Go Pope!

Pope Francis Washing Feet on Maundy Thursday

“Love one another,” said Jesus on the night of the Last Supper, and as a sign of that love he washed the feet of his disciples. Pope Francis broke tradition and washed the feet of women last night. Given the great commandment of love, how could Jesus be displeased?

Go Pope!

HuffPost Religion’s report follows here:

ROME — In his most significant break with tradition yet, Pope Francis washed and kissed the feet of two young women at a juvenile detention center – a surprising departure from church rules that restrict the Holy Thursday ritual to men.

No pope has ever washed the feet of a woman before, and Francis’ gesture sparked a debate among some conservatives and liturgical purists, who lamented he had set a “questionable example.” Liberals welcomed the move as a sign of greater inclusiveness in the church.

Speaking to the young offenders, including Muslims and Orthodox Christians, Francis said that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples on the eve of his crucifixion in a gesture of love and service.

“This is a symbol, it is a sign. Washing your feet means I am at your service,” Francis told the group, aged 14 to 21, at the Casal del Marmo detention facility in Rome.

“Help one another. This is what Jesus teaches us,” the pope said. “This is what I do. And I do it with my heart. I do this with my heart because it is my duty. As a priest and bishop, I must be at your service.”

via Pope Francis Offers Holy Thursday Foot Washing To Inmates In Casal Del Marmo Jail PHOTOS VIDEO.

 

Looking At Democracy

The Illinois Humanities Council and the MacArthur Foundation are sponsoring a contest for media pieces on the subject of strengthening democracy.

So where do you start?

It’s long been the view of Religion in the Balance that what ails the body politic are the fundamentals on which politics are built: an operationalized view of human nature and the end (as in purpose) of human life; how the liberty of the individual, and the responsibility of the individual to the community, are balanced; how those who have power and voice in a society treat (in word, deed, and policy) those who are relatively powerless and voiceless.

Rodney King once famously said (paraphrased), “Can’t we all just get along?” King’s plea was for the peaceful co-existence of different races, and therefore something we should all desire. In the context of democracy writ large, however, the answer to “Can’t we all just get along?” is a resounding “No”– thankfully. We shouldn’t expect, or even want, to “all just get along,” because plurality, diversity, and disagreement are our strength. Unanimity– broad, society-wide unanimity– is just another word for totalitarianism. It would be troubling if we were all getting along without conflict– it would be a sign that either we were snow jobbing ourselves through widespread self-deception, or that we were being coerced into unanimity by an outside power. Both are false, and symptomatic of a society in deep decay.

The genius of our democracy is that we hold as an ideal (if not always in practice) that we can live peacefully– and actually compromise– with people with whom we disagree: people who do not share the view of human nature that we do; people who do not pursue meaning in life the way we do; people who balance individual liberty and communal responsibility in society differently than we do. The genius of our democracy is our ability to use this difference and diversity as a strength.

Re-learning how to use conflict creatively is the most important beginning we can make, to strengthen democracy today.

 

Capitalism and Its Discontents

We’ve been considering different themes  in Eugene McCarraher’s “Morbid Symptoms”  (Commonweal, November 2012). The last one to mention is his critique of capitalism. Coincidentally, this month’s feature story in Foreign Affairs is an evaluation of capitalism: “Capitalism and Inequality”, by Jerry Muller.

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and then with the decades-long rise of China and India through their participation in the Western-dominated economic order, criticizing capitalism feels like swimming against the tide of history. Surely the way that the Cold War ended, combined with the last quarter-century of unprecedented wealth creation, prove that capitalism is above reproach?

McCarraher dowses us with a bucket of cold water. “Wake up!” he shouts in muscular prose: capitalism comes with huge costs to the material of the world, and to the spirit of humanity. How could we fail to see that an economic engine which harnesses the power of human avarice to drive it, will inevitably grind us down, diminishing and deflating our sense of what a human life means. Are we made for the Love of God, or for the market? We are socialized to live as though we are made for the market– ie, that we are commodities– and it takes an act of will to choose otherwise. Market-thinking dominates our culture; how could it not penetrate our most basic understanding of who we are, and what the purpose of life is?

