Women lectors and Mesiter Eckhart
Edit, edit, edit :)
- here's a YouTube of Fr. Paul Coutinho SJ talking about some of the ideas in his book, How Big Is Your God?
The last part of the book-group sharing at Creighton University's Daily Reflection page is just in, and we're done with the book, How Big Is Your God? by Jesuit Paul Coutinho. There were a lot of things I disagreed with in the book, but also many I liked. One chapter I found especially interesting talked about the difference between having a personal relationship with God and "practicing religion", and used the analogy of a river and a well.
What brings this to mind today is a post I saw at dotCommonweal about the possibility of an official role for women lectors - NEWS FLASH: Pope may allow women lectors!. I'm under-whelmed. Lately I've been more and more discouraged about being Catholic. I seem to disagree with so much and sometimes it's hard to remember what the whole thing is all about - not the perpetuation of an institution but a relationship. OK, yeah, not just a relationship with Jesus/God, but with our neighbor too, but how did we get from "community" to an infallible hierarchy that demands the submission of will and intellect?
Anyway, enough ranting :) Here's a little bit of what Fr. Coutinho wrote in that chapter I mentioned above .....
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[...] Meister Eckhart, the great medieval mystic, believed that everyone needs religion as a well to take them to the river of God's love and divine life. This is a wonderful analogy. Wells are fed by rivers of life-giving water, but how often the well - and not the water it can provide - becomes the goal of our lives. Since we are seeking a big God, let's ask ourselves: has the well become the goal of our lives?
It often does. We fortify our well; we decorate it and adorn it with elaborate and beautiful liturgies; we say, "Look at our well. Look at what we've done and how wonderful it is." And we are never taken to the river. The purpose of the well is to take us to the river. The river gives us freedom and salvation. Everyone needs religion, yes. Religion is a means to freedom, but it is not an end in itself. Religion helps us find the river of life and the river of freedom, and it's in the river that we experience the love of God and divine life. A question we must ask ourselves is once we find the river, once we are experiencing the divine love, do we still need the well? Once Paul found the river in his Damascus experience, did he still need the Mosaic law?
Many of us settle for the comfort and security of the well without realizing that the river exists ...... When the Lord comes, he will ask, "Did you know me?" "Have you seen the face of God?" "Have you experienced the Divine?" Did you see the river, or were you so lost in the well that it became an obstacle rather than a pathway to the river? ......
********************
- here's a YouTube of Fr. Paul Coutinho SJ talking about some of the ideas in his book, How Big Is Your God?
The last part of the book-group sharing at Creighton University's Daily Reflection page is just in, and we're done with the book, How Big Is Your God? by Jesuit Paul Coutinho. There were a lot of things I disagreed with in the book, but also many I liked. One chapter I found especially interesting talked about the difference between having a personal relationship with God and "practicing religion", and used the analogy of a river and a well.
What brings this to mind today is a post I saw at dotCommonweal about the possibility of an official role for women lectors - NEWS FLASH: Pope may allow women lectors!. I'm under-whelmed. Lately I've been more and more discouraged about being Catholic. I seem to disagree with so much and sometimes it's hard to remember what the whole thing is all about - not the perpetuation of an institution but a relationship. OK, yeah, not just a relationship with Jesus/God, but with our neighbor too, but how did we get from "community" to an infallible hierarchy that demands the submission of will and intellect?
Anyway, enough ranting :) Here's a little bit of what Fr. Coutinho wrote in that chapter I mentioned above .....
*****************
[...] Meister Eckhart, the great medieval mystic, believed that everyone needs religion as a well to take them to the river of God's love and divine life. This is a wonderful analogy. Wells are fed by rivers of life-giving water, but how often the well - and not the water it can provide - becomes the goal of our lives. Since we are seeking a big God, let's ask ourselves: has the well become the goal of our lives?
