jesus

Complicity

Complicity

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Recently I encountered a woman who said to me that many people have left the Church as a direct result of the news of the unmarked graves on the property of the old Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia–her husband being one of them. Of course, there is no denying that the Residential school system, at its origin, constituted a fundamental violation of the basic human rights of the Indigenous peoples of Canada. In 1883, John A. MacDonald wrote: 

When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that the Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.

Despite the fact that a number of First people had positive and memorable experiences in their Residential schools, the entire system originated in and existed under the umbrella of this utterly racist conceptual frame of mind and culturally genocidal purpose. It goes without saying that the Church should never have cooperated with the Canadian government in this. But they, along with the rest of the country, did cooperate with it.

In this light, why would I want to belong to such an organization as the Roman Catholic Church? I guess it is the same reason that I choose to belong to this country, Canada, which obviously has a very sordid history–it is not on account of this country’s sins that I wish to belong to it, but on account of the tremendous goods that this country has managed to achieve throughout its long history. In belonging to the Church, I certainly belong to an institution that has a very sordid past, but is there a nation or institution in this world that does not? Is it even possible for an individual person, a saint even, not to have a relatively sordid history? Don’t we all look back at our lives and shake our heads? 

The process of coming to belong to the Church is not in any way the same as the process of coming to belong to any other institution, such as a corporation like Pepsi or Bell Canada, or a hospital or educational institution, etc. The reason is that the object of faith is not the Church as such, but Christ. For a person to believe in Christ and to enter into his death through baptism is to become, by virtue of that baptismal immersion, a part of his Mystical Body, and that person’s eyes are still on Christ, not on his Church; for he has become that Church, a member thereof, and he is taught to say every day: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us”. The reason for this is that he remains a sinner, but one who has been “deified”, filled with divine grace, not by virtue of anything he has done, but simply by virtue of the unutterable mercy of God. His life is now a battle to overcome the effects of his wounded nature, namely, death, concupiscence, and the dulling of the mind. His life will therefore be one of continual reform, which is why the Church as a whole is in continual reform, for the Church is made up of sinful and flawed human beings whose minds are to a degree blinded by sin. There is no getting around this. And that is why the study of the history of the Church is a rather painful experience for the Catholic who has an idealized image of the Church, as a child has an idealized image of his own mother and father–the child chooses not to see what he simply does not want to see.

Those who choose to leave the Church because highly scandalous behaviour on the part of clergy or religious has been reported in the news, such as the operation of Residential schools and the abusive behaviour that took place in those institutions, or the clerical sex abuse scandals, etc., seem to believe that they have no complicity in the sins of the nation and the sins of the Church. But we were all complicit at the time–practically everyone operated within the arrogance of a Eurocentric worldview that looked down upon Indigenous culture, a worldview that kept us from appreciating its beauty and value, and we are all complicit today in the perpetuation of the injustices that First people continue to endure, such as lack of clean drinking water on the reserves among other things. And we are complicit in the injustices that Canadian young people and young families are forced to endure (i.e., housing prices and the cost of living) as a result of political and economic decisions made by an unjust and incompetent government that we put into power and kept in power. This notion of universal complicity is not a new concept, by any means. In 1923, G. Studdert Kennedy wrote:

Not long ago, a man was sentenced to ten years penal servitude for holding up a post office and shooting at a policeman. He was one of the army of unemployed in London. He had a wife and two children; he paid 8s. 3d [8 shillings, 3 pence] a week for two rooms in Whitechapel, which were so dark that the gas had to be kept burning all the time; he had fought in the army and been wounded, and he had done 10 weeks work in 18 months. He was not a good character, being weak and easily led; but in any decent community rightly ordered, he would in all probability have led quite a decent life. But in “justice“ he is to serve ten years. I am not disposed to rail at the courts – I think the sentence was inevitable for the protection of society, but purely for that reason, and not because it is just. He is suffering as much for the sin of the world, for your sin and mine, as for his own (The Wicket Gate, p. 73).

A person who leaves the Church or refuses to have anything to do with the Church because of her past sins has, at the very least, committed the fallacy of judging the past by the standards of today; to do so is to misunderstand the nature of human progress. I am what I am today because of the imperfections and mistakes of my past, and what I know today was the result of a decision to continually reflect upon my life as it was unfolding and as it unfolded. In other words, it was a result of a continued reflection upon my experiences, which are now past. All of us are expected to grow from experience, but how can a person be changed for the better unless he was in some ways worse than he is today? This means that if we are changing for the better, as we have a responsibility to do, then we can reasonably expect to experience disappointments when looking back on our lives. Individually, we cannot help but judge our own past by the standards we currently live by, but it seems we have no choice but to forgive ourselves, because the standards we hold up for ourselves today are the result of that experience and our own decision to reflect upon it, in light of moral principles we have discovered along the way–not to mention the resolution to improve. But for some reason we judge others’ histories with much less patience than we do our own; we overlook that the growing process is the same for everyone, every nation, and every institution. And of course, that does not necessarily cancel our responsibility for certain past decisions–one may still have to make reparation for a decision made long ago, perhaps a criminal decision or simply an immoral decision that left another or others profoundly hurt. But why would I walk away from the Church that Christ established— the Church that abandoned him on Holy Thursday night—, for being exactly the kind of developing organism that I have always been and cannot otherwise be?

Our Deeds Go Before Us

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Last month I was out with a few fellas from our parish men’s prayer group, and the reading our leader gave out for us to reflect upon (“The Great Project of Our Life”, Msgr. Fred Dolan ) contained a Jewish tale that, after reading it, I knew I would use at some point. A rabbi in Toronto told this story at a funeral; he said that in a kingdom long, long ago, there was a woman who had three friends. One of them she adored; they were in touch every day. As for the second friend, the two of them would get together once a month for a coffee. As for the third friend, they were rarely ever in touch. One day, however, this woman was summoned to the castle by the King. When she received that summons, she was terrified. And so she called her first friend, the one whom she adored and asked: “Can you please go with me to the castle? I’m really frightened.” The friend said, “No. Forget it, I will not go with you.” Terribly disillusioned, she turned to the second friend, filled with hope. The second friend, however, said: “I will go with you as far as the doors of the castle, but I will not take one step beyond that point.” On the verge of despair, she turned to her third friend, without expecting a great deal. To her great surprise, the third friend said: “I would be delighted to go with you. Not only will I accompany you, I will go ahead of you to prepare the way to make sure that everything is ready for you to see the King.” 

What does this mean? The first friend, the one who was adored, represents all our money. When we die, our money does us no good whatsoever; it will not even go with us to the castle. We’ve all heard the old adage that we’ll never see a hearse pulling a U-Haul trailer–we can’t take anything with us. But what about the second friend, the one who would go all the way to the gates of the castle but no further? This friend represents our family, who will be there at our side when we are on our deathbed, but they cannot go any further than that. Who, then, is this mysterious third friend, the one who will accompany us and even go ahead of us to prepare the way? That third friend is our mitzvot, which is the plural of mitzvah, which is Hebrew for our good deeds. Our deeds accompany us and even go ahead of us to prepare the way for us to meet the King of kings. 

This is a wonderful tale that illustrates what ultimately matters in this life, which is “the day to day leaving behind us a trail of mitzvot”, that is, good deeds. 

There is a real unity between love of God and love of others. The more a person loves God, the more that person loves all who belong to God, and human beings belong to God. That’s what holiness is–love of God and neighbor. Holiness is not the same as piety or devotional practices. These are certainly good, but a person can easily be pious and fervently religious without being holy, that is, without the love of God and neighbor, as Jesus implies in Matthew: Although you prophesied in my name, cast out demons in my name, worked miracles in my name, I never knew you (Mt 7, 21-23). And so, appearances can be deceiving.

Mother Teresa said very often: “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love”. Doing small things with great love moves this world forward in ways that are beyond our purview. We cannot see the effects of those small acts of great love, but God is not subject to the passing of time, so all our deeds in time are present to God all at once, eternally. Our good deeds are the sacrifices that rise to him like the sweet smoke of incense–the incense at a liturgy is just a symbolic representation of these small acts of great love, which include our prayers. Your day to day labors, if they are carried out with great love for God and neighbor, are that pleasing incense; they are genuine acts of worship, no matter what that work is. I met a former student of mine recently while taking out the garbage–he was the garbage man who grabbed and dumped my trash can. He kept trying to justify his job, as if he was embarrassed by it. But there is nothing to be embarrassed about. That work has great dignity, and it is utterly important work, and if it is done with great love for the common good, it is holy and has eternal value. Our good deeds are like the materials that we lay at the feet of Christ, who takes those materials and builds a mansion with them, one that will be our eternal dwelling place, as Christ says in the gospel of John: “In my Father’s house, there are many mansions” (Jn 14, 2). 

