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I've been reading some of the new book on/by Mother Teresea, Come be my Light: The Private Writings of the 'Saint of Calcultta." It is part biography, part autobiography as it intermixes biographical information as the context for private letters. In 1946 she received a vision: "'It was on this day in the train to Darjeeling that God gave me the 'call within a call' to satiate the thirst of Jesus by serving Him in the poorest of the poor'" (p. 40). This became translated into the first Rule for the Missionaries of Charity: "The General End of the Missionaries of Charity is to satiate the thirst of Jesus Christ on the Cross for love and souls by the Sisters, absolute poverty, angelic charity, cheerful obedience. The Particular End is to carry Christ into the homes and streets of the slums, among the sick, dying, the beggars and the little street children. The sick will be nursed as far as possible in their poor homes. The little children will have a school in the slums. The beggars will be sought and visited in their holes outside the town or on the streets."

Teresea intuited the connection between the thirst of the poor and the thirst of Christ on the cross. Teresea did not call persons to do fund raising for the poorest of the poor to make life better for them, although that happened; more importantly, she called sisters to personal engagement in ministering to the thirsty Christ in these poor. The imagery cam to mind in light of our readings this week, particularly the Gospel reading. I think it might be good to start with the Gospel reading, move to the Amos passage, and end with the passage from 1 Timothy.

Luke 16:19-31

The passage shows a parable of what scholars call "eschatological reversal" -- that social situations in the age to come will often represent a reversal of status and wealth. "Blessed are the poor . . . Woe to you who are rich." The gospels makes it clear that wealth is a disadvantage to live faithfully as followers of Jesus Christ; the poor have an advantage in hearing the gospel and responding positively to Christ.

Note how the "rich man" treats "Lazarus" in life and in death. Is there a change from before death and after death? What does this tell us about the moral failure of the rich man? What is the role of Abraham? What is Abraham's message about life? What difference should one who is raised from the dead make to the situation of Lazarus? What is the role of wealth in the passage? How is wealth a problem and how is it a possibility?

Amos 6:1-7

The Amos passage is written to wealthy Jerusalemites and Samarians. What is the problem with these people? Why are they so disassociated from the lives of "the ruin of Joseph"? What does wealth do to them and their solidarity to others of Israel? What happens as a result?

1 Timothy 6:11-19

The First Timothy passage again presupposes a situation of possible persecution -- the good confession seems to be a baptismal confession of Jesus Christ as Lord -- a confession that could lead to arrest and martyrdom under the Romans. What is the person to "pursue"? How does that list of virtues relate to the opposite of the "rich man" and describe "Lazarus"? Why is the good in practice that these virtues support in these passages and why would this good require such virtues? What it the call to the rich? Why to them? Why not to the poor? Who does this passage help interpret the gospel passage and the Amos passage?

After the first rule of the Missionaries of Charity, the second reads: "To be able to do all these -- the Sisters must learn first to live real interior lives of close union with God -- and seek and see Him in all they do for the poor." What do you think about this in light of the passages this week and your experience? How do these passages require love of God exemplified in love of neighbor? How do they require faith in Jesus Christ.

In times of great personal and spiritual darkness, Teresea could still write to her fellow Missionaries of Charity: "This brings you Mother's love, blessing and prayer for each one of you, that you may more and more grow in the likeness of Christ through meekness and humility, so that your Sisters in the Community and the Poor you serve feel His presence and His love in you and through you, and learn from you how to love Jesus in each other" (p. 198). How had her life as the opposite of the rich man empowered her to continue this in times of hidden, personal distress? What does this say to us in our spiritual pilgrimage?

Have a wonderful evening!

Posted by johnwright at 4:04 PM | Comments (0)

Over the weekend I began Charles Taylor's new book. Secularity obviously cuts across my concerns and life. I was profoundly shaped by the positivism of the 1950s and 60s. To work in the academy or the church one must deal with secularity. To work in both at the same time one must come to an understanding of its insidious nature. It was the post-structuralists, such as Foucault and Baudrillard, who helped break the disciplinary chain of the secular so that I was able to see the disciplinary powers at work underneath it that belied its supposedly emanciatory claims. Of course, the emancipatory claims of the secular still continue today -- the books by Dawkins and Hitchens show the popularity of this mythology. But it was the work of persons like Hauerwas, Barth, Milbank, MacIntyre, Lindbeck and their friends and students who have helped me think the secular without reifying it. Of course, they have taught me that the ultimately capitulation to the secular would be to attempt to take control of the "secular apparatus" of the state as a Christian -- the futility of this strategy is seen in the utter moral, political, and intellectual wastage of the American political religious right at the end of the Bush administration. Instead of a strategy of control of the secular by making it 'sacred', the church must learn tactics of resistance to not let our life be colonialized by these forces. This colonial power runs straight through my body, the bodies of my students, and the bodies of my parishioners. I literally feel this in struggles of faith and doubt, allegiance to various groups, that we experience, all of us, because we live "in a secular age."

