ECUMENISM AND POPE FRANCIS

Chapel Talk, Bethany College, April 20, 2016

 Since I am a Catholic, I thought it would be good to speak a bit about Pope Francis and his ecumenical endeavors.  I am not concerned so much about praising the man, though I do admit to admiring him, but about looking at the relevance and importance of ecumenism.

I wanted to begin by pointing to an important distinction whose relevance may become clearer by the end of my talk today.  That is the distinction between ecumenism and interfaith dialogue.  Ecumenism is the discussion within the household of Christians; the term derives from  Greek οἰκουμένη , which means “the whole inhabited world”.  Or more precisely, the entirety of the household of Christians (in this case).  We sometimes forget the metaphor of God’s church as a household, as a building in which resides a family.  This is the root meaning of oikos in the New Testament. 

Does ecumenical work involve Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and others?  No, traditionally ecumenism is among Christians.  Interfaith endeavors of one kind or another are thought to be different by nature because the commonality of God’s household is not that inclusive.

One more point before I look at Francis work:  ecumenism is not universally loved by Christians.  Every denomination tends at some point to be exclusivist, and at some point its members may become antagonistic to efforts to build bridges to other groups, especially if it is perceived that essential beliefs are thought to be compromised. 

Ecumenism can be weakened not just be its enemies, but by those who say that all denominations are the same, that differences don’t amount to anything important.  If that is true, then it is really pointless to engage in ecumenical discussion because there is no need to build bridges.  Christianity is one big bowl of jello where each group is indistinguishable from the next.

Pope Francis, like all popes, defends the heart of Catholic teaching.  He has consistently refused to modernize doctrines.  His approach to ecumenism has been distinctively different, because he has not focused primarily on doctrines, but on other issues.

If we take a look at his various major ecumenical meetings in the last few years we can get a glimpse of this.

In May of 2014, Pope Francis became only the fourth pontiff to visit the Holy Land.  It was, as he said, a pilgrimage of prayer.  Among the highlights of that trip was his meeting with the head of 300 million Greek Orthodox Christians, Bartholomew I Patriarch of Constantinople.  The significance of such a meeting cannot be underestimated.  The two communities had mutually excommunicated each other in 1054, and ensuing crusades did not endear the European Christians to the Greek Christians, since, among other things, the Europeans killed thousands of Greek Christians along with Muslims in the effort to retake Jerusalem. 

The theological issues involved had already been studied for a number of years prior to this, and the mutual excommunication had been lifted in 1965.  Nevertheless, full unity remains in the future.  The document published by Francis and Bartholomew speaks intensely of the desire to restore intercommunion at the Eucharist, and one gets the impression that this may come sooner rather than later.

But Francis and Bartholomew also had other issues to discuss, notably the growing persecution of Christians in the Middle East, and the impact of climate change on the world and especially the poor.  Bartholomew has been a champion of environmental issues for many years, and Francis would publish his own encyclical on care for creation only a year after his meeting with Bartholomew.

The issue of persecution of Christians came up when Francis, nearly a year before this meeting with Bartholomew, became only the second Catholic Pope to have met with the other “Pope”, Pope Tawadros, Patriarch of Coptic Christianity.  In that meeting, the two Popes emphasized their common belief in baptism, and their hope to overcome various theological differences, so that in time they would be able to take the wine together at a Eucharist. 

Two years later in Feb. 2015, Pope Francis again made mention of Egyptian Coptic Christians.  He prayed for “our brother Copts, whose throats were slit for the sole reason of being Christian, that the Lord welcome them as martyrs….”   It was also with respect to the murder of Coptic Christians that Pope Francis made this unusual comment:

The blood of our Christian brothers and sisters is a testimony which cries out to be heard…It makes no difference whether they be Catholics, Orthodox, Copts or Protestants. They are Christians! Their blood is one and the same. Their blood confesses Christ.