Muller is less radical. He sees chronic insecurity as the inevitable result of capitalism, since the dynamism of creative destruction brings continual change. His conclusion: don’t dismantle the welfare state, but strengthen it, because too much insecurity will lead to rebellion. Enlightened self-interest would suggest some level of re-distribution of wealth, in order to increase social stability.

While Muller and McCarraher have fundamentally different points of departure, both see serious flaws in laissez-faire capitalism. The system, while ascendant, is not above reproach– and without critique and correction, it contains the seeds of its own destruction. It may be said of capitalism as an economic system, as Churchill said of democracy: “It’s the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Which is to say that capitalism, like democracy, is not the holy grail. It is not our salvation.

 

The Church Called America

Eugene McCarraher (“Morbid Symptoms,” Commmonweal, November 2012) makes reference to the “church called America”– which he understands to be separate from, and significantly different from, a Christian church. In making this distinction, he identifies one of the faultlines in American culture today. That faultline is the point of collision between two continent-sized ideas: one, that God’s good will for the world is co-extensive with American economic, political, and military principles and practices; and two, that God’s good will for the world is co-extensive NOT with any state or nation, but with a person whose self-sacrificing love revealed a divine, redeeming, inexhaustable Love at the heart of all.

This gets messy. Why can’t it be both, some may say: why can’t Jesus be the Savior AND America be the light, lately arrived on history’s scene, to show the world the way of God? Why not both?

Because we are human. Perhaps there is such a thing as “American exceptionalism,” but even if there is such a thing, it does not apply to our basic fallen nature: power corrupts always; pride leads to overreach always; nothing is purely good, ever.

McCarraher is criticizing the US Roman Catholic bishops for conflating the way of Christ with the way of American consumer capitalism/militarism, but the criticism applies to all who have authority in Christian churches (hello, self): we need to draw more clearly the lines that locate the God of Christ at work in the world, and the lines that locate the god of America at work in the world. We may imagine a time when those lines corresponded, but that time is not the present time.

To say so, is to make possible a love for both God AND country, with a love that is appropriate to each.

 

“Morbid Symptoms”– Eugene McCarraher

Cardinal Timothy Dolan

A good essay is like a good compass: it points north, and the truth of its pointing helps us find our way. Eugene McCarraher’s “Morbid Symptoms” (November Commonweal) is just this kind of “true north.”

The essay– cultural critique disguised as a book review– uses the material in four recent books by Catholic clerics as a runway to gain speed, before soaring wheels-up over today’s American cultural landscape. The view is impressive. This is not McCarraher’s first flight; he knows where to go, and when to dip a wing so that we get a clear view down.

The essay, at 4000 words, is longer than most of us will want to take the time for. Religion in the Balance will be considering the article in smaller bits, over the next weeks. “Morbid Symptoms” gives us so many helpful vantage points, that it is worth lingering over.

It’s important to remember that while a major theme of the essay is criticism of the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, our interest is in McCarraher’s critiques of America’s cultural life, and of a particularly unhelpful response by religious leaders– a response that is by no means limited to the Roman Catholic Church. I’m not into bashing Catholicism, and I don’t think McCarraher’s article is most fruitfully read in that manner.

Here is just a sample of what McCarraher offers– a critique of American culture that is much more penetrating, and therefore much more interesting, than the facile finger-pointing that we often get:

As Stanley Hauerwas perceptively reminds us in War and the American Difference, “America is a culture of death because Americans cannot conceive of how life is possible in the face of death”; as unregulated accumulators and consumers of ever-expanding wealth, Americans share nothing in common “other than the presumption that death is to be avoided at all costs.”

More on this to come.

via Morbid Symptoms | Commonweal magazine.

 

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower….”