We must always remember that the "saeculum" is the time between the times of Christ's coming when the authority of a coercive "street gangs", the city of man in Augustinian terms, exists alongside the city of God. One of the key movements in modernist secularity is when this chronological understanding of the secular becomes a "space" so that a distinction might be drawn between the "secular" and the "sacred." The state becomes responsible for the secular, and grants, in its beneficence, a temporal amnesty over the "sacred" as long as the "sacred" capitulates ultimately to the power of the state. As a San Diego policemen once told me after arresting a person in one of our church services, "the church is ultimately just like K-Mart."

Part of what I try to do is in teaching and scholarship is to de-naturalize the "secular" by arguing that its counterpart, "the religious," does not exist except in imaginary projections shaped by contemporary interests of power. If "the religious" does not exist except nominally, then, of course, neither can the "secular" and its generator, the modernist liberal state (and its Marxist inversion) exist except nominally. It is with intellectual and pastoral interest that I began reading Charles Taylor's new book.

Taylor takes an interesting approach to the issue of our contemporary context. He asks, "What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?" (p. 1). He records three interrelated senses of what is means to live "in a secular age":

(1) Whereas the political organization of all pre-modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free from this connection. . . . . Religion or its absence is largely a private matter. (p. 1)

(2) secularity consists in the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God, and no longer going to Church. (p. 2)

(3) I believe that an examination of this age as secular is worth taking up in a third sense, closely related to the second, and not without connection to the first. This would focus on the conditions of belief. The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace. . . . The change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. (p. 3)

As a pastor and theologian, the lack of reference to God in the state does not bother me at all for the God of the state, at least in the United States, is an idol, not the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ. What is a concern, however, is the totalitarian claims of the state that generates a "private realm" where faith is relegated to "value" rather than a commitment to Reality, to what is True, Good, and Beautiful, as revealed by the Father through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is that privatization of the life of the church that I have argued results in the secularity of #2 -- the falling off of participation in the life of the church. I have argued in my books that it is precisely the attempt to accommodate to secularity #1 that results in secularity #2.

Yet Taylor's distinctions helps me see that the real issue is secularity #3. Who can deny that we live in a society "in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others" (p. 3)? To ask the question of the conditions for belief, particularly conditions for belief in the Triune God in the historic evangelical, orthodox, and catholic tradition of the church catholic, takes us right to the core of the witness and mission of the church catholic -- and the church catholic does not exist except in local congregations -- today.

Taylor rightfully states that "All beliefs are held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted, which usually remains tacit, and may even be as yet unacknowledged by the agent, because never formulated. This is what philosophers, influenced by Wittgenstein, Heidegger or Polyani, have called the ‘background’" (p. 13). This helps us understand that faith always comes to us as gift, what from human perspective is nothing less than the presence of the Holy Spirit. Yet it also reminds us that it is in the fullness of the gift of this tacit context where evangelism takes place, where the Spirit's sanctification occurs, and in its diminishing, where personal struggles with and even abandonment of faith occurs. When the tacit background of the "secular" overwhelms the tacit background that is the name of the Spirit's bringing forth the holy witness of the church in its good order, the falling away, secular #2, is bound to occur. Christians call that "God's judgment" -- or as Stan Hauerwas likes to say, "God is killing the church."

Taylor writes as a philosopher -- and therefore has limitations that are evident in his refusal to acknowledge as a philosopher God's revelation in Jesus Christ. Yet I am looking forward to his analysis, and even hope to share more his insights from the introduction as I work through the book.

Posted by johnwright at 3:38 PM | Comments (1)

I'm sitting in my eldest sons room, with stacks of books around me. I am reading these days to try and get a grasp of the cultural, philosophical, and theological undercurrents that have defined our contemporary scene, for pastoral, university teach and institutional, and writing reasons -- I continue to think about how to write the framing chapters for last winters interviews with Lindbeck, Burrell, and Hauerwas. It is quite a variety that provides a chance to see connections that I might otherwise miss.

I'm trying to read Hegel and books on Hegel for work that Eric Lee is doing -- particularly the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit and Alexandre Kojeve's interpretation of hiim. Second, I'm trying to get a grasp of the roots of liberal theology in the United States through reading Gary Dorrien's three volume work, The Making of Americal Liberal Theology. I'm trying to get a grasp of the analytic philosophical tradition, particularly that feeding into Wittgenstein and the transformation of his thought through Avrum Stroll's introductory book, Wittgenstein. I've begun reading Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions. Yesterday I received, and started to read, Charle's Taylor's new book, A Secular Age.

I'm also slowly making my way through works within the evangelic, orthodox, and catholic tradition -- very slowly through Augustine's On the Trinity; Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (examining the work of the eastern orthodox theologians Lossky and Zizioulas); Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue; Stanley Hauerwas's The State of the University: Academic Knowledge and the Knowledge of God; and, not least interesting, and maybe most importantly, Mother Teresea: Come be my Light: The Private Writings of the 'Saint of Calcutta.'