It often does. We fortify our well; we decorate it and adorn it with elaborate and beautiful liturgies; we say, "Look at our well. Look at what we've done and how wonderful it is." And we are never taken to the river. The purpose of the well is to take us to the river. The river gives us freedom and salvation. Everyone needs religion, yes. Religion is a means to freedom, but it is not an end in itself. Religion helps us find the river of life and the river of freedom, and it's in the river that we experience the love of God and divine life. A question we must ask ourselves is once we find the river, once we are experiencing the divine love, do we still need the well? Once Paul found the river in his Damascus experience, did he still need the Mosaic law?
Many of us settle for the comfort and security of the well without realizing that the river exists ...... When the Lord comes, he will ask, "Did you know me?" "Have you seen the face of God?" "Have you experienced the Divine?" Did you see the river, or were you so lost in the well that it became an obstacle rather than a pathway to the river? ......
********************
posted by crystal | 1:19 PM
5 Comments:
Crystal,
but how did we get from "community" to an infallible hierarchy that demands the submission of will and intellect?
Authority is something that has always been an issue. The authority of man over the earth, in Genesis, the authority of judges and then kings over the people of Israel, the authority of fathers and mothers over their children, the authority of Caesar, and on and on. I think if you notice, the Bible is clear that all authority ultimately comes from and belongs to God, but that he regularly intends for some people to have authority over others. In fact, there isn't really anyone who gets to live their life without some sort of authority over them; at the very least, all of us are meant to submit ourselves to our parents as children.
And I think there is a reason for this. Submitting to human authorities gives us practice that helps us submit to divine authority. It's like a smaller version of the choice that ultimately saves us. (Not to be confused with that choice, but still good practice for it).
So I think expecting a community, a group of people, to be without authority would be unnatural and unbeneficial in God's eyes.
There's also lots of biblical evidence for the role of authority in the early church, if you are interested.
Of course, authority comes with responsibility, and many wield their authority badly, even within the church.
The infallibility of the Church is just the icing on the cake of authority. It offers the smallest of protections to the one expected to submit; at least there is some guarantee of submitting to truth instead of error, and even that is limited.
The American ideal of people spontaneously coming together in democratic unity isn't realizable in this life and may not even be God's plan for the next. In the meantime, God works authority into just about every aspect of our workings together.
Does that help at all, or does that just sound like nonsense? :)
God bless,
Anna
Anna,
I hate authority - there, I said it :) My parents were good examples of bad authorities ,and now as soon as someone tells me to do something, I want to do the opposite :)
I just can't make myself believe in an infallible hierarchy - people are only human and make mistakes, and people in authority make mistakes that affect others besides themselves.
I think it is actually do-able to have people come together without authority, although it may be messy .... the Quakers don't have an authority in their denomination and seem to be doing ok.
But I think I do understand what you're saying. This is one of those cases where my personal baggage tends to influence me, I guess.
Crystal,
So let's see how brief I can be in responding. I've written out a response to this a couple times already, only to be interrupted and unable to finish it. Usually I get briefer on re-writings, but we'll see. :)
First some comments on the idea of authority. For one, I'm not so sure that the Quakers actually don't end up with a practicing hierarchy, if they don't have a formal one. (googling "Quaker hierarchy" seems to produce a variety of ideas). Does it bother you if the Bible doesn't seem to hold equality of authority up as an ideal even for Christian communities or the afterlife? Even the small groups I have been in with no explicit leadership, or rotating leadership, seem to have people emerge as natural leaders; this is part of the reason I say I think authority is built into being human.
As for infallibility, it hardly means that people in authority don't make mistakes. When it comes down to it, infallibility in the Church is so thin of a protection that virtually every particular statement or action by any leader can still be a mistake. Even when something is infallibly defined, infallibility only protects the truth of the definition; it can still be a mistake for the Church to have made the declaration at that time or in the manner it did.
One of the things about humans is that God likes to relate to us both as individuals and as a whole people. He related to the Jews as a people, and now he relates to the Church as a people, too. By using other humans to bring his goodness into the world, instead of giving everything to us directly from him, he draws us not only closer to him, but also closer to each other.