Perhaps the most distinctive ecumenical action taken by Pope Francis was his recent meeting with Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, the first such meeting in history.  Although the Greek Orthodox Church has been on friendly terms with Roman Catholicism, the Russian Orthodox Church has not been.  In part this is because of the growing unity between the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church.  This is so much the case that Vladimir Putin has often claimed that the religious shield of Russia is the Orthodox Church.  And that in turn has been helpful to Putin in the conflict over the Ukraine, which has within it both orthodox churches beholden to Russia and to Greece, as well as a uniate Orthodox church beholden to Rome. 

Pope Francis was criticized even in advance of his meeting with Kirill, which took place at the Havana, Cuba, airport.  The concern was that the Pope was not so subtly giving credence to Putin’s imperialism in Ukraine.   But Francis’ vision transcended the political dimensions of this meeting.  The statement that was issued by the two religious leaders affirmed their common heritage from the first thousand years of Christian history, insisting that the command of unity from Jesus was the basis on which the churches recognized one another, and appealing for greater cooperation between the churches, especially in Ukraine and Russia.  No doctrinal issues were addressed. 

The next important development in Pope Francis’ ecumenical endeavors will be a trip to Lund, Sweden in late October, to pray with the leaders of the World Lutheran Federation in commemorating the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation in 2017.  During the Oct. 31 visit to Lund, in southern Sweden, the pope will take part in a joint ceremony of the Catholic Church and the World Lutheran Federation.  I have met with representatives of both Messiah and Bethany Lutheran, and we are hoping to initiate a dialogue on Lutheran Cattholic rrelations in advance of the meeting in Sweden.  We are still working out the details, but an announcement will be forthcoming.

At a service for Church unity in January of this year, Pope Francis said: “I want to ask for mercy and forgiveness for the behavior of Catholics towards Christians of other churches which has not reflected gospel values.  “We cannot erase what happened before, but we do not want to allow the weight of past wounds to continue to contaminate our relations.” 

There has already been work by both Catholic and Lutheran theologians on one of the largest of the theological issues from the Reformation, one raised by Luther himself; namely the notion of justification by faith alone, and more generally the relation between faith and grace.  An agreement from 1999 was published which essentially resolved the heart of the conflict for both Lutherans and Catholics.  In 2006 the World Methodist Council also agreed to this document.

All this was in the air before Francis became Pope.  Typically, he has not spoken of the theological issues as much as he has of the sins of past generations—sins which included animosity on both sides, and an obvious lack of Christian charity.  In fact, the aftermath of the split between Catholicism and Protestantism was the Thirty Years War of the 17^th century.  Protestants and Catholics killed one another with abandon, such that the population of both Germany and Italy, in particular, were severely reduced.  While this was the last war between the two groups, elements of it still survive: the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Island.  And while war is not a major issue these days here in the U.S., I am just old enough to remember the paranoia that emerged in the U.S. when John Kennedy ran for President in 1960.  The U.S. was a Protestant nation, and Kennedy, it was feared, would become a lackey for the Roman papacy.

In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and its decree on Ecumenism (1964), as well as other statements from that time, a great amount of ecumenical work was inaugurated.  Pope Francis inherited all that. 

But his focus has not been primarily on doctrinal issues.  When he spoke about meeting with Lutherans in October, his words reflected the need to ask for forgiveness.  The break between the divisions of Christianity have never been simply intellectual affairs.  They have almost always produced violence, hatred, animosity, and contempt.  Mending fences is not possible by putting a group of theologians together in a room and asking them to come up with a document that will please everyone.  Mending fences begins with an acknowledgement of the sins committed by previous generations, and a humble admission of guilt. 

Pope Francis’ ecumenical endeavors have also sought to build unity among Christians by addressing common challenges.  Thus, the declaration that he and Bartholomew signed included an important emphasis on care of God’s creation, an issue that Francis cares as deeply about as Bartholomew.  And the declaration with Patriarch Kirill focused  on the growth of Christianity in Cuba and South America, and on a variety of other issues.

In short, ecumenical work involves focusing not just on theological differences, but on a more forward-looking agenda of issues both moral and religious.  To put it another way: ecumenism is not just about beliefs and past differences over them, but also about common concerns today, especially on moral and ethical issues.