This does not include the technical readings that I've been doing on Qumran and the grading. Reading like this has obvious problems -- I'm switching from book to book constantly, and make slow progress through them all. Yet it also raises questions and pushes me to see connections. I hope to interact with these as time goes on. For instance, reading Hegel and eastern orthodox theologians at the same time have shown to me the radical difference between what our culture calls "mystical" or "spiritual" as an intuitive, immediate experience of an immanent whole" and what orthodox Christianity calls the mystical as anchored in the divine-human relationship seen in Jesus Christ where God is invisibly manifested in the particularity of the physical world in which we live.

Today will be grading, reading, preparing for the multicongregational service, maybe a PLNU soccer game, some napping and detoxification after another very taxing week. I am thankful for the opportunity to let this material swirl in the neural networks and see what happens as a result.

Posted by johnwright at 8:00 AM | Comments (0)

It is very hard to hear these Scriptures this week. We want to hear these texts from points of thinking that we as Christians should life in control of society. It becomes more interesting, and perhaps helpful, to hear these texts as a people trying to survive as a minority. To do this let's start with the 1 Timothy passage and then move to the OT text and end with the Gospel.

1 Timothy 2:1-8

There are two different groups of people in this text, it seems to me, and two particular people. The first is the "recipients" of the letter -- us; then "everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions." The two persons are "the author" and "Jesus Christ". The author instructs "us" by pointing to Jesus Christ, and instructing "us" to take "everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions" to God. What does it mean that "we" are not "everyone", especially the kings and those who are in high places? Given this, why is it that we are to pray? What is the relationship behind "us" and "everyone" and Jesus and God?

Amos 8:4-7

In this passage there is the "you" and the "needy"? Who does this relate to the passage from 1 Timothy? What is the problem between the you and the "poor of the land"? Read in light of 1Timothy, who is the "you" and the "needy"? How does this allow us to hear this passage?

Luke 16:1-13

To whom does Jesus ask his disciples to associate with in his story? Why? How does this person deal with his finances? Why should one make friends with dishonest wealth? What is the good of wealth? Why cannot one serve God and wealth?

If one hears this from the perspective of peole who are controlling society, it sounds different from a minority trying to survive. What do these passages suggest about discipleship and wealth?

Enjoy!

Posted by johnwright at 3:18 PM | Comments (1)

It's getting a little late, and been a full day here at PLNU -- faculty meeting day. As one reads through the passages, a theme emerges: to receive God's mercy, one must recognize that one is a sinner. It is by grace that you are saved, through faith, not of works lest anyone boast.

One of the paradoxes of Christianity is the greatest saint recognizes that one is the greatest sinner. Yet from this comes, not a horrible weight of guilt, but thanksgiving in forgiveness, a thanksgiving that frees one to live for God through Christ in the world. These passages explore this irony. Perhaps finding the spot that does not exalt our sin, nor minimize it, nor excuse it, nor live weighed down by guilt, but rejoices in God's mercy as mercy becomes a key to what holiness folk used to call "victorious Christian living."

Exod. 32:1, 7-14

The setting of this passage is the first event after Moses has gone up Sinai and is receiving the Law -- actually the description on how to build the Tabernacle for proper worship in the wilderness. Ironically, it is at this time that the Israelites engage in building the golden calf -- the "god who brought you out of the land of Egypt." We are tempted to identify with Moses in this passage or the fact that "the Lord changed his mind." Yet Moses says nothing in the argument that God does not already know. Note how Israel is defined by God and by Moses. What does God know about this people? Does Moses appeal to the good works of the people? Why would Israel respond as they do?

1 Tim. 1:12-17

What is the attitude of "Paul" in this passage? Why is the relationship between "Paul"'s past and his election? Was he a sinner or is he a sinner? Who is the active character in Paul's salvation?

Luke 15:1-10

What is the irony in these parables? How are they are response to the criticism that Jesus receives from the Pharisees and scribes? With whom are we invited to identify?

I have been reminded lately that the passage that the one who has been forgiven much has much for which to be thankful. As Christians we believe in that sin is an absence, a deprivation from whom we really are, and that forgiveness through Christ is a means of freedom to become who we really are. Sin is not "natural" to human nature, but an absence. Even as the Spirit makes us holy by participation in the sufferings of Christ, we cannot get "take-overs". What happens if we lose the sense that we are sinners? What happens if we let this sin define us? What type of response does the passages call forth from us? What virtues do we need the Spirit to infuse in us?

Have a wonderful evening.

The Spirit cleanses us from sin

Posted by johnwright at 4:24 PM | Comments (0)

I hope to get back to Milbank's preface to the Second Edition of Theology and Social Theory. Yet as I try to grasp the deep structure of thought and culture to which Milbank refers that has happened in the past 15 years, thinkers like Slavoj Zizek become both an ally in analysis, but problematic in solution. I think that I am understanding an intersecting project between Milbank and Zizek, even as they very deeply disagree with the nature of "the Real."

