murray did appear to us as at
least mildly heroic. He insisted, against our adamant secularists, that
religious voices needed to be heard. And against his own church he insisted that
the voice of freedom coming from those secularists was indeed the voice of God,
to whom we ought to pay attention. Even though, early in his life, Murray had
entertained the notion that the Anglo-West was the "quintessence of all
that is evil," he really did think that our Anglo-American freedoms were
worth defending, and were God-given.
Murray's Mutual Conversation
Not very radical, by the standards of
Day's life style. Yet Murray had to - and did - overcome his nearly
lifelong, utter disbelief that we Catholics might learn anything about our God
from non-Catholics, non-Christians, from atheists. Early in his life he argued
that the Reformation break shattered the possibility of interfaith God-talk. And
he acted accordingly, until the Second Vatican Council. Then, during and
especially after the Council he confessed that, in the future, what we learn of
our God will be learned only in mutual conversation, that theology must begin in
ecumenical dialogue, if we are to know the truth of our God. And for Murray,
talking with atheists, especially about God, was even more difficult. Until the
Council he could give no principled grounds for not suppressing atheistic
voices. After the Council, hesitantly and even grudgingly, he did so talk with
them - although a picture from one such meeting reveals a Murray with the
glazed look of a deer caught in headlights.
Both Day and Murray taught us much about our twentieth century and God's
hopes for it. In this, our post-superpower world with its World Trade Centers,
its terrorized Jewish and Palestinian children, soaring hopes and seething
resentments and massive indifference - how can they help us tribalists discern
God's present revelation to us, to us Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sihks,
Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, all of us? Here I mention three points.
1. We are learning that any faith that traps the God of love, God
compassionate and merciful, within our moral and doctrinal commitments, is a
form of idolatry. That which we affirm as good is often enough truly good. But
to confine God within the limits of those goods is to take a creature and turn
it into a God. In an age of less communication (therefore an age less
pluralistic) and an age of less firepower, such idolatries could be tolerated,
even encouraged. Now we can no longer afford them. We simply now know too much
and can kill too easily.
2. Any claims to possess in one's small mitts the fullness or fullest
revelation of God's will and graciousness (my divine whole against your at
best fragmentary, if not diabolic, part), must now be recognized for what they
have always been: inadequate expressions of God's graciousness that too
easily, one might even say diabolically, lend themselves to building one's own
sense of election on the battered bodies and souls and cultures and religions of
the alien. We need to clean up our own traditions, recognizing our own tribalism
for what it has been - much as Day and Murray challenged their own tradition
for ignorantly abetting political, economic, and religious violations of human
dignity.
3. We are now in a position to appreciate a bit more fully that being
creatures means living within contradictory drives that allow no resolution.
Here the unresolvable contradiction is a permanent tension between the
particulars we know and the comprehensive that has been revealed to us - a
problem between the many and the one. As people such as Julian of Norwich, and
Day and Murray demonstrate, we need to simultaneously do the hard work of
discriminating between the real world goods and evils that surround us, on the
one hand, and living out God's all-encompassing love, on the other. We know
the good. We just can't limit the good when we think of God.
An example might help.
When we look at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or the West Bank, we
see people brutally murdered. But we Christians also have been trained to see,
in those who appear most abandoned by God, people who are taken up into God's
eternal life. After all, we have heard the Son of God cry out, "My God, why
have you forsaken me." As Day could see the Christ in those most abandoned,
so we recognize the Christ embracing all who are cast out beyond the margins of
civility.
Mohamed Atta's Distance from God
However, if we are to be true to
the Jesus who invited tax collectors, prostitutes, priests, and the learned to
sit at the same table, prior to reforming their lives (much like Day's hopes
for Worker dining rooms and farms), then we must ask ourselves: who at the World
Trade Center seems to us the most distant from God? And the answer surely is
Mohamed Atta, the pilot who directed one of the planes into the towers. Such
brutality, to our eyes and hearts, puts him outside any grace that we can
recognize. But is he beyond the grace that saves? Can we, living in the Spirit
of Christ, leave him twisting in the outer darkness, even when he himself
consigns us to hell? Do we return the favor?
In the fifteenth century, Julian of Norwich looked at her world, decimated by
both the black plague and lawless banditry, and the church's promise that evil
persons would burn in hell, on the one hand. And she encountered God's love so
intensely, on the other, that she could not resolve the demands of justice with
the experience of a God "in whom there is no wrath." She struggled
with her age's best demands for justice and with her God, and finally threw up
her hands and claimed that, when Christ comes again, "All will be
well." She could claim no more - and no less - if she was to be true to
the limited goods she encountered and the unlimited Good who grasped her. To
claim only the full realization of justice, or only the full realization of
mercy, is always an attempt to play God, and thus to deny the God who continues
to create and reveal.
Julian was a mystic. Murray certainly wasn't. Day possibly so. But the
moves of all three conform to a suggestion of Karl Rahner's: that the religion
that will survive and be worthy of our God and of our best hopes, will be a
religion that is mystical. Our times are revealing to us that our current
brutalities emerge not only from the evils we recognize, but more savagely from
our drive to idolatrize even our best moral categories. The corrective to this
idolatry is not abandonment of our hard fought moral discriminations, but lies
in a willingness to live with them while simultaneously we acknowledge that God's
embracing love reaches beyond them. Even Atta is grasped. Without that grasp,
God is not God, or at least not a God worthy of adoration.
