Several friends have been kind enough to ask why I had stopped writing blogs and whether I might start again. Truth be told, I have not written a blog post in many months – in part because of my own want of the energy (long covid), in part because there are already many very good bloggers and commentators out there.
For instance, since I’ve blogged often over recent years about Palestine-Israel (the last proclaiming I’d never write again about this mid-East mess), I’d rather have folks read better commentators like David Brooks who recently wrote about how we (Americans, Christians, Jews, Muslims) could endure the realities of the present without submitting to rage or despair. He urged a return to the two great sources of Western wisdom – Athens (or the Ancient Greeks) and Jerusalem (or the Biblical writings). He urged especially a recovery of the Greek’s tragic sensibility as a way of dealing with unexpected evil and fate. And a recovery of the biblical tradition embodied for Brooks most recently in the life of Etty Hillesum – the young secular Dutch Jew who grew to become “the girl who learned to kneel” and then “the glowing heart” of the camps where she was eventually murdered. I too highly recommend her journals published as “An Interrupted Life”.
I, at least, find that advice helpful as I face the simplistic temptations to rage at terrorists and murderers on many sides, and despair of any hope that anything will end this other than a drawn-out, exhausted stalemate, only to begin again soon enough (in one place or another).
But let me turn to a subject where I want to think I know something, or where I might learn something by trying to write about it. That is the topic of synodality in the Catholic Church and on the most recent Synod session in Rome, now several months ago.
I’m part of a zoom group of Catholic guys reading and talking about the Synodal process; I’ve tried to keep up with commentary about the recent Synod meeting, and the official document released by the Synod.
Here’s what strike me as the most “typical” responses to the process so far – 1) it has continued to be a saga of failed expectations at every level, just more ecclesial blah, blah, blah, even if this time coming from the mouths of women and laity and others; 2) it really is a hopeful start; clearly only a start, with many bumps in the road especially around still-controversial issues; yet the real beginning of something new – a sense of a need for new structures for participation of all God’s People in discernment as we move to next year’s synod in Rome and thereafter.
I want here to argue for the latter response even though I’m deeply disappointed on the lack of movement on ordaining women and married folks, and about the obvious need (at least in the US and Canada, and Western Europe) for accepting LGBTQ folks as full brothers and sisters in our communities. It’s pretty obvious, I sense, that the ordination issue is a no-brainer except for those with so much to lose once clericalism is dismantled.
By the way, I just read about the need to support our priests, especially the celibates in the secular/diocesan priesthood, as the sentiment of the folks moves to reject celibacy. I’ve taught some of those men and admire them and their ministry. Yet they mostly live alone (unlike religious-order priests) and must suffer the drift of opinion away from their hard-bought celibacy.
It’s just arrogance which leads some (and me not a few times) to reject the whole process. Not gonna do nuthin. Just rah, rah hype for the interested – and most are not.
Yet there’s no stopping the synodal process. In McLuhan speak, the medium is the message. Seeing laity, women, nuns, and cardinals speaking and listening at one round table is a game changer. Whatever the many bumps and discernments among polarizations down the road, the tooth-paste can’t be put back in the tube. Those images of listening, speaking, and praying are worth more than the thousands of words about the synod and about our polarizations.
I do not know where the synod process is taking us, neither on hot-button issues nor on local participation. I hope we move forward quickly but carefully to lay preaching, ordination of women and married folks, serious parish councils and diocesan synodal structures, and also to ecumenical and inter-faith dialogues or synods. But I suspect it will be more of a process (citing Eliott) of “hints and guesses,” “fits and starts” until we can, with Rilke, “love the questions themselves” and lean into the process with hope-filled yet realistic expectancy.
We need now, as always (as my master Lynch teaches) to embrace the drama of time, to move through many analogous pathways as we seek unity — not leaping above time to some fantastic vision of unity – and thus to suffer the inevitable step backward with every one or two steps forward.
I can’t resist a final note about Palestine: I’m mightily pissed at Biden for his seemingly unilateral and absolute support for Israel– with money and weapons and carrier fleets, yet will still vote for him if it comes down to him or Trump.