I've been slowly working through an essay by Zizek in a book, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (University of Chicago, 2006). It seems to me for Zizek, we must take this title with irony, yet it shows the opening for theological thought that now exists in the general academic culture.

What caught my eye is a general diagnosis from Zizek on the state of culture in the West (anchored in the nature of the state, it seems to me). Zizek writes, "Today, we seem effectively to be at the opposite point from the ideology of the 1960s: the mottos of spontaneity, creative self-expression, and so on, are taken over by the System; in other words, the old logic of the system reproducing itself through repressing and rigidly channeling the subject's spontaneous impetuses is left behind. Nonalienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all directly serve the system, which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics" (p. 135). The right to express oneself, the right of validation of one's one experience, the reduction of all stories to equally relative interpretations do nothing but serve "the System" of the endless repetition of the new and improved, of self-affirmation of all perceptions and desires, by which the "progress" of the world runs forward. Truth evaporates, a mere expression, so its said, of power; of course, the irony is that it is the power of "the System" that established the "truth" that "truth" comes in the validated experiential interpretation of each person or interest group.

In an absolutely brilliant move, Zizek moves to show the identical underlying oppressive ethical logic between an interview of Oprah Winfrey with John Gray, the author of the "Venus and Mars" series on gender difference, and the post-structuralist ethical work of Judith Butler. Gray on Oprah taught the audience to "'re-write' this scene, this ultimate fantasmatic framework of his subjectivity, in a more 'positive,' benign and productive narrative' (p. 137). Life becomes a means of re-writing: "yes, if it is sincere and serves the goal of your profound self-realization -- What disappears in this total availability of the past to its subseqent retroactive rewriting are not primarily the 'hard fact,' but the Real of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in teh subjects psychic economy forever resists its symbolic meaning" (p. 137). For Butler, we are all "thrown into a pregiven complex situation which remains impenetrale to him and for which he is not fully accountable" (p. 137). Yet this is precisely "the condition of possibility of moral activity . . . since we can be responsible for others only insofar as they (and we) are constrained and thrown into an impenetrable situation" (p. 137). Thus "what makes an individual human and thus somthing for which we are responsible, toward whom we have a duty fo help, is his/her very infinitude and vulnerability . . . this primordial exposure/dependency opens up the properly ethical relation of individuals who accept and respect each others vulnerability and limitations" (p. 138). We are all only responsible, not for our own desires, perceptions, and behaviors per so because of our own trauma and vulnerability; yet we are responsible for the Other in accepting our own limitation, that we are caught in our own finitude and subjectivity and limitations. "This awareness of limitation implies a stance of fundamental forgiveness and a tolerant 'live and let live" attitude: I will never be able to account for myself in front of the Other, because I am already nontransparent to myself, and I will never get from the Other a full answer to 'who are you?' because the Other is a mystery also for him/herself . . . . This mutual recognition of limitation thus opens up a space of sociality that is the solidarity of the vulnerable" (pp. 138-9).

It is this way that "This 'tolerant' attitude fails to perceive how contemporary power no longer primarily relies on censorship, but on unconstrained permissiveness" (p. 134). To not participate in proper understanding and validation of the "Other" in their vulnerability and limitations, is fundamentally to fail morally to recognize your own limitations and thus become "unloving" and "judgmental". All we can do is encourage each other with a permissiveness that allows the unchecked continuation of our unexamined desires that provides the very grist of the mill that keeps "the System" running. There is no greater intolerance expressed than that by the tolerant who encounter the intolerant within the logic of the contemporary culture.

Of course, Zizek merely names an antidote that Christians have long recognized -- the "pitiless self-censureship" necessary to withstand the moral malformation of the culture is another name for Christian asceticism, the disciplines of the Christian life, particularly being engaged in the spiritual and corporeal works of mercy. Traditionally these have been ensured by living faithfully to the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Yet, it seems to me, that what instances like Wesley's "Rules for the Methodist Societies" was trying to do was to take the Christian asceticism out of the celibate life within monastaries to shape all Christian lives through engaging these works of mercy. In a culture of permissiveness and "understanding," it seems to me that holiness, the sanctifying work of the Spirit, lies on the other side of the "pitiless self-censureship' that engaging in the works of mercy require, down out of faith in Jesus Christ, hope in the power of the Spirit, and love of God the Father -- love of the Triune God that is then manifested in a proper love, not tolerance, of the neighbor.

Posted by johnwright at 8:48 PM | Comments (0)

The soon-to-be published letters of Theresea of Calcutta have received some press. David Jones at ressourcement.blogspot.com linked to this excellent article by a preacher in the papal household. I found it, not only helpful, but moving

The ‘Atheism’ of Mother Teresa

She became poor to serve the materially poor — did she similarly share the sufferings of the spiritually poor?

BY FATHER RANIERO CANTALAMESSA, Ofm Cap

September 9-15, 2007 Issue of the National Catholic Reporter

http://ncregister.com/site/article/3762

| Posted 8/31/07 at 1:02 PM

What happened after Mother Teresa said her Yes to the divine inspiration that was calling her to place herself at the service of the poorest of the poor?