English poet William Wordsworth said: The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love (From ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798.’). And that’s the point of sacrificial offerings to God, especially the Old Testament sacrifices, to offer Him the best portion of what we have, the first fruits of the harvest or the first born of the flock. The best portion of our life is our little, nameless, and unremembered acts of kindness and love.

Thoughts on Free-Choice, Damnation, and Grace

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Human beings certainly have free-choice, for without it, we would have no sense of responsibility. But that sense of responsibility–for we do hold others responsible for their decisions–is a clear indication that we are free. However, contrary to Jean Paul Sartre, I don’t believe we are absolutely free. I’m quite convinced that our freedom is limited by a multitude of factors: ignorance, passion, unhealed memories and emotional wounds that distort our perception and understanding of things and people and that keep us from an accurate assessment of things, etc. These factors in the lives of others are for the most part invisible to us–even to ourselves. Only God, who is omniscient, knows the human heart, and so we are rightly commanded not to judge the hearts or guilt of others (Mt 7, 1-5). 

Years ago, when I held an almost absolutist notion of freedom, I had a tendency to judge, because in my mind at least, I was able to. That absolutist notion of freedom allowed me to leave out any consideration of the myriad of factors that limit human freedom and responsibility–if no such factors exist, then the sinner is completely and entirely responsible for his choices, and I am free to pronounce judgement. But those factors do exist. All we have to do is look back at our own lives to when we were younger and made very bad decisions, even sinful decisions. The point I wish to make is the following: free-choice involves options, and each option contains finite goods, some of which are not contained in the other options, which is the reason we deliberate. The object of the will is the “good”, and so the will is drawn to the finite goods contained in each of these options. If any option contained all the goods that are found in the others, there would be no choice to make–I would not deliberate but would necessarily choose that option. But I continue to deliberate because no option contains all the finite goods that are found in the others. Decision is the “cutting off” (Latin: decidere: to cut off) of the deliberation process.

Now, let’s say I know that option #3 is contrary to God’s will–it may be an act of adultery, or theft, or lying under oath, etc. What draws me to this option is not the evil as such, but the good or goods that the option contains, such as, in the case of adultery, the alleviation of loneliness, the comfort of companionship, the feeling of being loved or the feeling of being important, etc.,–let’s say this woman is saying all the right things at the right time. I know, on the other hand, that this is seriously wrong, but I just don’t believe I have the strength of will to deny my passions–probably because I haven’t had a whole lot of practice, for let’s assume I was not raised by religious parents who stressed the importance of self-denial, who never observed Lent, much less encouraged me to fast and pray, and of course I was raised in a postmodern society that encourages young people to follow our dreams and passions, etc. I would argue that in this imaginary scenario, my choice to be unfaithful was really not a choice to be unfaithful as such, it was fundamentally a choice for the finite goods contained in that option. It was a deficient option to be sure, thus an evil option, and I was aware of that, which is why the experience of guilt results from the decision. I am all too aware that it was a selfish decision, and I am responsible for it, but it was the limited goods in that option that were the motivating principles of that choice. I accepted the evil (as opposed to ‘intend’), that is, the deficiency of that option–which I was obligated not to–, but what I intended primarily in choosing that option (an option I willed) were the goods contained therein. I am indeed responsible for choosing that option, the deficiency of which I understood and in principle could have rejected–otherwise I am completely without responsibility. But how much responsibility do I have? God knows the degree of my freedom, limited as it is by a myriad of factors partially hidden from me, because God is omniscient. Although my choice was a sinful choice, was it essentially a rejection of the Supreme Good Itself (God)? I don’t think so; rather, it was a choice “for” certain goods that are congruent with my nature. That is not all, of course. I knew it was wrong in the larger scheme of things and that there were better options, but accompanied by fear, loneliness, anxiety, weakness of will, etc., I freely chose the sinful option. Did that choice amount to a decision for eternal alienation from God? Did I really look God in the face and spit? I would say not at all, even were I to feel no remorse and to have no use for religion. God knows all the many factors that contributed to my decision to leave religion behind. But it is not as if one option was simply God in all his unlimited goodness and love which I rejected–that’s impossible anyways, for the Supreme Good contains all the good contained in the entire ensemble of all possible alternatives. But it was a deficient option (evil option) that contained finite goods that I was drawn to, and the ultimate motivating principle for my being drawn to these goods is my being drawn to God, who is the Good as such, without limits. 

To continue with this phenomenology of sin, I know that I should discipline myself so that I can avoid those choices and choose in accordance with God’s will, but in this case I did not. Before I get to Confession, I am shot as a result of a robbery. Did I freely and totally reject God and choose hell? As was said above, I did freely reject the option I knew would please God, so I made a choice inconsistent with His friendship, and thus wounded my friendship with him, but did I totally and intentionally reject God in all his goodness and beauty? I don’t think so. Do I deserve the pain of purgatory? Yes I do. I need to experience the hurt that I’ve caused others (i.e., my wife, children, relatives, etc.). But do I deserve a never ending torment? I cannot for the life of me see it. Is it possible for me to refuse to repent of that sin? I would have to say yes. But did my choice amount to choosing darkness for all eternity? I don’t think so. I don’t want darkness, for there is nothing to love about darkness; for it is empty. Indeed, I am my own worst enemy when I sin, because I don’t want darkness and emptiness, but I choose a course of action that leads to darkness and emptiness. I was deluded in believing that the pleasure of adultery, or the pleasure of stolen goods, etc., was going to last forever and bring me perpetual joy, which I ultimately seek–because I pre-consciously seek God in every one of my choices. It did not last forever; rather, it left me empty. Again, there’s my ignorance. So what would motivate a person after death to persist in rebellion against God? After all, it is not as if the state after death leaves a person frozen and completely immobile; just consider the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus: “…he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.’” At the very least, the rich man is no longer completely indifferent to Lazarus. When that didn’t work, he said: “‘Then I beg you, father, send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment’” (Lk 16, 24; 27-28). After I am dead, what competing finite good exists that I choose instead of life and light? I have no idea. The illusion of pride perhaps? The fact that I have become my own god? Could anyone choose that perpetually, over the Supreme Good? No one has been able to explain that to me. Some do insist ‘there is no competing good’, one simply has to live eternally within the state of mind one is in, which is a state of darkness and emptiness, for ever and ever and ever and ever, ad infinitum. But what could a person do to deserve a retributive punishment that is unending? A fling with another woman during a difficult period of his/her life? Perhaps it was not a difficult period of a person’s life, perhaps this person is just self-centered and irreligious. Indeed, God does not owe anyone eternal life or mercy. Such a person dies his/her own worst enemy, and there is nothing anyone can do to escape the hell they put themselves in as a result of a life of sin. But what can we on the outside expect from God, according to what He has revealed about himself? We can expect mercy, because his justice was revealed as unfathomable mercy. 

There is real irony in those who, on the one hand, insist that the divine mercy is unfathomable, but on the other hand reveal themselves to be the most brutal of infernalists; for the doctrine of never ending hell makes God’s mercy quite fathomable, limited, and understandable according to our own limits. Some descriptions of hell do much worse than render the divine mercy fathomable; they render the divine justice patently absurd, i.e., Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and others like it found in the writings of some saints. We are the ones who say “I’ll never forgive that person as long as I live”, not God. He instructs us to forgive 70 x 7 (490 is the numerical value of the biblical Hebrew word “tamim” which means to “complete,” “perfect,” or “finished”; God’s forgiveness is perfect). Would God command us to forgive 70 x 7, a symbolic number that corresponds to his divine nature, which is without limit, while He Himself refuses to forgive once the blanket of death covers our eyes? I can only doubt it. A man’s sin is in his unjustified acceptance of the deficiency of his choice, and so that choice deserves kolasis (chastisement), even aionios kolasis (Mt 25, 46), a chastisement that lasts “ages of ages”. But unending? 