There is another vision of ecumenical unity that Francis has mentioned as well, a concern that arises from the current crisis of Christians in the Middle East and Africa: namely, the persecution of Christians by the Islamic cult called ISIS and Boko Haram and other such groups.  In an interview relating to the Coptic Church Francis made the following statement:  For me, ecumenism is a priority. Today, we have the ecumenism of blood. In some countries they kill Christians because they wear a cross or have a Bible, and before killing them they don’t ask if they’re Anglicans, Lutherans, Catholics or Orthodox. The blood is mixed.

In speaking of martyrdom, and in forging new relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, Pope Francis has touched on the implications of ecumenism for political realities.  When Christianity becomes closely allied with the nation-state, it brings with it a number of political headaches, as the Russian and Ukrainian churches know well.  To some extent Pope Francis has seemed to want to make a gentle impact on the alliance of church and state, reminding all of the true message of Christianity.  In the case of ISIS, the problems deepen because of the group’s ties with Islam.  But ISIS is a political phenomenon not unrelated to world politics in the last five years and more. 

In the face of the ecumenical unity forged by the wanton murder of Christians by members of ISIS, interfaith dialogue with other religions becomes important and indispensable.  Such dialogue triangulates the relation between Christianity and Islam over against ISIS and its claim to represent all of Islam.  Such dialogue is not easy and criticism from all sides is not wanting.

Pope Francis visited the historic Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, removed his shoes before entering, stood next to the Grand Mufti Rahim Yarran, facing Mecca, and bowed his head in prayer for some time.  It is not surprising that some Christians and conservative Catholics found this horrifying.

This is interfaith dialogue, not ecumenical relations.  My point is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the two in practice.

To return to the ecumenical side of the question: The foundation of all ecumenical endeavors is the prayer of Jesus that “all may be one, as I am in the Father”.  That unity is most fundamentally a unity of love, not simply of a set of beliefs.  Beliefs are important, but they are not everything.  Religious diversity has been a feature of Christianity from its beginning—think only of the difference between the communities under John, James, and others, each of which had its own distinctive preoccupations.  Diversity is not an evil thing necessarily.  In his address to the U.S. Congress, Pope Francis said: In this land, the various religious denominations have greatly contributed to building and strengthening society.

Even though diversity in itself is not an evil, there are all too many times when religious diversity hides contempt, anger, hostility, and bursts forth occasionally into violence.  That is why I chose the parable of the Good Samaritan for the reading today.  It might seem that that parable is far afield from the subject.  But it is entirely apt when we consider its central character: The Samaritan.  We are a bit used to think of the Samaritan as someone from Samaria, which is true enough.  But Samaria was the geographic location of a people who were heretical and schismatic, who accepted only the Torah and none of the rest of Scripture.  They were always looked down upon by proper Israelites.  The parable of the good Samaritan is accordingly a parable about how God’s grace is sometimes better seen in the actions of a detested religious group than in the authorities of the Jewish religion. 

That remarkable parable is a reminder that God’s grace may appear in the work of others we don’t like or don’t respect.  And when faced with that, we need to ask God’s forgiveness for our own sins of hasty and insensitive judgments of those whose beliefs we do not accept.

My concluding prayer is simple: Lord, that we may all be one in you, in love, in respect, and in humility.

Gene Bales

 

 

 

Some Reflections on the Current Priest-Pedophile Crisis

Last night I came to the end of a book I have been reading rather feverishly.  The book is Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal by Michael D’Antonio (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).  It is wonderfully well written, not unlike And the Band Played On, which happens to cover much of the same time period.  D’Antonio lays out the emergence of the priest pedophile crisis in the public eye and in the courts, with much emphasis on the U.S., but also encapsulating developments around the world, especially in Ireland where the impact has been very strong.  It is a wide ranging history, with a solid vision of the issues at stake.  By and large I think he was fair in his treatment of individuals, though they might not think so.

It led me to take a look at BishopAccountability.org, a web site set up which, among other things, lists every priest, bishop, and nun who has been accused of pedophilia or a cover-up here in the U.S.  I had hesitated to look at it for fear of who I would find.  I had spent a lot of my life at Conception Seminary College, run by the Benedictine Abbey, in northwest Missouri–first as a student in college and theology (1964-69), then as a faculty member teaching philosophy (1976-1991).