The world knew well all that happened around her — the whirlwind development of her charitable activities — but until her death, no one knew what happened within her.

That is now revealed by her personal diaries and her letters to her spiritual director, published by Doubleday, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of her death, under the title: Mother Theresa. Come, Be My Light.

Some have completely misunderstood the nature of these writings, thinking that they oblige us to reconsider the personality of Mother Theresa and her faith and holiness. Far from undermining the stature of Mother Theresa’s holiness, these new documents will immensely magnify it, placing her at the side of the greatest mystics of Christianity.

Jesuit Father Joseph Neuner, who knew her, has written, “With the beginning of her new life in the service of the poor, darkness came on her with oppressive power.”

A few brief passages suffice to give an idea of the density of the darkness in which she found herself: “There is so much contradiction in my soul, such deep longing for God, so deep that it is painful, a suffering continual — yet not wanted by God, repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal. ... Heaven means nothing to me, it looks like an empty place.”

It was not difficult to recognize immediately in this experience of Mother Teresa a classic case of that which scholars of mysticism, following St. John of the Cross, usually call “the dark night of the soul.” Tauler gives an impressive description of this stage of the spiritual life:

“Now, we are abandoned in such a way that we no longer have any knowledge of God and we fall into such anguish so as not to know any more if we were ever on the right path, nor do we know if God does or does not exist, or if we are alive or dead. So that a very strange sorrow comes over us that makes us think that the whole world in its expanse oppresses us. We no longer have any experience or knowledge of God, and even all the rest seems repugnant to us, so that it seems that we are prisoners between two walls.”

Everything leads one to think that this darkness was with Mother Teresa until her death, with a brief parenthesis in 1958, during which she was able to write jubilantly:

“Today my soul is filled with love, with joy untold, with an unbroken union of love.”

If, from a certain moment, she no longer speaks about it, it is not because the night was finished, but rather because she got used to living with it. Not only did she accept it, but she recognized the extraordinary grace it held for her.

“I have begun to love my darkness for I believe now that it is a part, a very small part, of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth.”

The Silence of Mother Theresa

The most perfumed flower of Mother Teresa’s night is her silence about it.

She was afraid, in speaking about it, of attracting attention to herself. Even the people who were closest to her did not suspect anything, until the end, of this interior torment of Mother.

By her order, the spiritual director had to destroy all her letters and if some have been saved it is because he, with her permission, had made a copy for the archbishop and future Cardinal T. Picachy, which were found after his death. Fortunately for us, the archbishop refused to acquiesce to the request made also to him by Mother to destroy them.

The most insidious danger for the soul in the dark night of the spirit is to realize that it is, precisely, the dark night, of that which great mystics have lived before her and therefore to be part of a circle of chosen souls.

With the grace of God, Mother Teresa avoided this risk, hiding her torment from all under a constant smile.

“The whole time smiling — sisters and people pass such remarks — they think my faith, trust and love are filling my very being. ... Could they but know — and how my cheerfulness is the cloak by which I cover the emptiness and misery,” she wrote.

A Desert Father says: “No matter how great your sufferings are, your victory over them is in silence.”

Mother Teresa put this into practice in a heroic manner.

Not Just Purification

But why this strange phenomenon of a night of the spirit that lasts practically the whole of life? (The same happened to Padre Pio of Pietrelcina: he was convinced throughout his life, that stigmata were not a sign of predilection or acceptance on the part of God but, on the contrary, of his refusal and just divine punishment for his sins!)

Here there is something new in regard to that which teachers of the past have lived and explained, including St. John of the Cross. This dark night is not explained only with the traditional idea of passive purification, the so-called purgative way, which prepares for the illuminative and the unitive way.

Mother Teresa was convinced that it was precisely this in her case; she thought that her “I” was especially hard to overcome, if God was so constrained to keep her such a long time in that state.

But this was not true.

The interminable night of some modern saints is the means of protection invented by God for today’s saints who live and work constantly under the spotlight of the media. It is the asbestos suit for the one who must walk amid the flames; it is the insulating material that impedes the escape of the electric current, causing short circuits.

St. Paul said: “And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7).

The thorn in the flesh that was God’s silence preserved Mother Teresa from any intoxication, amid all the world’s talk about her, even at the moment of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

“The interior pain that I feel,” she said, “is so great that I don’t feel anything from all the publicity and people’s talking.”

How wrong author and atheist Christopher Hitchens is when he writes “God is not great. Religion poisons everything,” and presents Mother Theresa as a product of the media-era.

But there is an even more profound reason that explains why these nights are prolonged for a whole lifetime: the imitation of Christ.

This mystical experience is a participation in the dark night of the spirit that Jesus had in Gethsemane and in which he died on Calvary, crying: “My God, my God, why hast thou abandoned me?”