A number of people have raised the following objection or something similar: “There is a danger in trying to understand God’s mercy and justice through human experience; we apply limited human logic to mysteries that transcend our comprehension. God is always more.”

This is an interesting objection. Of course, it depends on what we mean by “trying to understand God’s mercy and justice through human experience”. If one means that we impose limits on God, i.e., anthropomorphism, then there is a sense in which this is true. But God became flesh, joined a human nature, precisely in order to reveal Himself, that we might understand him through our natural mode of knowing, that is, through our own human experience. Christ reveals God through his human words, through his own human experience, which he shares in common with us. He speaks a human language and reacts emotionally as well. That is precisely how we understand him, in the same way we understand anything else–you step on a thumb tack and yell out in pain; I understand you are in pain through my own past experience of pain. 

When Jesus says: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do”, I understand his words through my own experience of ignorance, which lessens responsibility, which I too have experienced—I’ve done things that I didn’t realize were worse than what I thought, but I just didn’t realize it at the time, for I lacked experience. But that is how we understand Christ, through our own experience. God revealed Himself through a human nature, that of Christ, and when it comes to the mercy and justice of God, he too speaks in a way that we can understand, because it corresponds to our own experience. We know through experience that sacrifice is the language of love. Christ sacrifices his life for us. We understand what that means through our own experience of making sacrifices. When we realize, through faith, that Jesus is God, and that God the Father gave up His only begotten Son for us, we understand this analogically, through our own experience of our love for our children. We also know, through the experience of the limits of our own love, that His love exceeds what we are capable of. Moreover, when we read about the divine justice, again, we understand this through our own experience of justice. However, when we are expected to believe that God’s justice is completely incongruent with our own in the sense that we would not impose an infinite sentence of unending suffering on another, but God would, we experience a cognitive dissonance, one that flies in the face of all we understand about justice. Such a teaching cannot be understood analogically. To insist that “God is a mystery that is beyond us” does not resolve the dissonance, but merely buries it. Justice implies that the punishment fits the crime, and a good judge must, to the best of his ability, take into consideration the intention of the person as well as what he knew and did not know or understand. A 66 year old man from Norwalk, Connecticut received a 675 year prison sentence for sexually abusing an 11 year old relative. Obviously, he cannot serve that. But let’s do a thought experiment. He can now live for 1000 years. After 675 years, he has paid his debt and ought to be released, otherwise it is an inadequate prison sentence. We seem to intuitively understand that justice demands a limit to the punishment, for there is a limit to the crime, for the criminal is limited in every way. Now, if one maintains that God imposes a punishment not of 675 years, but infinity, for a person who was let’s say not a Christian, not baptised, or who lived a very selfish and irreligious life, there is simply nothing in our experience by which we can grasp or make sense out of that, unlike every other aspect of divine revelation; for it is the only thing in divine revelation that is entirely incongruent with our own mode of knowing. Unimaginable suffering that does not end is unintelligible as a mode of justice. From our point of view, it is absurd. But the infernalist claims that from God’s point of view, it is love. Faith is assent to what is beyond reason but consistent with reason, not what is below reason and absurd. Nicholas Berdyaev writes: 

There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. To overcome the servile conception means movement within, movement in depth. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God. It is impossible and inadmissible to construct an ontology of evil. The idea of an eternal hell is, therefore, absurd and evil. Evil is but a pathway, a testing, a disruption; to fall into sin is above all else a testing of freedom. Man moves towards the light through the darkness. Dostoyevsky revealed this more profoundly than anyone (The Divine and the Human, p. 89). 

There is a real sense in which I am what I am today because of the imperfections and mistakes of my past. What I know today was the result of a decision, to be sure, a decision to continually reflect upon my life as it was unfolding and unfolded, and so it was a result of a continued reflection upon my experiences, which are now past. I and everyone else are expected to grow from experience, but how can a person change for the better unless he was in some ways worse than he is today? That is why judging the past using the standards of today is irrational, because the standards of today were the result of reflection upon what is now past; for we are here today, precisely where we are morally, as a result of that past and our decision, as a society, to reflect upon our past decisions and their repercussions. That’s how a culture changes and truly progresses. That does not necessarily cancel our responsibility for certain past decisions–one may still have to make reparation for a decision made long ago, perhaps a criminal decision or simply an immoral decision that left another or others profoundly hurt.

Finally, consider the following objection: “If we can freely choose love and goodness, then it’s also possible to freely reject them. And if someone were to persistently reject God, even in the face of His mercy, then the separation they choose may well be eternal”.

Perhaps this is correct. If someone were to persistently reject God, then God must allow that person to do so, if God is Love, for love does not compel. But this becomes very mysterious when we consider the fact that God did not allow you and me to reject Him, for while we were sinners, Christ died for us (Rom 5, 8). Consider the gospel of John: “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (15, 16). My freedom was restored by grace. Moreover, it is my experience that most Catholics hold a semi-Pelagian position in that they naturally believe that grace came to us precisely because prior to the infusion of grace, we made a free choice to open ourselves to God, and so God responded. But no, this is a heretical position. “While we were sinners” means while we were slaves, and slaves are not entirely free. We were unable to merit any grace; for we were unable to do anything pleasing to God that would merit a sharing in the divine nature. Otherwise, we are not saved by grace, but by our own initial choice to say ‘yes’ to God. Grace is utterly gratuitous. You and I were saved by grace, and so our cooperation with grace was itself a grace. 

Freedom is a task to be achieved. It is not a homogeneous state that endures unchanging throughout the many changes in our lives. I was not as “free” in the past as I am today–and here I do not refer to political freedom, but moral freedom, which implies love, knowledge, and responsibility. Moreover, we often look upon the relationship between free-will and one’s ability to reject a course of action (such as the decision to form a friendship, or to marry and remain faithful to another, etc) as enjoying a positive correlation. But this may not be the case. Consider a faithfully married couple, married for 40 years. At the start of their relationship, they were more free to choose another option, for example, to pursue other relationships. And yet, they did not love one another then as they love one another now, after 40 years–their love now has been tested; it is stronger and purer. Are they more able to say to one another: “Well, there are other options for us, so let’s pursue those and open our marriage or just call it quits”? No, they are not; rather, that is far less likely to happen. And yet, their freedom is much greater than it was at the beginning. The greater the love, the greater the freedom, which in this case also means the less likely they are to freely choose to dissolve it; the less love there is, the greater the likelihood that they will dissolve it. Similarly, it is far less likely for a saintly person to reject God than it is for a not so saintly person, but the saintly person has a much greater freedom, a much deeper knowledge and certainly a greater responsibility than the not so saintly person. The paradox is that grace increases our freedom, but it also makes us less likely to reject it. Hence, St. Edith Stein writes:

All merciful love can descend upon anyone. We believe that it does. And now, should there
be souls who exclude themselves from it permanently? In principle, the possibility is not
excluded. In fact, it can become infinitely unlikely, precisely through what prevenient Grace is able
to accomplish in the soul. This Grace can only knock, and there are souls that open themselves
at even this quiet call. Others let it go unheeded. But then this Grace can worm its way into these
souls, and more and more expand itself in them. The greater the space that it occupies in such an
illegitimate way, the more unlikely it will be that the soul closes itself off. It already sees the
world now in the light of Grace…The more ground that Grace wins from that which occupied it
before, the more ground it deprives from the free acts directed against it. And, in principle, there
are no limits to this displacement. When all the impulses against the spirit of light are displaced
from the soul, then a free decision against it [the spirit of light] becomes infinitely unlikely. For
this reason, the belief in the boundlessness of God’s love and Grace, as well as the hope for universal salvation, are justified… 

This is an interesting and mysterious paradox: that grace slowly and gradually deprives a soul of the ground for the free acts directed against it, and yet such displacement in fact marks an increase in freedom, for “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Co 3, 17). Those in darkness are slaves to sin, and they really do not understand the full implications of the choices they make. Indeed, Christ himself said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23, 34), and for the most part, we don’t know what we are doing–at least not entirely–, especially when our choices plunge us more and more deeply into darkness.

The Normality of Struggle

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Struggle is a normal and necessary part of human existence, with or without the Fall of Man. After the Fall of Man (Gn 3), the struggles involved in everyday human life did not suddenly arise; rather, they simply became difficult, frustrating, and unenjoyable. The reason is that after the Fall, man, wounded by concupiscence, seeks rest without struggle. Prior to the Fall, daily struggles that are part and parcel of human existence would have been as enjoyable and exhilarating as a well played game or sport. In this light, rest and struggle are not opposites.