In my time there, I knew of only one person–a monk– who had a problem with a young boy.  The monk was originally a student of mine, then a colleague and fellow teacher.  He left the Abbey in a hurry after this incident with a boy in a boys’ choir.  I knew the incident was sexual, but I did not know, and still don’t know exactly, what happened.  The Abbot at the time has been accused of ignoring evidence of this individual’s proclivities from a previous Benedictine Abbey.  The previous Abbot’s day in court is yet to come.  The monk is home free because of the statute of limitations.

A third person–a monk of some standing– accused of molesting a young relative was someone who had played a very large and important role in my education.  Even though I and others were aware that he lacked a sense of appropriate sexual boundaries, he was such an unusual person in some ways that certainly I did not draw any immediate conclusions about his actual behaviors.  It was a shock to read only a year ago or so that he had been charged with molestation sometime when I was teaching at Conception.  I was shocked because he was then my colleague and eventually President-Rector of the seminary.

A few other individuals–classmates from my time as a student at Conception– I knew had been charged with child molestation, but when I checked out the Accountability website, I discovered that there were more than a few.  Two of the many came from the Joliet Illinois diocese, and they first came to Conception in their first year of theology, which was my last year there as a student.  While I liked both of them–they were lively and humorous and outgoing–I had no clue that they would become child molesters.  Indeed, one of them was thought both by me and others to be “good material” for bishop–even then he had the “aura” of a person with ecclesial authority.  He happens to be the one who was labelled one of the worst priest pedophiles in the country because of a history of repeat offenses, and his inability to control his behavior.

Some of those classmates from the Joliet diocese struck me even then as “full of themselves”.  What I mean is “full of their soon-to-be-priestly powers”.  At that time I was contemplating leaving seminary life because of the issue of celibacy.  To be specific, while it was clear enough that one might have a calling to be priest, I did not perceive that I had “calling” to be celibate.  i did eventually leave the seminary at the end of that year.

But what struck me then about other seminarians, and about the seminarians I taught in the 70’s and 80’s, was how much a calling to celibacy was discounted in favor of a calling to be a priest.  Being a priest gave an individual respect and deference from others, and for some Catholic seminarians this was clearly a draw, especially if their self esteem was particularly low (and I will posit without a lot of empirical proof that self esteem has been an issue for seminarians since the dawn of time).  Celibacy was no draw for seminarians looking for self esteem; indeed it made it vastly more complex and challenging.  What is it at issue here is just how important human physical intimacy is for self-esteem and for love of others.

By the late 80’s I had seen enough of individuals with stunted psychological growth to question why celibacy got so little attention from seminary authorities.  There was, as I recall, a little movement in that direction, but it always came off as “hey, let’s get somebody in here to talk about the joys of serving God as a celibate, maybe for an hour or two.”

If celibacy is legitimate and defensible, it cannot be easy, and I suspect most priests are not capable of it over a long term.  I do not condemn those who fall from grace in a consensual relation; but I do not have time for those who rape and abuse, and especially for those who argue “the child really enjoys the sex”.

Looking through all the cases against priests on the BishopAccountability.org website, one has the sense of looking at a vast field of tragedy, or rather, two overlapping tragedies.  The one tragedy, the most obvious, is the one which involves a huge number of victims, much larger than the number of priests and bishops on the site, since so many of the priests abused multiple and sometimes dozens of victims.

The second tragedy is the large number of bishops and heads of religious communities who all took the perspective that no priest should be turned over to the police for prosecution.  Because of the celibacy requirement, the number of priests is limited, and so bishops are very reluctant anyway to compromise the number of priests they have.  But there is another factor: the insistence on seeing child abuse as exclusively a moral issue to be dealt with internally to the Church, with the assumption that civilian and police authorities are to be kept out of the whole business.  “The Church is above the State” is the thinking that characterizes so many of the bishops.  Hardly any of them ever seem to have questioned this; indeed they all tacitly and without question accepted and embraced it.

Helping victims and their families is something that has been thoroughly compromised in all this.  Bishops are required to defend their monies and the wealth of their dioceses, and to that end only high-powered and ruthless lawyers will do.  The consequence is more agony for the victims.

