christianity – With a Cane

I received a number of greetings on Feb. 1, my 82^nd birthday.

One was a funny take on Lao Tzu: “Yung No Mo.” Another was from a good and equally old friend on the phone. We reminisced about the good times and shared a sense of diminishments, from hearing loss, vision loss, leg loss, no more skiing! Finally a beautiful care from my Sister-in-law who’s into her 90s and living in Switzerland. It depicts a flock of migratory birds already heading north through, she says, Colorado. She notes that the natural world stays its course and urges me to stay my course this coming year, writing, fathering and grandfathering, husbanding, doing all this with grace and contentment. Beautiful sentiments.

My own take, so far, is “ain’t never down this road before.” What should I fear, what expect, what hope for, and the like…? And, yes, I don’t know, since I never been here before.

So first, I don’t want to live too much longer – as into mid- 90s like my sister-in-law. But do want do enjoy more wine and roses and other escapes into reading, viewing, and fantasy. Of course, as the beautiful Italian song suggests, “Que sera, sera.”

My master Lynch continually instructs us that we must live through time, through all its stages and phases, and not try to somehow (impossibly) flee from time’s challenges and changes, joys and rigors.

He urges that one of the ways human faith (as hope and love) deals with time is by understanding its great ironies. Especially, as the good Jesuit says, the ironies embodied in Jesus’ life. Born poor, teaching in the boonies, entering Jerusalem on a donkey and eventually crowned with thorns and put to a political criminal’s death. Just dwell a bit on the ironic form of this supposed to be savior. And then the resurrection, his and the promise of our own. Just imagine that, or try to.

Ironic though it seems, given my want of energy, both physical and mental and spiritual, I will try to continue to write.

And I hope to continue to read, both good stuff and escapes.

I just sent off to a second publisher my edited readings of several of Master Lynch’s manuscripts – one never published in any form – what he entitled “A Book of Admiration” and subtitled “A Prose Poem on the forms of Salvation”. I really want to get this published someplace because it is a wonderful re-thinking of the doctrine of Salvation. He wants all of us to pay less attention to “Big ‘S’ Salvation” and more to all the little forms of salvation (real salvation or healing or wholeness) which we experience whenever we are caught up in or graced with a moment of admiration. Admiring a person, a scene in nature, a writing, some form of drama or writing, the little children whose skipping hope we (thankfully) see all over the place.

I’ve entitled this edited work, along with some of Lynch’s shorter essay, “A Good Taste of the World” since that’s what moments of admiration, small “s”, actually are. Experiencing, really tasting, some of the many goods of the world. And thereby, since they are mutually inclusive tastes (what Lynch calls the “two pearls of great price” promised in the Gospels) – a good taste of the world brings with it a good taste of our own selves.

And with Ukraine and Gaza and environmental catastrophe and desperate migrants and starving children – there is certainly much reason NOT to experience much good taste of the world.

Yet we are continually saved from such despairing tastes by the many good tastes admiration brings us.

Admiration does not lead us to escape harsh realities, but to find even there the goodness which somehow prevails beneath or within such evils. That, I believe, is the meaning of the Christian doctrine about God’s goodness ad omnipotence and omnipresence – the great Mystery which we call “G.O.D.”

Just a bit of rambling here since I continue to enjoy the good high of weed, and hope to (moderately of course) during this 82^nd journey.

So far, my health holds, with too many increasing diminishments – in mind as well as body.

I still have the joy of remembering faces, but rarely remembering names. Of neighbors, former students and colleagues.

I just had a beer sitting in the sun on the patio of a nearby restaurant. Thinking of each passerby as made in the image of God. Believing that “this” (these folks, the shining sun, the buildings old and new, the immigrant family that approached me asking for money for food…) as the body of Christ. Really, God’s good presence hic et nunc.

Hope I have many occasions for such seeing throughout the coming year.

Enough already.

May you experience joy and hope aplenty during this year of our Lord 2024. Even as you face all the evils, wars and hatreds and the like which will plague our path.

Ad Multos Annos.

Reflections on Christmas and the New Year # 1

I intend this writing about one central meaning of our Christmas celebration to be the first of two reflections on this holiday/holyday celebration. This one will focus above all on Francis the Great’s 2020 encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship. (About which I have written 5 commentaries on this blogsite, all in November 2020.) The second will contrast Francis with Trump as “cultural icons” for two very different political and social futures for our world in 2024.

My wife and I ended this year’s Christmas Letter with the following citation: “The urgency to get out into the world, to the margins, is what Jesus’ incarnation is all about. When Jesus later says ‘Come, follow me’ he is not talking about climbing a ladder to heaven. Jesus is heading downward, into the world of the poor and oppressed. It is along that road that he invites us to journey with him.”

“Downward into the world [and] along that road” can and should mean many things to different people and situations. In this Christmas reflection I wish to explain what the Pope means by social friendship with reference to what my mentor Lynch means by his teaching that faith has a body or must be embodied in the real world of social experience (in his 1973 book Images of Faith).

Neither Francis nor Lynch (two great Jesuits) mean something simple. I, then, have the freedom to give a fairly simplistic explanation while acknowledging that I’ve but scratched the surface.

Clearly, Jesus’ ‘follow me” does mean direct service to the poor, homeless street folk, refugees and immigrants in our cities. Yet it also means, and commands, restoring and building up the relations of trust and hope within our human “city” (whether extended family, ethnic tribe, or small village, whether town or city, local or national) – relations so trampled and torn by the polarizations which dominate our public (even familial) lives.

For if, at Christmas, we again celebrate and pray for “peace on earth, good will toward men”, those words clearly imply the foundation of such peace – the sense of basic trust and social friendship without which any human (humane, civic, civilized) society is impossible.

Francis’ discussion of such social friendship is appropriately detailed, covering many different aspects of social life, in the nation and world – from discussions of war and violence, to poverty and work, justice and climate change, law and civic justice, and more. I suspect it will, long after he and I have both exited this world, be considered one of the great papal social encyclicals, one of the major building blocks of Catholic Social Teaching which started in 1890 with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (about new social conditions in the industrial age).

Yet the grounding principle which moves through these many dimensions andss crises remains that given by its title “Fraternity and Social Friendship”. And yes, pace many feminists, also “Sorority” or the social friendship among women and between women and men. We trust our friends or lose friendship when we lose trust. And this is true not only among what today we consider close friendships, but among work colleagues, the other drivers on the road, fellow voters and taxpayers, and so on.

Lynch’s discussion of “the body of faith” is less discursive or expansive than the Pope’s. His is more a theoretical effort to change how we imagine faith, from something transcendental to something primarily horizontal. From what binds us to God to what binds us to our many kinds of neighbors. And most importantly, it is that latter relationship of faith – to friends and fellows, sisters and brothers in this very ordinary and secular world – that is the most fundamental. Without a realistic sense of faith in the human community (well-seasoned, of course, by appropriate forms of distrust, skepticism, and wariness), any supposed faith in God is little more than an illusion (substituting as both Marx and Freud correctly noted, for the absence of faith in humans and humanity).

Both Francis and Fr. Lynch, then, as I understand them, remind us that Christmas means Jesus coming into this messy world (of dirty shepherds and royal princes) to bring realistic forms of peace and transforming forms of justice. A good – and hopefully somewhat merry – Christmas to all readers-friends. And should you wish some reading about all this for the holidays or thereafter, I highly recommend starting with Francis.

Tag: christianity

On beginning my 82nd year.