Creation itself, the bringing into being of all things, involves a kind of tension or a battle of sorts: 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

Water is a symbol for chaos, for it is powerful, destructive and without form, and thus creation is depicted as a bringing order out of chaos, or form and content out of what is formless and empty, or light from darkness, as a sculptor stands before a heavy slab of marble that will resist his efforts to bring form and order out of its formless posture. Like an artist who contemplates his finished work, God contemplates all He has made and “behold, it was very good”. Rest comes after the struggle, and there is no rest without it. Beauty is its fruit.

Work is holy, but work is fundamentally a struggle, a kind of emulation of God who creates: “And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” It was only as a result of the Fall that work–or what is humanly good to do–became burdensome to man: “…in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life,…In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread”. 

The spiritual life is a battle, specifically a battle of love. It is only a battle against the self because it is a “battle of love”, and inordinate self-love destroys love and is the resistance that makes the spiritual life a genuine struggle. Without a spiritual life, human life is empty, for it is the spirit that brings direction (meaning) to the matter of the universe, and so human life as a whole is a battle, specifically a struggle to achieve love, which is unitive and creative, and thus it is a battle for universal fraternity (the kingdom of God). Inserting struggle into our lives is God’s way of dealing with us: “We should be grateful to the Lord our God, for putting us to the test, as he did our forefathers. Recall how he dealt with Abraham, and how he tried Isaac, and all that happened to Jacob in Syrian Mesopotamia while he was tending the flocks of Laban, his mother’s brother. Not for vengeance did the Lord put them in the crucible to try their hearts, nor has he done so with us. It is by way of admonition that he chastises those who are close to him” (Jud 8, 25-27). To chastise is to prune, which a gardener does for the good of the plant being pruned, that it may bear more fruit. And so a life without the struggle and dialectic of opposites, that is, a life of rest without arduous struggle bears very little fruit and leaves a person without a great deal of depth and light.

G. Studdert Kennedy writes: 

“Love endures all things.” The word of “endure” is translated patience, and so is long-suffering, but “endures” is the patience that works and plods at things. Love is a fighter, a reformer, not content with things as they are. “Endures” means “conquers through patience,” it is that which overcomes the world. Patience that fights and wears things down until they become expressive of order and love. It stands on the rock and is patience born of faith and hope in presence of love’s very self. It has the sense of going on along a road or climbing a hill and never giving up but going steadily at it. There is the description of what love does, it ends as this life, which consists in walking on steadily, will do. There’s this much joy in it, that the road gets easier the more faithfully we keep on. The first hills of childhood seem terribly hard and so the troubles of the young are harder than those of the old because the young do not realise that the flat part will come later, it won’t be all hills. But patience is its own reward and there is never a moment when we don’t need it. The troubles of a child seem quite heart-breaking, e.g. when it tells its first lie and is ostracized by its parents who hear it crying in the next room and cannot go to it. At last we must get our feet firmly set and know that if sorrow comes we will go through it. If we keep close to Love we shall win in the end. …The world is made for love and demands it. We are toiling and working out the problem of the perfection of love and we must learn to live in unity in the human race, bearing each other’s burdens and fighting the battle of love.” The Best of Studdert Kennedy, p. 190-193.

Some Thoughts on the Cross and the Lynching Tree

The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by James Cone

Deacon Doug McManaman

When I read about this terrible suffering and injustice, this complete indifference to the rights of black Americans during the lynching era, the utter brutality and mind boggling hypocrisy, all I can say is that indeed they are the Christ among white Americans. Christ is them, and they are Christ, and their suffering is the deepest possible sharing in the redemptive work of Christ himself. They are suffering for their persecutors, for white Christians who don’t know Christ, who are crucifying the Christ they allegedly worship. These laugh now (at the time), but will weep later, as we read in Luke. Those who are suffering in the Person of Christ achieve the greatest honor and they have the greatest joy in the kingdom, thanks to this identification between their lives and the crucified. Their persecutors, these cruel murderers and all those who cooperate with them, are forever connected to their victims, and this is their torment. They are immersed in the specter of their utter cruelty, the ugliness of their sin, and it is an intolerable sight. But in the midst of their crucified victims, these murderers see the crucified that they think they’ve worshiped. He is there among the lynched, tortured, and burned. He is their only hope. But if he is their only hope, it means that they, their victims, are their only hope, because the identity between Christ and their victims is perfect. They forgive their persecutors, because they are victorious in the crucified one who is among them, and they have received the forgiveness of their own sins in him, so how can they deny forgiveness to those who have murdered them. In fact, their greatest desire is to share in Christ’s victory over sin and death, which they do by their sufferings and the heart of mercy, which each one possesses. They can say with Christ: “…forgive them, for they know not what they do”, and indeed, they know not what they have done. But they will, because they are forever connected to their victims, and so they will forever behold what they have done until they cannot stand the sight of their own ugliness any longer. Their victims along with Christ, who is in their midst, are waiting to be invited by these murderers to defeat their evil with the victory of Christ’s charity and forgiveness. That will be their greatest joy, because it will be their greatest victory, their unique sharing in the victory of Christ. And they wait, and wait, but they won’t wait forever, because St. Paul tells us that “every knee shall bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”. Finally, it is interesting to compare two perspectives. Today, so many have called for reparations; for they see black Americans as terribly disadvantaged by the allegedly superior whites. But in the light of a theology of the cross, in particular the theology of the cross that came out of this era, in their poetry, their music, their literature, it seems rather obvious that they have a nobility and power that is their glory. They entered into the struggle against sin and death, and they conquered, and many graces were bestowed upon America as a result of that struggle. What we are today is, in large part, the result of that victorious struggle. Black Americans stand higher, not lower. We look up to them, not them to us.

Harmful Dualisms

Deacon Doug McManaman

A great irony today is that Catholics, generally speaking, no longer think historically, that is, within a historical paradigm. However, all things were created through him (Christ) and for him (Christ). As Tertullian points out, the very clay in which Adam was formed was created in view of Christ; man was created in view of Christ. And so history is directed towards Christ, that is, towards “Christification”. This movement of history does not stop at the Ascension of Christ; it is not as if now, since the Ascension, history is cyclical and we are just waiting for the number of the elect to be complete, which will then be followed by the Second Coming of Christ. No, history is still linear and moving towards Christ. Everyone who has gone before us has in some way contributed to the evolution of humanity towards Christ. History is sacred. There are not two histories, one sacred and the other profane. All history is sacred history, because it is under the providence of God, directed towards the Second Coming of Christ, that is, towards the Christification of creation (Teilhard de Chardin). My own individual and personal existence has a place within this history; it is a historically relational existence. It is related to the past in that others have made my life possible–I’ve inherited proclivities, talents, I’ve been positively influenced by certain people, many of whom I have forgotten not because they were insignificant, but by virtue of the limits of memory; and my existence influences others who will live after I am gone, who will have been influenced by my life in some way. But “my life” is not purely mine; it is the product of the labor of innumerable others.

The genuinely creative work of others is holy. The evolution of medical technology and medical advancements, for example, is holy (set apart from what was ‘before’); advancements in the design of automobiles and other means of transportation is holy; the creation of computers is holy; the invention of new techniques in construction and its latest products are holy, etc., for they are all the result of creative conflict that is ordered to the betterment of humanity, and man was created in view of Christ. 

It is not as if the world is unholy (the realm of the profane) while within this world is a tiny community of believers, the baptized (the Church), who alone are holy. Not at all. It is sin that profanes, but creation is holy from the start, and man was created to be a priest of creation and to have that priesthood perfected and elevated by Christ. Creation comes from God, and it is sustained by God, and the Old Testament reveals the God of Israel as the God of history. The Church is much larger and wider than the Roman Catholic Church. A Roman Catholic Mass certainly does involve the changing of the substances of bread and wine into the single substance of Christ’s body and blood, that is, the Person of Christ, but that is the very image of history in its completion, for the matter of creation is destined to become Christ (Christification). The Mass is a sneak preview so to speak, a microcosmic instance of history’s destiny. The Mass is ordered towards the fulfillment of history. 