Mother Teresa was able to see her trial ever more clearly as an answer to her desire to share the sitio (thirst) of Jesus on the cross: “If my pain and suffering, my darkness and separation give you a drop of consolation, my own Jesus, do with me as you wish. ... Imprint on my soul and life the suffering of your heart. ... I want to satiate your thirst with every single drop of blood that you can find in me. ... Please do not take the trouble to return soon. I am ready to wait for you for all eternity.”

It would be a serious error to think that the life of these persons was all gloom and suffering.

Deep down in their souls, these persons enjoy a peace and joy unknown by the rest of men, deriving from the certainty, stronger than doubt, of being in the will of God. St. Catherine of Genoa compares the suffering of souls in this state to that of purgatory and says that the latter “is so great, that it is only comparable to that of hell,” but that there is in them a “very great contentment” that can only be compared to that of the saints in paradise.

The joy and serenity that emanated from Mother Teresa’s face was not a mask, but the reflection of profound union with God in which her soul lived. It was she who “deceived” herself about her spiritual status, not the people.

By the Side of the Atheists

The world of today knows a new category of people: the atheists in good faith, those who live painfully the situation of the silence of God, who do not believe in God but do not boast about it; rather they experience the existential anguish and the lack of meaning of everything: They too, in their own way, live in the dark night of the spirit.

Albert Camus called them “the saints without God.” The mystics exist above all for them; they are their travel and table companions. Like Jesus, they “sat down at the table of sinners and ate with them” (see Luke 15:2).

This explains the passion in which certain atheists, once converted, pore over the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, the two Maritains, L. Bloy, the writer J.K. Huysmans and so many others over the writings of Angela of Foligno; T.S. Eliot on those of Julian of Norwich.

There they find again the same scenery that they had left, but this time illuminated by the sun. Few know that Samuel Beckett, the author of Waiting for Godot, the most representative drama of the theater of the absurd, in his free time read St. John of the Cross.

The word “atheist” can have an active and a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also one who — at least so it seems to him — is rejected by God. In the first case, it is a blameworthy atheism (when it is not in good faith), in the second an atheism of sorrow or of expiation.

In the latter sense, we can say that the mystics, in the night of the spirit, are “a-theist,” that Jesus himself on the cross was an “a-theist”, without-God.

Mother Teresa has words that no one would have suspected of her: “They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God. ... In my soul I feel just this terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing. Jesus please forgive the blasphemy.”

But one is aware of the different nature, of solidarity and of expiation, of this “atheism” of hers:

“I wish to live in this world that is so far from God, which has turned so much from the light of Jesus, to help them — to take upon myself something of their suffering.”

The clearest sign that this is an atheism of a completely different nature is the unbearable suffering that it causes to the mystics. Normal atheists don’t torment themselves because of the absence of God.

The mystics arrived within a step of the world of those who live without God; they have experienced the dizziness of throwing themselves down. Again, Mother Teresa who writes to her spiritual father: “I have been on the verge of saying — No. ... I feel as if something will break in me one day. ... Pray for me that I may not refuse God in this hour — I don’t want to do it, but I am afraid I may do it.”

Because of this the mystics are the ideal evangelizers in the post-modern world, where one lives etsi Deus non daretur (as if God did not exist).

They remind the honest atheists that they are not “far from the Kingdom of God”; that it would be enough for them to jump to find themselves on the side of the mystics, passing from nothingness to the All.

Karl Rahner was right to say: “Christianity of the future, will either be mystical or it will not be at all.” Padre Pio and Mother Teresa are the answer to this sign of the times.

We should not “waste” the saints, reducing them to distributors of graces or of good examples.

Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa

is the preacher to the papal household.

Posted by johnwright at 1:01 PM | Comments (1)

Our Scripture readings this week follow an interesting order. The Epistle reading stands in the middle, a passage where Paul writes to a Christian slave-holder, Philemon, to receive back without punishment a Christian slave named Onesimus. Before it stands a key passage in Deuteronomy of how election now leads to a choice, and followed by the gospel who speaks of the rational determination involved in following Jesus as the One to whom our loyalty is due. Perhaps it might be appropriate to begin with the Epistle, and then move to the OT reading and end with the Gospel call.

Philemon 1-20
According to legal norms of his day, Philemon could have had Onesimus physically punished or killed for running away – Paul here is harboring and advocating for a fugitive. Part of later Christian embarrassment is that Paul – nor anyplace explicitly in Scripture – never condemns slavery as an institution, and early Christians held slaves, even as many early Christians were slaves. Please don’t think of slavery here as the particularly vicious, racial form that it took in the United States. Think of it more as someone today who works at an entry level service occupation, such as a barrister at Starbucks or hotel room service or bell boy – it’s still not very pleasant being looked down upon and receive little compensation. Onesimus was Philemon’s employee – he just didn’t have the opportunity to quit his job (as if anyone of us can!) and move to the next one. How, formed by such a cultural context, might Philemon have experienced Onesimus’ fleeing? What sort of emotions might he have toward Philemon?
A few years ago, I read an article about Paul’s use of language in this passage. It analyzed Paul’s use of imagery and language. What Paul wants Philemon to do is obvious; yet he refuses to use his authority to force the issue, but speaks in terms that surround himself and Philemon in the same network of friendship with a warmth and compassion. Read through the passage and see how Paul uses language to describe his relationships between himself and others in and around Philemon. What is the importance of Philemon making the decision to follow Christian rather than societal norms in his treatment of Onesimus? How else does Paul try to help Philemon do the “right thing”?