I wish I could say that all this has not affected my good feelings about the church.  The truth is that it has.  I share the anger of victims, because I know from my loved ones the agony of abuse.

In the meantime the Church would do well to allow priests to marry.  It would do even better by integrating women into the hierarchy.  There is no reason at all, for example, why a woman could not be appointed a cardinal of the church.  Cardinals are not required to be ordained; they exist as advisors to the pope.  The presence of women in positions of authority in the church might do a lot to address the enormous problems it faces.

For the thousands of victims it is all too late.  Many have lost their faith; many are in treatment for depression; many suffer from post-traumatic syndrome; and not a few have committed suicide.

FREEDOM, POWER AND PEACE: A CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST INDIVIDUALISM

FREEDOM, POWER AND PEACE: A CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST INDIVIDUALISM.

My Spiritual Odyssey

Talk given to the Unitarian/Universalist Church, Salina, KS
July 22, 2012

I retired on June 30, but long before then many people wanted me to impart some last words of wisdom about myself at least. So I have spent the last several months doing something I don’t always enjoy doing, which is talking about myself. Today I will be adding another chapter to this autobiography.

But I fully realize too that an odyssey—especially a spiritual one—is never simply about oneself. Yes I am the subject of it, but the significance of what I have experienced—the elements of it—are things that others have experienced as well. Perhaps the only novelty is the particular combination of events has made the outcome unique.

1. Ghetto Catholicism and the Second Vatican Council

I am a product of ghetto Catholicism. I grew up very catholic, went to a catholic grade school, at the end of which, for reasons only Sigmund Freud would understand, I decided I wanted to be a priest. So I went to a high school seminary in Kansas City–St. John’s–which has long since closed its doors. I enjoyed the experience, though I’m not sure all others did. Only the prayer life was a bit oppressive. Musically, I became adept at singing medieval Gregorian chant, which was still used at that time. I can still do that, but my ability has not been in much demand.

One of the most interesting events in my life began to unfold while I was in high school seminary—the second Vatican council. Initially, I didn’t have much of a sense of how important it was, but a number of us who were upperclassmen at the time were pretty quickly enlisted in the project of translating all our communal daily prayers from Latin to English. We were pretty good at Latin by our third and fourth years, because we were required to take Latin every semester. I cannot tell you how revelatory it was to actually pray in English the words we had never quite understood in Latin. And I had participated in the project myself. In time, I came to appreciate the Second Vatican Council enormously, and do so especially now as many clergy and the Vatican have relegated it to the status of “less said the better”.

What the Vatican Council called for especially was reform, not for its own sake, but for the sake of making the word of God clearer to all. In part this was a dusting-up operation, but you can’t dust a house without getting to questions about why things are as they are. By the end of the 60’s Catholics had begun to raise all kinds of questions that only 15 years previously they wouldn’t have ever considered—new ethical questions, the role of women, married priests, ecumenical relations, and a host of other things. I understand the conservative reaction in some measure—the changes were overwhelming and were threatening to tear the church apart. They still are.

If Catholicism in my early years made me very sectarian and conservative, the second Vatican Council did exactly the opposite—it broadened my horizons and made me a convinced liberal on many issues. But one of the questions that germinated in my mind because of reforms was the connection between required celibacy for priests and ordination. Celibacy has been a requirement for priests since the middle ages. My problem was that while I thought I wanted to be a priest, I did not feel “called” to be celibate. I left the seminary after four years of college and a year of post-graduate work in theology, facing potential draft into the Vietnam war, which I also questioned on grounds of the just war theory—a question that hierarchy and many clergy did not experience too strongly, it seems . They would not stand behind my request for a conscientious objector status, because as a Catholic I had no grounds for being a pacifist. I turned to the Quakers for help, which I got. But then, the lottery came along, and my lottery number was 354. I would not be drafted unless the U.S. invaded the Soviet Union by land.