Images of Christ abound throughout creation: each of the four seasons, fertility, death and growth, the sun, the stars that praise God, creatures of every sort, etc. To enjoy a sunset is a holy act; for the beauty of a sunset speaks of the beauty of God who hides himself and illuminates our lives, only to hide himself again. The light of faith, which is like the rays of that sun just before dawn, allows us to believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God; that light allows us to see creation on a much deeper level, a level that was hidden up to this point. The habit of mind that regards the natural as essentially profane is a false paradigm, a distorted and non-biblical worldview. In revealing Himself, God intends to reveal the deepest meaning of creation, not a new meaning. It is new to the person who does not have faith and suddenly acquires it, but with faith, one sees Christ everywhere in it, which is why Christ could speak in parables. Grace, although distinct, is not separated from nature. Grace is part of the divine plan, just as my life includes friendships that were gratuitously given. Grace is a part of human existence, because man was created in view of Christ. Grace is supra-nature, but God’s supernatural and Trinitarian existence is to be opened up to humanity. The natural is not the supernatural, but it is ordered to the supernatural, for it is ordered to Christ, from the very beginning. The Church’s task is to reveal the true nature of things.

In the Incarnation, Christ conquered death and sin, giving all of us the capacity to rise above the struggles that belong to human existence and to conquer in him. One does not have to be explicitly aware of this in order for Christ’s Incarnation to be effective in one’s life and in the life of the world. All the progress in this world is the fruit of the Incarnation; for Christ has joined himself to every man when he joined himself to matter. 

When Pius X was made the archbishop of Venice, his mother and father both looked at his ring and said: “You would not have that ring if it wasn’t for this ring”, indicating their wedding ring. It was as if to say: “We were instrumental in this. Without marriage, you wouldn’t be here, buddy.” They were the ones who provided his education that led to this. Hierarchy, sacred order, arises out of the faithful, not above the faithful. It is the fruit of marriage. The word “laity” is from laos, which is ‘of the people’. A cleric remains a part of the people, a servant of the people, never outside and above. The movement from non-cleric to cleric is not from above to the Cathedral; rather, it is from parents to the Cathedral, parents whose marriage is holy, a sharing in the paschal mystery. 

A Sign of Hope: Faith Day Talk to the Staff of Father Michael McGivney Catholic Academy

September 27th, 2024

Deacon Doug McManaman

Whenever I am asked to give a retreat talk to a staff of teachers, I usually have to think hard about it: “Is this something I can do or should do, etc., but when I was asked to give this faith day talk for McGivney, immediately I knew that I wanted to be here for this. There was no need to think about this for more than two seconds. Now, I don’t come to Markham often, but these past few years I have had to drive to 48 and Steeles for some eye appointments, so I would end up driving by the school. And I have to tell you that every time I’ve done so, I was left with a very real and palpable feeling of joy. I find it very interesting to think about this. I experience joy for the rest of the day. It’s an interesting phenomenon, because there is so much that I’ve forgotten, so many details–I spent my last 20 years of teaching here, and memories do fade, especially as we get older, so it’s not as if I have a collection of distinct memories that bring me joy. They are subconscious memories. There was something very beautiful about this school, the students and the staff. A whole world is opened back up to me when I drive by the school. So I am quite convinced that we did something right at this school: the staff did something right, and the students did something right. And I’d like to spend some time reflecting upon just what that might be. 

I know the theme of the retreat day is hope, and one of my favorite themes to preach on at Mass is divine providence, precisely because of the hope it provides those who really think about providence, the idea that God is in complete control of all things, that every moment of our existence is within his providential hands. My former students have often told me that one of their best memories from our class is of the day I told them the story of my return to the faith. I was baptized a Catholic and went to Catholic school up until grade 3; after that, I was sent to the “Protestant” school across the street from my house in Dollard des Ormeaux, a suburb of the west Island of Montreal. We then moved to another part of Montreal, and I never went back to a Catholic school again, so I was sort of an atheist by the time I was a teenager. I did not grow up Catholic after that.

My entire life was music. Bluegrass music. I was a five string Bluegrass banjo player, I played in two Bluegrass bands before deciding to go to University. But the turning point in my life came when I decided to hitchhike to Nashville, Tennessee. Clearly I was lacking a prefrontal cortex; I had absolutely no sense of danger when I was 17 years old. Now when I drive to Cincinnati, Ohio, I take 75 south, the route I took when hitchhiking, and even with the doors locked, I still get scared going through Detroit and Columbus, Ohio; how I was able to hitchhike down south with only $150 is beyond me. The only explanation is an undeveloped prefrontal cortex.

But it was the most providential event in my entire life. I got a lift just outside of Columbus from a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C, and he drove me all the way to Kentucky. As I got into the car, after putting my backpack and banjo in the back seat, I asked him what he did for a living. He said:  “I am a priest”.  I thought that was interesting, and of course the last time I saw the inside of a Church was in the 3rd grade, so I used that time to question him, challenge him, question him again: How do you know God exists? Why would you take a vow of celibacy? Why do you need religion in your life, etc. 

But what struck me about this priest were two things. First, he related to me as an equal. There was an eye to eye relationship; there was not an ounce of condescension, not even the slightest indication that he was superior in any way. He related to me with a kind of reverence, for lack of a better word. Secondly, his joy. He was clearly happier than I was. He’s in his mid 30s, he’s got all these responsibilities and obligations, he can’t get married, I’m young, free, I can get married, but there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s just happier than I am. And that was a mystery to me. I had a sense that he belonged to a world that I once knew as a child, and I guess I wanted back into that world. I had lost touch with it, and wanted back in. And he revealed that world to me, just by the kind of person that he was: a person of great joy, without any pretensions. 

At one point, he asked me if I went to Mass, and of course I said no, and he asked if my parents went to Mass, and I said no, and he was so disappointed. I couldn’t understand it. “Why do you have to go to Mass?” I asked him. “People can pray on their own”. And he yelled out the answer: “To receive the body of Christ”. 

Now I hadn’t heard those words in years, since the 3rd grade, and I knew at that moment that this was the key to entering back into that world that I once knew as a child, the world that this priest belonged to, which was a joyful world. So I decided to get back to Mass from that point on. He dropped me off on the side of the road where he had to exit; I played my banjo for him outside, took down his number and address and promised to keep in touch with him. 

I made it to Nashville and joined the Rudy Meeks Band. He’s a 6 time Canadian fiddle champion, so I went all the way to Nashville to get a job in a band back in Canada. 

And I did keep in touch with that priest, and I did return to my faith as I said I would. What was interesting about the rest of his trip was that when he got to the seminary in Kentucky, there was nothing for him to do. He had to get up the next morning and leave and return to Washington, D.C. there was simply nothing for him to do there. The bishop sent him to visit this seminary, but the trip was a complete waste of time. And after a while, he came to realize that the only purpose to that trip was to pick up a hitchhiker, relate to him as an equal, buy him lunch, answer his questions, and inspire him. The bishop of course didn’t know that. So it was the one time in his life that he felt that God chose him to be at a particular place at a particular time. 

After touring with the Rudy Meeks band and another band, I decided to leave the music industry. I wanted to become a priest, which led me to St. Jerome’s College at the University of Waterloo; two years into philosophy, I met a woman, and I thought “Maybe I don’t want to be a priest after all.” 

So I studied philosophy at Waterloo and theology at the university of Montreal, went to McGill university for teachers college, and my first 10 years of teaching were in the heart of the Jane and Finch area of Toronto. The school was Regina Pacis, and it was founded by Father Gerald Fitzgerald, of the Holy Ghost Fathers, and he wanted to establish a school for kids in Jane and Finch who could not get accepted into St. Basil’s, which only accepted the best at the time. So he handpicked his staff, those who shared the same vision of education, who were aware that this is not going to be an easy task but who were committed to it, and he made sure we had a first Friday Mass and social every month, with alcohol. And those were great years, but they were rather difficult years. Jane and Finch was and probably still is a very broken neighborhood. I spent my first ten years there. I then spent two and a half years at Chaminade College, an all boys school, and that was a very different experience. The kids were always in uniform, and their attention span was not 7 minutes, as it was in the previous school, but a full hour. It was a very easy place to teach at. But then I soon decided to switch to York Catholic, because of the driving. And my first interview was here, in 2001, with Paul Walsh, Kathleen Westmaas, and Domenic Scuglia. 

