Tag: faith

Two Holidays — MLK And trump

Posted on by withacane

I’ve not written much of late for this “With a Cane” blog, but today is the national holiday for Martin Luther King – truly a “holy day” for our national civic religion. And it is, ironically, also the day of Trump’s inauguration — anything but a “holy day” even though in the past presidential inaugurations have occasionally risen to that status in our civic religion.
As will soon be evident, my source for this reflection is (not surprisingly) William Lynch’s soon to be published (by Georgetown University Press) Book of Admiration. It is a work he left uncompleted when he died in 1987 and which I have edited for publication later this year by Georgetown where it will be accompanied by two of Lynch’s earlier published essays on analogous themes about admiration and imagination, contempt and the death of imagination.
Both the national holiday and this year’s inauguration have already been the subject of much commentary. See, as one very good example, Nicholas Kristoff’s recent essay: “The World Is a Mess, and It’s Still the Best Time to Be Alive” (NYT 1/18/25). As its title suggests, it argues the need for balance in our thinking. There is much cause for contempt, but also much cause for admiration about the state of our world.
Today’s national holiday celebrates all the good envisioned and achieved by the ongoing movement for justice and peace celebrated by what we in Denver call the “Marade” – a public parade from the MLK statue in Denver’s City Park to the State Capitol. It is an expression of deep admiration both by the marchers and for those following the parade on live TV and on the day’s news.
Today’s inauguration events will be an expression of admiration for Trump’s many fans, but simultaneously an expression of contempt for those (like myself) who see the man and his movement as a bunch of gangsters and robber barons grabbing way too much power in political, economic, and cultural affairs.
While recognizing Kristof’s call for balance, I’ll be showing my deep contempt by not tuning in. Much better stuff to watch on Netflix and then there’s all the hoopla around the coming national championship game between Notre Dame and Ohio State . (The Irish sure to win. What’s a “buckeye” anyway?)

It’s clear to all but those (too many) who’ve got their heads in the sand that we’re a deeply polarized and fragmented culture. Not just one big polarization, but many forms of polarization on so many different matters which we tend to understand as just one big polarization so that we can make sense of the mess.
You’ve probably heard the truism that God foresaw the mess but went ahead anyhow. She does things like that because She’s a very good cleaner-upper. And mud was and remains, the Good Book says, the stuff she chose to work with.

At any rate, back to admiration and contempt and our two celebrations.
Since we’re supposed to love our neighbors and all that, it’s easy to think that contempt is wrong (even when our thinking is filled with it!). Yet it’s necessary to have contempt for much that’s going on in God’s good world. I’ve already expressed my contempt for Trump Etc. I do on occasion pray for him/them/it. I like to believe that the Kingdom always comes though we only get brief glimpses which occasionally shine through the darkness.
Said in the language of classical philosophy, the Good and the True and the Beautiful are “transcendentals” which pervade all being/existence. Amen and Alleluia. But truth also demands contempt for the arms manufacturers, the war profiteers, the human traffickers, the robber barons and the like. Justice may arise from peacemaking, but we need to fight like hell against their ilk.

What’s crucial is that contempt must not be allowed to dominate our sensibilities – our media, our art, our language, our feelings. Though it often does. And the only remedy for that disease is admiration – the practice of admiration, the habit/virtue of admiration, at every level of life (family and work, conversation and competition, prayer and poetry).

I’d urge what the Jesuit’s call a “daily examen” – perhaps at the end of each day, or several times a day – where we pause to examine where our spirits have been moved mostly by contempt and more by admiration.
The mantra from the 60’s to “tune in, turn on, drop out” made some sense if we tried to tune in to the right stuff, the truly admirable. Too often, back then and still, we tuned way too much to the unholy spirit of contempt and dropped out of the challenge of realistic admiration.
Remember the devil and the spirit of the world in John’s Gospel and the prevalence of seven deadly sins? (I’ll give you a 10 second pause here to try to remember all 7, and the moral and theological virtues as well!) As it always has been and will be, but for the grace of God.

‘Nuff. Celebrate MLK’s vision today, but not the inauguration. At least faintly trust the larger hope. Or, better, fully trust the real hopes, the everyday admirable, the saints among us. Enjoy a good drink today and some good reading instead of the TV nonsense.

On beginning my 82nd year.

Posted on by withacane

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

Posted on by withacane

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.