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
I was fascinated this summer in examining the Dead Sea Scrolls to see how the book of Deuteronomy was copied and read differently from the rest of the Torah. I think this passage is a reason why. Israel has been elected by God to be a blessing to the nations and receive the land. The reception of the land is at hand; God’s faithfulness is about to be manifested. The manifestation of God’s faithfulness to God’s Word now leads Israel to a choice. Choice does not lead to God’s faithfulness, but God’s faithfulness leads to choice. What is this choice? What implications does this choice have? For whom? How can Israel become “free”? What is the importance of Israel’s ‘heart’? Why is it that choosing obedience to God’s command is choosing “life”?
Luke 14:25-33
What is the cost to be counted in “coming to Jesus”? Why would loyalty (faith) in Jesus demand such words from him? Why does Jesus here demand this as a “choice”? What should the expectations of his followers be that makes one make this “rational choice”? How does the saying about hating family help us interpret the giving up all possessions in the two sayings of Jesus that frame the whole?
There is so much that are possible for discussion out of these passages. Perhaps we could discuss what the relationship between doing the right thing and doing it for the right reasons with the right emotions? In classical Christian thought, one cannot receive the right emotions/passions unless one does the right things. But the goal is never merely to do the right things, but do so with the right internal disposition and emotions. How does our Scriptures emphasis on “choice” an important connection between choosing to do and also to do so for the right reasons with the right underlying disposition/character/passions?

Posted by johnwright at 1:00 PM | Comments (1)

So the title of this post is a little pretentious -- okay, very pretentious, pretentious beyond irony to absurdity. This morning I spent some time reading a copy of the foreward to the second edition of Theology and Social Theory. As typical when I read Milbank, it will take me a couple of more times of reading the text to grasp it. Within the preface I find both clarifications about so-called "radical orthodoxy" and our contemporary intellectual-cultural situation and my dual thankfulness and reservations about the work. Of all Milbank's works, it is Theology and Social Theory that has helped me see better. The preface is a piece worthy of some sharing and reflection, I believe, because of the reflective and programmatic nature of the essay.

Of course, the title is true -- Milbank grew up in the Church of the Nazarene, as I did. Milbank became a high church Anglican, a return to the site of John Wesley; I have remained within this offspring of Wesley's Methodists. Despite obvious differences of intellect, reading, and institutional matrix between myself and Prof. Milbank, I can find much of my life in what he affirms and that against which he reacts. I am intrigued by the formative roles of particular traditions that can re-emerge in other manifestations in radically different persons and contexts.

I've also been following the fortunes of my book, Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation, on the "free market" of Amazon.com (it has regular moved from 30,000 to 360,000 on the Amazon.com "best seller" list -- now around 340,000th, I believe) and comments on the web (not much recently -- I hope to share some emails and web reviews in the near future). As a matter of fact, if someone would want to write a review of the book for Amazon.com, I'd greatly appreciate it!

As I was reading Milbank's preface, I was reminded how Milbank's criticism of 'the social' helped me develop a crucial part of my thesis on that oxymoron "American Christianity" that forms the backdrop of my chapter 2 and much of my other work in Second Temple Judaism by "de-naturalizing" the "church-sect" cycle found in the United State as already a manifestation of liberal (mal)formations produced by liberal democratic political thought and institutions. I try in the chapter to concretize what Milbank, and others such as Hauerwas and Phil Kenneson, had done to respond to the accusation of endorsing a "sectarian" form of Christianity. One should have a clue to the problem of such an accusation that such "sectarian" thought often does so on a claim to catholicity in thinkers such as Yoder, Milbank, Hauerwas, Ratzinger, and, if I may, Wright!

At any rate, Milbank writes that his wok at first invoked "a certain amount of outraged protest from sociologists, many of whom took it that I was objecting to a supposed 'reduction' of religion to the social, when I was explicitly arguing that 'the social' of sociology was itself an unreal, unhistorical and quasi-theological category. Today, this sort of reaction survives only amongst theologians themselves -- who are so often belated. Within secular social theory by contrast, there is a widespread recognition (only a very little indebted to my book) that 'sociology' is an exploded paradigm, and in part because of its inbuilt secular bias. The less ideologically-freighted models of ethnography and histoire totale are today far more in vogue -- in academic practice still more than in academic theory" (p. xii). The argument is much more radical than the often "conservative" reductionist argument against sociology -- it is taking the social more seriously in undercutting its own claim to understand the world by showing how the social itself is anchored in particular histories and traditions that were formed as heretical alternatives to catholic Christianity. It is because of this that one cannot simply uncritically use the "social sciences" such as psychology, sociology, and political sciences (or a liberal or Marxist bent) to pursue and define the ministry of the church. We cannot conceive of the life of the church as "applied sociology" or "critical theory" as the world conceives of engineering as "applied physics," for instance. We must not react against this thought, but think differently to continue the faithful ministry, the only effective ministry of the church long term, my book argues, to which we are called.