I didn’t think I was going to remain at McGivney, because I wanted less driving, but I ended up here for the rest of my career. There was only one point where I tried to leave. When St. Maximilian Kolbe opened up in Aurora, I applied for the headship in Religion. Dominic Scuglia wanted me to apply for the headship, I would have been able to walk to work every day, and my friend Eugene Pivato coached me on how to answer the questions that they were going to ask.

But when I sat down for the interview, it was so interesting. My mind went completely blank. I couldn’t answer the questions. I felt like a complete idiot; I was just fumbling all over the place. When I got back to McGivney, I saw Kathleen Westmaas, who was now the principal; she was in the parking lot heading off to a meeting at the board, and she asked me: “How did the interview go?” I said it was terrible; horrible. I couldn’t answer a thing. In her Trinidadian accent, she says to me: “That’s God’s way of telling you to stay with Kathleen. Stay with Kathleen.” And of course, she was right. The headship for religion opened up a week later, and she wanted me to apply for it, so I said I would, but “I’m not giving canned answers. I’m going to answer the way I want and if they don’t like it, too bad. And I’m bringing notes in case I go blank. We make accommodations for our students, so you have to make accommodations for me”. And that interview was a breeze. And after that, they brought in the IB program, which gave me a new lease on teaching for my last 6 years. And so, screwing up that interview for Kolbe was one of the greatest blessings of my teaching career.

Teaching at McGivney was a blessing on so many fronts. One of the things I continue to reflect upon is the ecumenical aspect of this school. Prior to McGivney, it was always only Catholic students that were registered in the schools I taught at. Here, a significant percentage of Muslim students, Hindu students, some Sikh students, Buddhist, atheists, alongside Catholic kids. That was a very important experience. So many people I know, who are serious Catholics, did not have that experience or anything similar, and so when they speak about those who belong to non-Christian religions, especially Muslims, they do so not from any concrete experience, but from what they’ve deduced in their heads, on the basis of their assumptions. And what they say is not always very good, often very ignorant, very much rooted in fear and a kind of religious tribalism, an us-and-them mentality–and these are well educated people I’m referring to. 

My best friend is a retired priest from the Hamilton diocese, and one of the last things he did as a pastor in Kitchener, Ontario, was to sponsor a refugee family from Syria, a Muslim family. That family fell in love with my friend, Father Don Sanvido, and to this day they treat him as one of the family. I was there for supper one day, and I saw how much the children of that family loved my friend, the joy of that family, their appreciation for all the parish and this priest in particular did for them. And I asked my friend after we left: “Notice how joyful and charitable that family is. Do you notice any difference between them and Joe’s family?” Joe is a friend of ours, a Catholic teacher with a large family,  and visiting them over the years was also a joy. “Do you notice any difference in the way you are treated by Mohammed and his family and the way you are treated by Joe’s family? Any difference in the overall atmosphere?” And he said to me: “No, I don’t notice any difference”. Both homes are filled with the joy of the kingdom of God. That was an important experience for him.

I remember ordering a number of books for our library at McGivney, some Muslim authors, and I was visiting my friend one weekend–I’d often visit him, give him a break and preach for him. At the time I was reading some great Muslim and Sikh religious texts, and so I decided to test my friend, with a bit of deception. I said to him, as a test, to tell me where in the Old Testament can one find the following words: 

The One who created the million species of being gives sustenance to all. The Lord is forever merciful; He takes care of all. Those who hear and believe, find the home of the self deep within. Those people, within whose hearts the Lord abides, are radiant and enlightened. Speak of Him continually and remain absorbed in His Love.

He was sure it came from one of the wisdom books, such as Sirach or Ecclesiastes. But this came from the Sikh holy book, the Sri Guru Granth Sahib. Before telling him that, I asked him to tell me which mystical theologian in Church history would have said the following:

Does anyone think that the ocean is only what appears on its surface? By observing its hue and motion, the keen eye may perceive indications of that ocean’s unfathomable depth. The Lord’s mercy and compassion are an ocean with no shore, providing endlessly varied vistas for those who sail its surface; but the greatest wonderment and fulfillment is reserved for those “creatures of the sea” for whom that mercy has become their own medium.

The Lord beckons us through a divine love and attraction that has been implanted in our hearts, a love that may be understood and felt consciously as divine by some, and only indirectly as love for His creatures or creation by others. In either case the pull of our heart draws us to those Mercy Oceans, just as our physical bodies feel drawn to a warm and gentle sea….we are of that sea, our place, our home is in the depths of that sea, not on its surface.

After I finished reading this, my friend listed the following possibilities: Meister Eckhart, one of the desert fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Gertrude, St. Hildegard. But no, it came from a modern Sufi writer Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kibbani–Sufi is the mystical branch of Islam. My friend thought it was from one of the great Catholic mystics. And you know, only prejudice could keep us from recognizing the supernatural quality of these texts.  

One of the benefits of retiring is that you have time to explore things that you didn’t really have time for when teaching. And it is amazing how many buried and relatively unknown treasures there are to uncover, especially among non-Catholic thinkers. One great treasure that I stumbled upon was a Chaplain to the British army in World War I, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, who wrote in the midst of battle, when shells were exploding all around him. Here’s something that Studdert Kennedy wrote in 1920, forty years before Vatican II will begin to move in this direction:

I do not think there is any doubt that we have grossly underrated the moral and spiritual worth of other religions, and have allowed prejudice to blind our eyes to their beauty, and to the foreshadowing of Christ which they contain. It is a tragedy that we should have allowed a spirit of almost savage exclusiveness to have blotted out for us the revelation of God contained in earth’s million myths and legends, so that Christians have regarded them almost as though they were the inventions of the evil one. It is a disaster that we should have lumped all other faiths together and called them “pagan”—dismissing them as worthless. It is disastrous because it has distorted our missionary methods and delayed the development of the world religion. It has made us seek to convert the East not merely to Christ, but to our specifically  Western Christ, and to force upon other peoples not merely our experience of Him, but our ways of expressing the experience. It is disastrous, too, because it has bred in us the spirit of intolerance and contempt for others which is one of the chieftest obstacles to the union of the world.

That’s an astounding text, especially in light of the fact that it was written in 1920. There is no doubt in my mind that this text is still ahead of our time–not even Vatican II was that daring. Teaching at McGivney among so many Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, among others has been a genuine blessing, because we saw how much reverence they have for all that we believe. I recall a Muslim student going through each desk in period 1 in a room I had in that period on the 3rd floor one year, and he was removing the bibles from the desks, and stacking them neatly; he’d do this every morning, for those bibles were left in the desks by students in period 4 the previous day. This Muslim boy would shake his head and say: “Sir, these students have no respect”. And he’d place the bibles on the table at the side of the room.

Now, I’m not at all sure that leaving a bible in a desk is irreverent, but he thought so, because to do that to the Koran would be irreverent, so it was his reverence for our Scriptures that struck me. There are so many instances like these that filled my 20 years at McGivney. I remember grade 12 male students walking into period 1 looking so tired and hungry, because it was Ramadan, and they were determined to observe the fast. And that too challenged me in my final years. As you can see, I don’t have the body of a person who is good at fasting, and our Lenten fast is nothing compared to their Ramadan fast. But in my last few years, I felt guilty for my lack of effort, and so I did make a real attempt to crank it up, as a result of their example. Again, that’s just one among many. And there are the Hindu students with their openness and willingness to learn from everyone. And there’s the irony: the word Catholic is from the Greek kataholos, which means ‘on the whole’ or universal. The Hindu students have that universal openness and willingness to embrace all that is good, a truly Catholic attitude, whereas we Catholics–not you necessarily, but certainly in many parts of the world today–have become so sectarian and tribal, so closed to anything that is foreign. Consider the recent ruckus caused by the Pope’s recent remarks in Singapore regarding the great religions of the world as “paths to God”. It seems we’ve gone backwards, some of us at least.