That is why I think that infallibility and authority in the Church are good for us. Infallibility is God's way of giving us humans a good thing - his Truth - through each other. It draws us closer to each other. All Catholics are drawn closer to their leadership by relying on them even a little bit for the truth. Bishops themselves are drawn closer to each other because they aren't infallible by themselves; their authority together is greater than their authority by themselves.
Now, local bishops councils like the U.S. bishops aren't infallible. But I have noticed that when they get together to produce a document on a difficult subject, it ends up being head and shoulders above other writings I've seen. You may not agree with everything the bishops writing in their document on homosexuality, but isn't it better than what gets said by individual people defending Church teaching? I was particularly impressed when they explained, "It is crucially important to understand that saying a person has a particular inclination that is disordered is not to say that the person as a whole is disordered. Nor does it mean that one has been rejected by God or the Church." That was a point that most people leave out of their discussions of homosexuality.
And on voting, too. Have you ever read Faithful Citizenship? It does something I almost never see when listening to Catholics talk about how to vote: it emphasizes the importance of the right to life without drawing the conclusion that you simply can't ever vote for a pro-choice politician.
To me, these are examples of how when the bishops work together to produce something, instead of acting on their own, God uses his Spirit to bring them closer to the truth than they could on their own. And even the Church doesn't claim infallibility on that level. Does that make sense?
Now I want to address something you said, apart from the issue of authority. You've mentioned personal issues in relation to both authority and suffering now. And I wanted to share that personal baggage doesn't have to stay burdensome. God can take those burdens away, heal us from the wounds that people (usually loved ones) have left us with.
My ideas on this come originally from a book called Waking the Dead, by John Eldredge. But I have experienced the healing power of God in my own life, too, so I wanted to offer this as testimony. I'll give the gist of Eldredge's idea, since he mixes his idea up with personal experiences in a way that's hard to quote.
Some clues that you might need healing: a painful memory keeps popping up in your mind; a situation from earlier in your life seems to be replaying itself in a new setting; it feels like there's a little child in you; "Anytime someone says, "I feel like there's this part of me ...," my radar lights up." (Eldredge)
When you think you need healing, find some quiet time to be alone with God; let yourself relive the memories that are painful. Ask God for healing; give him authority over your life; give him permission to heal you, for he won't if you don't. Listen for his voice in your heart, and go where he leads you. He may offer comforting words, he may show us something we need to repent of, he may reveal something to us we didn't consciously realize, there may be spiritual warfare involved.
Here's my own story: I have an almost-two-month-old son, Gabe. He's my fourth, and I had epidurals with my first three births. I never felt quite satisfied with the decisions to do so, but lacked the resolve to try an epidural-less birth. Over the last year or so I've been learning how to hear God's voice much better, so this time around I asked him to make it very clear to me whether he wanted me to have an epidural or not. At one point I was even near tears thinking about the whole thing, and suddenly experienced what felt like a little child's voice inside me saying "Do you still love me, God?" (As in, do you love me despite the fact that I had had epidurals). It shocked me; I didn't realize that that was how I felt.
And then over the course of a few weeks, I realized that there was a memory from my childhood that usually surfaced whenever I thought about my own ability to handle pain. So one day I went into my bedroom and locked the door. I relived the event over a few times, letting the pain well up and letting all the thoughts that I was used to shoving down, that I didn't even let myself believe were there, come out in the open.
I was in fourth grade or so at the time. I tripped on a ball just as recess was ending and skinned my knee. It hurt badly and was bleeding, but I didn't really know what to do about it. I went to class, and my teacher asked or suggested that I go to the girl's bathroom and clean it off. So I went there, but I didn't know how to clean it off. It hurt too much for me to be willing to wipe it with a wet paper towel, and I couldn't reach my knee into the sink to run water over it. So, in pain and confused and alone, I sat on the bathroom floor, probably crying. And then I prayed. I had the faith of a child; I asked Jesus to walk through the door and touch my knee and heal it. I remember expecting to see him walk through the door. He didn't.