The Forces at Work in the Cosmos– Yarkovsky Effect

The near-miss asteroid last week raised questions regarding how these space rocks move in orbit. Astronomers are studying the “Yarkovsky Effect”– a subtle force caused by the uneven heating of an asteroid’s surface. University of Arizona astronomer Ed Beshore [excerpt below] likens the force of the Yarkovsky Effect to the pressure you feel when holding two grapes in your hand– an almost negligible force for the duration of a moment, but which, accumulated over millennia, has appreciable influence on an asteroid’s orbit. Over time, the Yarkovsky Effect can “move mountains.” (Beshore)

This is a reminder of how many and varied are the powers at work in the world– and a reminder that power is not just big and loud. Small pressures, applied patiently and relentlessly, can shift seemingly irresistable objects. So it is good to pause and recollect these small pressures, these soft powers: the powers of love and commitment; the powers of prayer and trust; the powers of truthful words and good deeds. They don’t move asteroids, but they can move the human heart.

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age” is Dylan Thomas’s poetic rendition of another power: the life-force, pulsing and moving, in flower and human alike. For some of us, Christ is the fullest expression of this life-force: the willing renunciation of domination (power over), and the willing embrace of suffering love/compassion (power with). Even death, we affirm, is not stronger than this force for life.

The asteroid story from The Christian Science Monitor follows:

For instance, when sunlight hits the surface of an rotating asteroid, the asteroid returns that energy to space in the form of heat.

“The heat acts like a tiny rocket thruster that can push asteroids out of otherwise harmless orbits,” he says. The reason: A rotating asteroid sheds the heat unevenly across its surface, in effect sloughing it off in the direction of “dawn” on the asteroid. This direction may or may not coincide with the direction the asteroid is traveling along its orbit.

Indeed, this force, known as the Yarkovsky effect, is thought to help resupply the inner solar system with asteroids that otherwise might have stayed in the main asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter.

A year ago, Dr. Beshore says, one of the mission’s team members performed “a really exquisite set of measurements using radar data and came up with a preliminary estimate for the kinds of forces” this effect imposes on OSIRIS-Rex’s target asteroid.

It’s about the same as “the force that you feel when you hold a couple of grapes in your hand,” he says, adding “that force, applied over millions of years, can literally move these mountains of rock around.” [Emphasis added]

Since the force also plays a role in shaping and reshaping the orbits of near-Earth asteroids, “it’s really quite important for us to make sure we understand this force much better.”

via Friday’s near-miss asteroid could help track more dangerous ones +video – CSMonitor.com.

 

Ash Wednesday and a Billy Collins Poem

To remember that we are ashes, and to ashes we will return, is a call back to our human life. It seems a little odd to be called back to the only kind of life we can have– that is, a human one– but the Ash Wednesday reminder addresses a beautiful (and sometimes very dangerous) silliness that is part of human nature: our tendency to forget that we’re not the center of the universe; to forget that we’re not gods; to forget that our time on earth is but a breath.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Remembering in this way sounds, initially, like a death sentence. What it is, really, is a life sentence. Remembering that we are dust opens the door into fully inhabiting the lives we’ve been given, into living more completely into this place and time. We don’t have forever.

And so I offer Billy Collins’ poem “Nightclub.” I like it for Ash Wednesday because, like Ash Wednesday, it is a poem that reminds us who we are , and invites us to embrace our human foolishness as the doorway into a fully human kind of beauty.

Nightclub

You are so beautiful and I am a fool
to be in love with you
is a theme that keeps coming up
in songs and poems.
There seems to be no room for variation.
I have never heard anyone sing
I am so beautiful
and you are a fool to be in love with me,
even though this notion has surely
crossed the minds of women and men alike.
You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool
is another one you don’t hear.
Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.
That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoon
I am listening to Johnny Hartman
whose dark voice can curl around
the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness
like no one else’s can.
It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette
someone left burning on a baby grand piano
around three o’clock in the morning;
smoke that billows up into the bright lights
while out there in the darkness
some of the beautiful fools have gathered
around little tables to listen,
some with their eyes closed,
others leaning forward into the music
as if it were holding them up,
or twirling the loose ice in a glass,
slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.

Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,
borne beyond midnight,
that has no desire to go home,
especially now when everyone in the room
is watching the large man with the tenor sax
that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.
He moves forward to the edge of the stage
and hands the instrument down to me
and nods that I should play.
So I put the mouthpiece to my lips
and blow into it with all my living breath.
We are all so foolish,
my long bebop solo begins by saying,
so damn foolish
we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

Billy Collins