And those twenty years at McGivney have helped me to understand more deeply Pope John XXIII’s vision of the Church at Vatican II. Many bishops at Vatican II, like the Belgium Bishop Emile-Joseph De Smedt, were breaking away from the image of the Church as a pyramid, with the Pope on the top, bishops and priests below as his intermediaries, and at the bottom of the pyramid was the laity. Such a model tends to regard the Church as primarily and principally clerical. Vatican II moved beyond that model towards a concept of the Church as an Open society–fundamentally, the people of God–a pope, a bishop, a priest, are one of the faithful, like you and me, and they’re called to temporarily serve in a certain capacity. The Church is not the hierarchy, it is much larger than that, and it is much larger than the Roman Church. Hierarchy means ‘sacred order’, not levels of perfection from the inferior to the superior. The movement of the Church is not to be centripetal, but centrifugal, outward, towards the world. In that old pyramid model, the main effort of the Church’s apostolate was to bring the other peoples into the Church. Recruitment. Fill the pews.

In 1959,  John XXIII wrote in his diary: “The whole world is my family. This sense of belonging to everyone must give character and vigour to my mind, my heart and my actions. This vision, this feeling of belonging to the whole world, will give a new impulse to my constant and continual daily prayer:…” There’s no doubt that his experience as head of the Vatican diplomatic mission to Turkey was the root of this feeling, which was behind a new model of the church that was developing under his leadership. As Piet Fransen S. J., pointed out, the center of human history is not the Church, but the realization of the kingdom of God in the Person of Christ. The Church does not have a monopoly on salvation. The Church is called to serve all men and women and not merely the baptized. Pope Francis is very familiar with that vision and has been trying very hard to bring the Church back to that model. The day before his papal election, when he was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, he quoted a passage from the Book of Revelation in which Jesus stands before the door and knocks. He added: “Today Christ is knocking from inside the church and wants to get out.”

The foundation for this vision is in the Incarnation. The Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, joined a human nature to himself, and Vatican II points out that in doing so, God the Son joined himself to every human person, not just the baptised. And so, God the Son is intimately present to every man and woman in the deepest regions of the human person; sufficient grace is available to everyone, and every decision we make in our lives can be translated as either a ‘yes’ to God, in which case we move towards Him, or a ‘no’, in which case we move away. Lumen Gentium sections 15 and 16 are very clear that divine grace is available outside the visible boundaries of the Church of Rome, and that outside of those boundaries, whether among our non-Catholic brethren (Lutherans, Anglicans, Mennonites, Presbyterians, etc.), or non-Christian brethren in the religions of the world, and even among atheists, people can and do respond to the impetus of divine grace in a way that directs their lives fundamentally to God, and grace of course is the indwelling of the Holy Trinity. And so we can really say, as Kathleen Westmaas would always remind us, that this person here, this Hindu or Sikh or Muslim, is my brother, my sister, and that this is what we want our students to understand by lived experience, and those students who do understand this help us understand this more deeply. The wonderful thing about this school is that many of the non-Christian kids, after a time, came to the realization that this Hindu person who has been sitting next to me in math class for the past two years or so, or this Catholic, or this Sikh, is not the infidel that I might have been led to believe he or she was.  And vice versa. 

And any Catholic teacher who doubts this, who still operates out of a kind of tribal Catholicism, has to just consider the fact that if you believe what St. Paul teaches in his letter to the Galatians, that “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me”, then in loving you and what you stand for, your students really love Christ without necessarily knowing it explicitly. That Muslim family from Syria that my friend sponsored, through the parish, that family, in loving my priest friend and receiving him into their home as their uncle, they are loving Christ without them necessarily realizing it or knowing it explicitly–because that’s all he has in his life, that’s his whole identity and all he lives for. 

That’s evangelization, that’s proclaiming the good news of Christ’s resurrection, and that’s very different from proselytizing. So many Catholics today still confuse evangelization with proselytizing, with recruitment. Evangelization is witnessing to the good news that Christ is risen, that our greatest fear and the one enemy that man was helpless to defeat, has been defeated by Christ: namely death: “By dying you destroyed our death, by rising you restored our life”. And we proclaim that good news by carrying that risen life within us, by living in the joy of Easter. That’s what did it for me when I was 17 years old and hitchhiking; it wasn’t the answers to my questions that I was given by this priest, nor any kind of apologetics that brought me back. It was his joy and the eye to eye relationship he was able to establish. And that’s how we evangelize our students, by entering into their sufferings, paying attention to them, and joining our light to their darkness. 

And I know that over the years, a number of Muslim parents would express to me their fears, on grade 8 Curriculum night, fears that we are going to convert their child, recruit their child to the Catholic faith. And unfortunately, we only see in others what we see in ourselves, and a large percentage of devotees in the world religions also think in terms of a closed society, that you really have to belong to “our group” if you are to be considered genuinely religious and pleasing to God. But that’s not what this school was about at all, and Muslim and Hindu parents, many of them, came to see that over the years. What impact that had on their own religious attitudes is uncertain; whether that helped any of them escape their own religious tribalism, we can only hope. But there is no doubt in my mind that the kingdom of God is among you, as Christ tells us in the gospel of Luke, and the kingdom he established is a universal covenant, an international covenant (kataholos), not a tribal family covenant, and the wonderful thing about the Church is that it is in continual reform. The Church, by its very nature, cannot remain static, although many individual Catholics are determined to keep it static, not to move and who believe the Church need not reform in any way. But the Church as a whole is always in reform–which necessarily implies that the history of the Church is rarely ever pretty. At every moment of its history, it is always a Church in need of reform.

But this is true on an individual level as well. That’s so important to recognize. Each one of us is always in need of reform. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like seeing myself in the past, either on an old VHS cassette or in old photos that remind me how stupid I was at that time. I often shake my head, saying to myself: “I can’t believe I said that to him”, or “What an idiot I was for doing that”, etc. And this is one of the best things about retirement. Two other friends of mine retired shortly after I did, and what all three of us have in common is we’ve spent the last 5 years or so reflecting on our own lives, looking back and seeing that if we had to do certain things over again, we’d do many things differently. In other words, we do regret some of the attitudes we had at one time in our lives.

Teaching theory of knowledge made this process a bit easier. To prepare students for writing their TOK essay, I decided to study the philosophy of Nicholas Rescher, from the University of Pittsburgh, one of the greatest philosophers of science in the 20th century. And I wanted to find a way to make his thought easy and accessible to the IB students, so I studied his theory of plausible reasoning. To make a long story short, let’s just say that knowledge is very hard to achieve, and much of what is in our heads is not knowledge at all, but belief (natural faith), some of it warranted, much of it unwarranted. And so Rescher was a real proponent of epistemic humility and the importance of coming to a deeper awareness of the limits of human knowing, that it is not so much truth that we possess, as it is truth as I currently see it. He does not deny the possibility of possessing truth, but he argues that it is much more difficult than most people are willing to admit. 

So I got in the habit of paying very close attention to the inferences that I would make on a daily basis, particularly the mistaken inferences, and I would use those as examples in my theory of knowledge classroom. It’s hard to get adolescents to appreciate the limitations of human knowing and the tentative nature of our truth claims–we tend to be rather doctrinaire when we are young and speak with a rhetoric of absolute certainty, so I needed lots of examples for them. After a time, you get used to the fact that we are quite often wrong. But it is especially interesting discovering, in your 50s and 60s, that certain beliefs you’ve held onto for decades might not be as sure and definitive as you once thought. When I was in my 30s, things were different; 30s is young, so too 40s, so being wrong is something that doesn’t stand out that much; on the contrary, when we are young, it’s being right that tends to stand out, and it’s a good feeling being right. But when I turned 50, things changed, because I saw 50s as ‘getting up there’. Thomas More, one of my favourite saints, was executed outside the Tower of London when he was 57; I always wondered what it would be like to be in my 50s, which I saw as ‘old’. So, when I turned 50, 51, 52 etc, and I discovered that so and so was right after all, 20 years ago when he said that and when I argued against him so passionately, that had a different impact on me. I couldn’t hide from it. I would say to myself: “It took me 20 years to figure that out”, or “30 years to discover that so and so was right after all”, or “I’m 56 and I’m just learning that now”? Why did it take so long? and things like that are still happening. I’m 63 now, and I’ll be reading something written in 1885, by an unknown Protestant theologian, at least unknown to me for the past 60 years, and I’d think to myself: “This guy knew things about scripture and the Church fathers, and the nature of God, back in 1885, which I’m only learning today, through him, in 2022 or 23–and what he’s saying is still very much ahead of our time. It’s a fascinating experience. And I really do feel like a beginner all over again. It sounds counterintuitive, but it is an exhilarating experience to discover that “I’m far more ignorant than I realized”, and that there’s a brand new path to explore for the next few years. It reminds me of Physicist Richard Feymann who said that science is an ever expanding frontier of ignorance. The more we discover, the more we come to know how much more there is to know, and how much we didn’t know, but thought we knew.  