2. Graduate School and the 70’s

So off I went to graduate school at the University of Missouri in the summer of 1969. I was there at MU when the riots over the Kent State business began and there when the police pulled up in buses as a show of force to the hundreds or thousands of people gathered. I was fully sympathetic with the crowd, but more than little nervous about the unpredictability of people in a crowd. The fact that many of my confreres in graduate school were so supportive of the demonstrations had a deep effect on me, and led me to begin thinking about political philosophy. Nothing in my catholic upbringing had prepared me for a world of imperial warfare, culminating in the dirty tricks of Richard Nixon and his paranoid administration. I defended then, and have always defended, the right of a nation or individual to self-defense; but I have learned since then that disciplined thinking about the limits of self-defense are nowhere in evidence in government. That was true of Vietnam; I believe it is true of the two Gulf Wars, especially the second; and it remains true in our absurd claim to be defending ourselves by imprisoning people without trial. I remember not one public protest ever called by a bishop or cardinal over the dismal history of unjust wars in my lifetime. When Catholics protest, it seems it must be about sex; war and poverty remain matters covered in written documents mostly.

Another development, and a much more personal one, was my entry into the world of dating and relationships with women. Some of the women I knew as colleagues in graduate school were feminists, and a few had created a group of young to middle aged women to discuss some of their issues. At one of their meetings, they decided to invite their male spouses and / or significant others. I was in the latter group. I did not know what to expect, but what I met with was shocking to me. After the usual pleasantries of introductions and casual chat, the men took over the meeting with shrill and angry attacks on their relevant feminine counterparts—for one reason or another. This was something I did not expect, and I came away realizing very clearly that some men were not comfortable with equal relations with women. And so I began to consider just how different control was from power. The women were attempting to broaden their power; the men were frantic that they were losing control of the women, of their wives. That dynamic is very much at work in my church and in society generally. While I think contemporary American culture has done much to change this, the backlash against feminism has been real and sometimes rather nasty.

By 1974, I had my doctorate in hand, but no job prospects. Since I couldn’t find a job in the field, I became a temp worker in the secretarial area (my typing abilities were the way in which I first got my wife’s attention). For a year and a half, I worked in the MU Dept. of Veterinary Pathology, half days in a regular office, where the other women working with me insisted on getting me coffee in the morning (because that’s what women are supposed to do for men). The other half day was spent in a small room just off the larger lab area where the pathologists regularly killed or at least dissected animals. The stench was awful, but the practice of killing innocent animals in order to see if they had an illness that might spread to the herd seemed more than unpleasant. Hearing animals scream in pain over and over again as they were electrocuted or whatever raised ethical questions for me about our treatment of animals. Helping me along that path was the philosopher Peter Singer, who wrote the original Animal Liberation text in the mid-70s. That book was a revelation, not only about the value of non-human life, but also about the value of human life itself. Singer has made a name for himself by asking difficult questions and providing reasoned and sometimes shocking answers. All of this came at a time when questions about the moral differences between humans and animals, between embryos and fetuses and infants and humans were being asked. Clearly many moral and political views are affected by the answers to such questions. Singer called into question the usual dichotomy between humans who have rights and animals that do not. Christianity has long endorsed a sharp distinction between the supernatural and the natural, and thus between humans and animals. There is no doubt that acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution has put this question to the fore; and although many theologians have accepted Darwinism within limits, Pope Benedict has been on warning the faithful about the dangers of evolutionary theory. Without conceding anything to either side of this, I would note only that the problems here are extremely difficult, and there is so much at stake ethically that there is nothing gained by rushing to conclusions. I hope at some point to delve more into the issues at hand in all this, but I am not sure I will live a long enough life.

But the question about the pointless suffering of animals cannot wait for solutions, and it didn’t in my own case. When the question of animal suffering first confronted me, I was, as it happens, studying Indian and Buddhist philosophy. The Buddhhist philosophy of compassion toward all living things struck me as an immediate answer to the question, even if Buddhist philosophy was generally very tough going in its metaphysical assumptions. Compassion toward all creatures capable of suffering—which includes animals and humans at all stages of life and growth—demanded an affirmation of the value of life. Since that time, I have slowly moved toward less meat eating, toward a critical view of our food sources, both in terms of animal rights and in terms of care of the environment.