Years later, thinking about this, it was like the pain was still fresh, and I'm pretty sure I was crying. In remembering this, and asking God for healing of this memory, it felt like he was telling me that he was there in the bathroom with me. But this didn't satisfy me; I wanted to know why he didn't heal me and take away the pain. Again, he told me that he was there with me in the bathroom. And then I thought about what he was saying and it was like a light went on. It was never about the pain, for me. It was about the abandonment. I'd been as good as abandoned by the adults who should have been taking care of me when I didn't know how. It wasn't that Jesus hadn't healed me that made the memory so painful; it was that he hadn't walked through the door when I expected him to. So when God told me that he was there with me, though I could not see him, that was what I needed to hear. And when I let myself believe it, it brought me the healing I needed.
I'm not sure if I can convey just how emotional a thing this was for me. I told this story to my prayer group after it happened, and I was crying 10 words into it, and through the whole thing. That was a couple months ago, and even just writing the story out now I find I have a lump in my throat. I can still vividly remember what happened to me as a child, but the pain associated with the memory is gone. God's healing has made my life now freer in a way I never expected.
So, obviously I recommend this approach. :) I think, anytime you think you are dealing with personal baggage issues, it might be worth looking into, for the sake of being made whole and free of the weight of those burdens.
God bless,
Anna
Anna,
Hi. Thanks for the response. BTW, I ended up deleting that other post on which you commented, but I appreciated your comment :)
When I think of authority in the Bible, I guess I think of Jesus, who seemed to find fault with the religious authorities of his time.
All Catholics are drawn closer to their leadership by relying on them even a little bit for the truth.
I do feel this in partucular circumstances - I respect priests that I know and ask them for help when I don't understand stuff. I guess I just don't automatically trust or respect leadership.
That is an important distinction, about the difference between homosexual acts and homosexual persons. But in the Vatican document I mentioned in the post I deleted, that guy said that it didn't matter that a homosexual priest was celibate and chaste, only that he was homsexual. He did away with that distinction.
No, I haven't read Fiathful Citizenship. Thanks for the link.
Thanks for telling me about your experience. I think I understand how abandoned you felt when Jesus didn't come and be with you. I think in a way I now feel the same as you once did,.
I wasn't raised in a religion, so when I was a kid, I didn't talk to Jesus or expect him to help.
My parents were divorced when I was about 3. Then my mom remarried when I was 5, and my stepfather sexually abused me. When I graduated from college with a dgree in art, I found out I had a degenerative eye disease. Later my husband of one year had an affair and left me. I thought God had it in for me if he even existed at all.
Now that I think God (probably :) does exist and I do talk to Jesus, my main problem is that I don't et why he doesn't intervene to actually help. I try to accept that he is my friend therough the bad times, even if he doesn't fix them, but I have a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that if he really cared, he'd help.
It's something I've been working on since I started believing - don't know if I'll even feel quite right about it. Thanks for sharing what happened to you and what you learned from it :)
Crystal,
Jesus did find fault with the religious authorities of his time, yes. And if someone is suggesting that it is Catholic teaching that you are supposed to automatically trust Catholic leadership, don't believe them.
Authority isn't primarily about trust; it's mainly about obedience. I think we have an obligation to obey any order given by someone in authority over us, if it does not violate our conscience to do so. But that doesn't mean that we have to trust our leadership and never question anything they do.
Now, I do think there is something to be said for respecting leadership. On one level, Jesus calls us to treat everyone, even the vilest criminal, with a kind of radical respect. This certainly applies to those in authority over us as well. Besides that, I think maybe that we are supposed to give the benefit of the doubt a little more easily or quickly to those in authority, that we should be a little less willing to speak out publicly against them than we would to someone else. This is how I understand the Biblical calls for respecting leadership and not giving them a hard time.
But giving authorities the benefit of the doubt (when there may be things you don't know that justify certain actions) doesn't mean we should avoid criticizing authorities when it is clear to us that they are wrong. Jesus certainly modeled that, being quite vocal in his complaints against the attitudes of the Pharisees and scribes. Various saints throughout history have also been known for getting after bishops or popes when they go wrong. So we have strong examples along those lines.