And my two best friends are experiencing much the same thing. And I think that might be the key to longevity. When you feel like a beginner all over again, you feel young again, at the start of a new adventure. And that spawns hope. A continuous cycle of new hope. You kind of have something to live for again, something to achieve, something to master, and that may take 2 or 3 years, then it happens again. So life really is a learning process. And that’s what makes teaching so much fun. You learn new stuff, and try it out on the students, see what they think.

Teaching is a very noble profession. The work is holy. When we enter a classroom, we are walking on holy ground, as God said to Moses when he approached Mount Sinai. But teaching is a way of the cross, and that’s the beauty of it. We have a tendency to assume that life is not meant to be a struggle, that when things are difficult, something is wrong. A friend of mine, a principal from years ago in the Toronto board, would always identify a good say with a smooth day, and I used to challenge him on this: “A smooth day is not necessarily a good day, and a day with all sorts of headaches, frustrations, difficulties, and stress, might very well be the best day of the week, the most fruitful and effective.” He was a friend of mine so he could talk to me in a way that he would not talk to others, which is why his reply consisted of two words that I cannot repeat here. But as anyone who has studied evolutionary biology well knows, life itself is a struggle. It’s supposed to be. Marriage is a struggle; teaching is a struggle, working with young people is a struggle, working with administrators is a struggle, and vice versa. But the Second Person of the Trinity joined a human nature to himself in order to enter into that struggle and conquer it, to become victorious over it in a way that we could not; and that’s the mystery of his cross and resurrection, and our greatest gift is to be given a share in his cross and resurrection, that victory over the struggle of human existence. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ prayer was not “Let this cup pass from me”; that was a moment of weakness in the Son of God, interestingly enough. His prayer was “but let not my will be done, but Your will be done”. Studdert Kennedy points out that this is the real prayer of Gethsemane: “This prayer is immediately answered. The angel of God appears to comfort Him. Terror dies within his soul, hesitation disappears, and with His battle prayer upon His lips, ‘Thy will be done,’ he goes out from the garden in the majesty of manhood to bear such witness to His truth, to live in death so fine a life, that He becomes the light in darkness of every age, and the deathless hope of a dying world.” 

God the Son entered into human suffering in order that we may find him there, and be given the divine life, the grace, the strength, to heroically endure. And of course he gives us his very self, his body, blood, soul and divinity under the ordinary, mundane appearance of a wafer of bread. The Eucharist is our strength, and I have to say that the greatest gift I’ve been given in my entire 32 and a half years of teaching high school was that in every school I was at, there was a school chapel with the blessed sacrament. To be able to visit first thing in the morning, and to drop by for 30 seconds many times during the day and finally at the end of the day, was easily the source of strength that kept me from burnout and despair. 

The bitterness of the cross always ripens into a profound sweetness, because charity is sweet, and teaching is a work of charity, and the joy of heaven is an unimaginable sweetness and ecstasy that does not end. My spiritual director always quotes St. Augustine who said that God loves each one of us as if there is only one of us, as if you are the only being that exists to love. Each one of us has God’s undivided attention at every instant of the day. God can give us each that undivided attention because he is unlimited. No human being can come close to that–we’re too limited. But to discover that you are loved like that is to discover joy, and then life in the classroom becomes very different than what it was, because we bring that joy into the classroom every day with us, and when that happens, we will give our students a network of subconscious memories that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. 

I think Father Michael McGivney is really a microcosmic symbol of hope, hope for a united humanity, a universal fraternity. It’s a microcosmic instance of what this world can look like and should look like and probably will look like in the future–the very distant future, given the lessons that human beings still have yet to learn. And I believe this vision of a united fraternity is at the root of Pope John XXIII’s vision of the Church in the modern world, not a closed society rooted in fear with culture warriors in defensive posture at every corner, but an Open Church, open to the world, open to dialogue with the world, and open to change and reform. This is a vision that Pope Francis understands well.

Pray to Want, not to Know

Deacon Doug McManaman

“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your foot causes you to sin, cut it off, and if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out.” 

The hand, the foot, and the eye; all three are very dear to us, and to lose even one of them can make life very difficult. So, something very dear to us, it could be a job or someone we love, symbolized by the hand, by which we feed ourselves, can snare us in sin, and so we are feeding on something that is spiritually poisonous. And then the foot, something also very dear to us and so much a part of who we are, can symbolize a mentor perhaps, or an organization to which we belong, and which provides us with some direction, but can lead us into darkness and to our own eventual destruction. Finally our eyes, the most precious of the five senses, can blind us and thereby cause us to walk right into a pit. This can refer to a certain mode of thinking, a set of ideas that we might have embraced when we were young and which feels illuminating, but will in fact lead us astray. 

Because they are precious and feel so much a part of who we are, they are very hard to eradicate. In fact, it is difficult to become aware of their destructive nature. So, we can say “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off”, but we don’t always see clearly what is sinful and destructive, and the reason is that very often we don’t want to see it. There’s that old expression: “There are none so blind as those who will not see”. We don’t see it because we simply don’t want to see it, which is a kind of self-deception. I’m as guilty of that as anyone in this Church. We see this even in the hierarchy, made up of human beings; just consider the history of the Church, the sinfulness and blindness of the Church reeks from the pages of history. How do we explain the blood shed, the bigotry, the Church’s tolerance and defense of slavery, or the death penalty, or the buying and selling of Church offices, and much more? There are all sorts of factors involved, from plain ignorance, weakness, to willful blindness. Try convincing a person that something is a sin who just does not want to see it. It’s not going to happen. So how do we get out of this difficulty? Sin blinds, and so although I want to eradicate sin in my life, I don’t always see what is genuinely sinful, because of ignorance or worse, my own willful blindness. 

The one way out of this difficulty is to pray to want to see what God wants me to see. It’s very difficult to know what God wants me to see, just as it is difficult to know what God wants me to do in a particular situation. I remember in my final years of teaching, I said to my spiritual director: “I don’t know what I should do. I can retire, but I don’t know if God wants me to retire or to keep teaching. How do I find out?” He said: “Don’t try to figure out what God wants you to do, you’re not going to be able to know that, there’s a myriad of possible avenues you could take. Instead, pray to want to do what God wants you to do”. That’s a very different prayer: “Let me want to do what you want me to do”. If we are open and God answers that prayer, He will mold the heart, dispose it in a certain direction through grace, and we will eventually want to do what He wants us to do. It is the same thing with sin. This is important because we can be our own worst enemy, even the most religiously pious among us. Some of the most religiously devout people can go through their whole lives without ever moving past the immaturity and vices they’ve had since their younger days, whether that’s a matter of envy, or personal pride, a condescending spirit, or greed, lying, bigotry, the inordinate love of security, jealousies, abuse of authority, vindictiveness, looking at others with contempt, indifference to the poor and the suffering, etc. Piety does not guarantee that one will be freed from the snares of self-deception, and neither does ordination.

So, the way out of this darkness is to pray, asking God to help us want to see what up to this point we simply did not want to see, and to give us the courage to endure the pain of that vision. The result will certainly be painful, difficult at first, because it will be a death, and death is always painful, but it is an entering into the tomb of Christ, and the good news is that the tomb is empty. Christ rose. The result of this will be a new life, a resurrected life with a much deeper joy. We will begin to see the hell we lived in up to that point, sort of like Ebeneezer Scrooge after he woke up from his ordeal. Life on the outside did not change at all, but he changed, and the result was a joyful existence from that point onwards, as opposed to the miserable and blind existence he led before, which was spawned by his own avarice, arrogance, and lack of generosity. He acquired a sense of humor and referred to himself as a blind fool, weighed down by the chains of greed and indifference, like his partner in business, Jacob Marley. He could see it now. His eyes were restored. 

Archbishop Fulton Sheen of New York used to say that heaven and hell begin here; we create that heaven or hell for ourselves, and it really boils down to love of others. The greater our refusal to exit ourselves so that we remain the center of our own lives, the more we will be weighed down in misery, in our own hell, and the sad thing is we won’t really understand that it is a miserable hell, until we are on the outside. But the more we transcend ourselves in a self-forgetting exit of self in a genuine love of others, the greater will be the joy in which we live.