What is interesting is that I have at times found the same response to my book -- but also, more importantly, to the congregation at Mid-City. Because of concern for the works of mercy and the resultant awareness that the political and economic forces of the society are so patterned to hurt those to whom we are commanded by Jesus to go, we have consistently faced tensions with those who wish to engage the "social" and "the political" to use the congregation for a broader agenda of social change with operationally-defined social and political results -- to continue the early 20th century Protestant liberal 'social gospel' agenda for building the kingdom of God through engagement of the proper sociological and political structures within the contemporary culture -- thus reifying the categories of the unreal categories of 'the social' and 'the political' that Milbank correctly implodes through genealogical and historical analysis. A more radical orthodoxy that wants to live according to the reality that there are no categories of the "social" and the "political". The Real is found in the biblical categories of "Israel/church" and "the nations/world". We must understand the life of the church within the context of "total history", a history that must be understood as that described within the characterizations and typologies found within the biblical narrative -- which never discusses the social or the political. We can learn from sociological and political and economic projections; but the importance of random events teach us that these must be subordinated to a sense of Christian wisdom that comes from the concrete formation of the sanctifying Spirit in our lives as we live in the local contexts that such projections are abstractions from such a context.

For persons initiated into the politics that form the social as real, some read Milbank -- and myself -- as promoting an authoritarian, conservative, nostalgic response to the modern, even as others, as they read Milbank -- and myself, as promoting a critical leftist reactionary program against the modern. Rather than this, we must remember that we live as "resident aliens" or "sojourners" -- out "political commonwealth is in heaven" -- i.e., our ultimate end is in God. Recovering this sense of local wisdom outside the ideologies of this age through the proclaimation of the Word -- finding ourselves within the narrative of Scriptures; the sharing of the Sacraments -- baptism into the elect life of the church through dying and rising with Christ and then being made the true body of Christ together through the sharing in Christ's body and blood; and personal engagement in the physical and corporeal works of mercy -- thus opening ourselves to repentance from the Spirit's sanctifying presence with us, is the call of local congregations that would seek to live as part of the church catholic throughout the ages.

Posted by johnwright at 10:30 AM | Comments (1)

In my book I adopt Steve Fowl's designation of "professional biblical scholarship" as a phrase to designate the reading of the biblical text within the American academy. I am a "professional biblical scholar" in many senses, and I love the work that I do as "one of those."

Yet in the book I also try to "de-throne" the exclusivistic claims of the guild that remove the biblical text from its concrete location within the church as a witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ by providing a narrative context to understand Jesus. Often the polemic against the reading of the church of the text as a witness to Christ masks the western liberal colonial purposes that such "professional biblical scholarship" serves. At least in preaching in so far preachers maintain the contemporaneous personal, social, and political end of their preaching to the formation of those who interact with their readings.

I think this has become apparent to me in the past several months. I have worked hard as a "professional biblical scholar". The past several weeks I have been working through the interpretations of Khirbet Qumran -- is there a wide-spread ash layer found at the site to distinguish between Phase Ib and Phase II of the site? Inquiring minds want to know!! It is fun but mind numbing, and often frustrating work because of the strength of claims made by contrasting interpretations and the difficulty of working through the rhetoric to what actually is the data upon which such claims are based. Ultimately, without a greater end outside itself and professional careerism, it is interesting to experience the underlying nihilism of such study.

I've spent some of my time today reading instead on Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas by Paul McPartlan called The Eucharist Makes the Church amid the stifling heat and humidity of southern California today. The biblical text underlies much of the discussion in language of "the image of God", "Christ in you the hope of glory" amid talk of the human being, nature and the supernatural, mysticism. The text is placed into a different framework, a framework formed by the world of the text itself rather than a mere "pure nature" that professional biblical scholarship presupposes. The biblical text becomes reduced to something less than it really is, just as reading human beings as "pure nature" reduces human beings to something less, for it separates us from the image of God in which God constantly creates and calls us as human beings.

"Professional biblical scholarship" is a good, but in its imperialistic claims, it seeks to make itself the good that it cannot sustain rationally or even existentially. The guild places heavy pressures to socialize its graduate students into the absolutist claims of the guild. Yet the academic institutions that have the greatest reason to the academic study of the biblical text as part of their general education, church-based universities, must ask because of their very different presuppositions from which they run. Such institutions serve a different polity, the church catholic, than the liberal nation-state that the guild serves in return for the state's patronage.

Thus, while I have engaged in "professional biblical scholarship", I have moved away from reading and thought related to the audience of the blog that I had conceived. With other demands, blog entries have dried up. I hope to do better.

Posted by johnwright at 1:47 PM | Comments (0)