As for a biblical take on authority, there are Bible passages that make it clear that authority is part of the spiritual order of things, passages that urge us to submit to civil authorites, passages that show that authority is meant to be part of the Church set-up, passages that warn against rejecting authority, and even passages that mention authority that some will have after the Second Coming.
One key passage relating to authority in the Church is Luke 22:25-30, where Jesus makes it clear that Church authorities are to be humble in their leadership, seeking the good of those they lead instead of their own. But even as he warns the apostles about how they exercise their authority, he gives that authority to them, conferring on them a kingdom and the leadership of judges. (You may recall in the OT that Israel was led by judges until the people demanded a king, something God warned them against.)
Ok, moving on. Sort of. :)
But in the Vatican document I mentioned in the post I deleted, that guy said that it didn't matter that a homosexual priest was celibate and chaste, only that he was homsexual. He did away with that distinction.
Sort of. As I understand what he was getting at, he wasn't trying to imply that chaste homosexuals were somehow sinning just by being themselves, he was just saying they shouldn't be priests (for the same reason, perhaps, that a kleptomaniac ought not to be a priest, even if he has controlled his desire to steal, if you buy that kind of logic).
More importantly, that was just one official's opinion. Lots of individual priests and bishops will give their opinions on various matters. You don't have to agree with everything that comes from someone in the Vatican. They don't even always agree with each other; for example, I have heard one theologian say that using condoms is intrinsically evil, so that a married couple cannot use them even if one of the couple has HIV; and I have heard a Cardinal say that such a couple could use condoms legitimately according to the principle of double effect.
Here's the tests I try to use: Aside from the general rules that apply to the whole church, the Church hierarchy doesn't really give a lot of orders these days, mostly just suggestions (sometimes very strongly stated "suggestions"). If a suggestion comes from my priest, my bishop, or the pope (who are the only Church hierarchy who are actually in authority over me), then I try to do it, depending somewhat on how strong of a suggestion it was, and how much I think I ought to do it. If one of those three gave me an actual order, I would try to do it unless I thought it was a sin/wrong to do so.
If someone in the Church hierarchy says something I disagree with, I usually ignore it. (But I admit part of the reason I feel free to do this is because I have learned enough about Church teaching to have a pretty clear idea in my head when someone is teaching doctrine and when they are giving their own judgments). If something someone said that I disagreed with comes up in conversation, I make an effort to be respectful towards the official I disagree with, trying to see and represent their side of the argument as well as my own.
That is the kind of respect and submission that I think the Church asks of us. It is not the kind of absolute submission that is due only to God; it is not absolute agreement with everything someone in the hierarchy says or does; and it doesn't mean we can't chew them out when they need it. Does that make any sense?
but I have a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that if he really cared, he'd help.
I'm pretty sure everyone feels this way some of the time. I certainly have. And when it comes down to it, I can't really say why God let you be hurt in the way you have. This is what I can say ...
... I think it has something to do with God's radical respect for our free will and the authority over ourselves and our lives and each other that he has given us ... but that's not always satisfying by itself.
... And I think that it is good to know that all the bad things in your life don't come from God, even though he allows them. They come from Satan, who hates you. There really is someone out to get you. An Enemy, an Accuser, who will do everything and tell you any lies to keep you miserable and destroy any spark of happiness in your life. (But Jesus came to rescue you from him.)
... And, in the end, I think knowing why God allows any given evil to happen to you would require understanding the whole universe. (I think that's why, when Job asks God why God allowed him to suffer, God's reply is along the lines of "Were you there when I made everything? Do you know how big the earth is or how a whale is put together?")
So I can't really tell you why God let you suffer. But I know he loves you, more than you can imagine. And more than that, I know that he wants to heal you of the wounds that you still have from all those painful experiences in your life. He wants to heal you; let him. Go to him for healing; seek him out and he will come to you. Take your anger and hurt and distrust to him; trust me, he can handle it. And he doesn't want you to bear it alone. What happened to me was minor compared to what has happened to you; if God took the time to heal me of even this minor issue in my life, how much more must he be eager to heal you. (Although, as a practical matter, it might help if you dealt with one issue at a time... :) ).
God bless,
Anna
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