On Admiration and Contempt

In my last posting I noted that I was experiencing what I there called “brain fog”. My attempt to write here about admiration and contempt may well be muddled because of that fog.
My mentor, Bill Lynch SJ, says (in his yet unpublished Book of Admiration) that the experience of admiration is for us a real and present form of salvation, and that attaining an attitude of admiration often demands struggling against and through contempt which is admiration’s great opposite and enemy.
I note this because I have recently expressed (not on this site) my deep contempt for those I there called “spiritual fascists”. I mean those whose sense of righteousness leads them to purge from their lives and institutions the insufficiently righteous. I wrote about one particular case of such spiritual fascism and the way it utterly destroyed one particular institution (a Catholic boys’ high school which I had loved), though those involved would see themselves as “saving” it. I still hold those folks in deep contempt.
Another case involves Donald Trump and at least some, probably many, of his sycophants. I’ve long wished that someone would assassinate that son of a bitch. Indeed, I’m sorry that the recent attempt failed. And I’m dismayed that little comment about that attempt notes how much he and his ilk have continually provoked contempt and polarizing hatred towards so many “others”.
Lynch also reminds us of how enjoyable it is to hate, something most of us know yet typically fail to acknowledge. That may be one of the motivations for Trumpers and their like. It’s fun to hate, a real joy, a passion. I know this joy in my contempt for Trump and his toadies, and my contempt for spiritual fascists.

Yet there’s another, far deeper side to contempt. It is a vice and like all vices it gets a strong and corrupting grip, a headlock, on the minds and spirits of those who revel in it. It locks us down, locks us within ourselves. It hates the real and blocks admiration for real things. Thus, it is often accompanied by a deep feeling of confusion and hopelessness.

Where does that leave me since I do indeed have strong and deep contempt for quite a few folks and causes, institutions and movements. Nor, I suspect, am I alone. For how do you feel these days about out great “supreme” court, about not a few of our Catholic bishops, about not a few politicians here and elsewhere….
The hate is there, on so many sides of so many different forms of polarization in culture and society.
And it is, I repeat, corrupting.
So, again, what are we to do if we fail to acknowledge, not just with our heads but with our consciences and emotions, the reality of such corruption. If we fail to experience the corrupting forces at work within the joy of hating?
Truth be told, I don’t really know.
For there are real evils that we must hate and oppose. I think Trump and what he represents is such an evil, as also various forms of spiritual fascism.
Yet somehow we must learn to discern between such legitimate, even necessary hatreds, and the tendency for even such hatred to expand, to grow like a vicious cancer, to spread like a dark blanket which eventually covers everything, blocking (or so it seems) any possibility of admiration.
I guess one starting place is to try to focus on admiration. When I shift from enjoying my hatreds to paying attention to the many, many things I admire – people and works of art, good films and books, good institutions and movements – then I may be on a slow road to recovery, to salvation.
Let me mention a few of my admirations.
I admire Regis University where I taught for 30 years. Where I had the privilege of being on the rank and tenure committee for many of those years, trying to promote the many good folks with whom I worked and to “weed out” the bad folks who poisoned the atmosphere. Bad teachers and a few bad deans, and some bad students who deserved to be flunked out. Fortunately, over the years there were few such among the teachers and administrators and students.
I continue to admire the Roman Catholic Church, despite all it’s too obvious failings. I never admired John Paul II (even if at some personal level he may have been saintly). I think his long tenure as pope led to the appointment of a generation of bishops and cardinals whose presence still corrupts the church. Yet I admire Catholicism’s long tradition of thought and prayer, of poetry and liturgy. Dante and Aquinas, Augustine and (yes) Luther – with whom I admire many important forms of protestant thought and community as well as so many expressions of Orthodoxy. And the great Councils and Synods, especially today Vatican II and Francis’ continuing effort to establish a synodal style for the Church.
I admire many of the religious orders of sisters and brothers and priests. Dominicans and Benedictines, Jesuits and Marianists, Franciscans and Carmelites – and so on.
I admire poets like John Donne and T. S. Eliott, Yeats and Hopkins, Wordsworth and Heaney. And singers like Joan Baez and Sinead O’Conner (may she rest in peace), Peter-Paul-and-Mary and Simon-and-Garfunkle, Eric Clapton and Luciano Pavoritti (google their marvelous rendition of “Holy Mother”). Though I’ve never had much use for the widely admired Frank Sinatra or even Elvis.
I admire the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon, the Missouri and the Mississippi, the Hudson and the East rivers. The Statue of Liberty and New York’s skyline. So too, of course, Cape Town and Table Mountain, Krueger National Park and the great Serengeti with their herds of zebras and giraffes, kudu and impala and wildebeest, elephants and rhinos, lions and cheetahs.
And so much more, in daily life and on the world scene.
And I must continually learn, by the practice of attention, to focus on what is admirable. And, while attending to news and commentary, story and song, not letting myself be captured by the levels of contempt which pervade so much of their content.