3. Thinking about God

My values as a human being and a catholic were seriously challenged by experiences in the world of the late 60’s and beyond. I could have easily dropped off the religious map, but I didn’t. My theological interests remained rather strong. And then came an invitation in 1976 to return to the seminary where I had gone to college, to teach philosophy. I ended up staying there until 1991.
During that time I became more and more persuaded that Christianity needed to be rethought in terms of the religious, scientific, philosophical and artistic experience of the contemporary world. For conservatives that is to unleash a torrent of relativism. But I think at heart it is at heart no better or worse than the way the Christian religion and most other religions have attempted to sanctify the world in which they find themselves. The relation between religion and the world is always a two-way street; each influences the other, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
During my time teaching at the Seminary, my own thinking about God and the divine took some paths that were off the beaten road. While I understand the very human ways in which people speak of God in prayer, I am uncomfortable with those who are too quick to identify God’s will in the world, from helping out our basketball team, to standing behind our nation regardless of its wars. God’s relation to the world, if it is anything, is a relation of truth and goodness in the face of moral darkness. I became concerned to affirm the relative distance of God from the world, at least in terms of our ability to speak or think of God. I found some consolation in Thomas Aquinas on this point, who says that while we are like God in some sense, there are many other ways in which we are unlike God. Those were my philosophical thoughts back in the 1980’s or so. My thinking since then about the God-question has grown since then in a different direction.

My framework today begins with the Christian Scriptures, understood both historically and in terms of thoughtful literary analysis. The vision of Jesus that emerges from this is one consistent with the claim that he was the Lord, but is inconsistent with the piety many Christians drown Jesus in. Bonhoeffer wanted Christianity without religion; I guess I would have Jesus and his times without the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. I don’t think Jesus was a comfortable fellow to be around, unless you were one of the anawim, the poor ones, the outsiders, the Samaritans, the prostitutes, the sick and the unclean. Too much of Christianity today has evolved into the defense of the community of the clean and the good. That can and does easily lead to self-righteousness. But it is one of the great ironic travesties of modern Christianity that so many have made drawing clear cut lines between us and them, between the sinless and the sinners their chief preoccupation. And I have come to be an ardent opponent of those who preach salivation based on St. Paul’s account of faith, and proceed to jettison all that embarrassing stuff that Jesus says in the Gospels. For some salvation through faith alone has become an excuse for not doing much of anything, for others that Jesus came to teach us the golden rule, where loving your neighbor means being nice to them. Bonhoeffer speaks of cheap grace; the cult of good feeling for oneself and niceness for others is about as cheap a version of faith as one can get.

4. Lutherans and Unitarians

Another event taught me something about love of the other who is different: my encounter with the Lutheran community at Bethany. Coming from the background that I did, I was not at all certain how well I would adjust to teaching religion and philosophy at a Lutheran College. In fact, however, the Lutherans were very welcoming and more than accepting of my own religious perspectives. In time, I came to appreciate being a Catholic on campus that other Catholics could talk to, even though being a liberal Catholic did not endear me to the Catholics as much as to the Lutherans. Over time I came to be friends with a number of folks here at the Unitarian church (I can hardly believe that I was first invited to this church was 1998, 14 years ago!). Coming here was again a broadening of my experience, and I have been an interested of the overall tone of ethical and spiritual engagement. I have also spoken at the Mennonite church here in Salina. I have come to feel a sense of ecumenical breadth with all this.

Through all of this I have remain partial to something like Catholic liturgy, and more particularly Benedictine liturgy. I am struck by the similarities that exist in worship among denominations, but I am also concerned about the effect of religious worship on congregations. Too often, I think its effect is largely to underline our contemporary and comfortable assumptions about the world. I give this church much credit for being much more provocative and thoughtful than many other churches, including my own. But I don’t have any final judgments about denominations, other than each does good, and each has serious challenges that require thoughtful criticism. I remain loyal to the faith of my birth, but I don’t take that faith for granted, and certainly don’t take the simplistic assumptions of a young boy in pre-Vatican II Catholicism as a framework for where I am today.

5. Conclusions

So at the end of these meandering comments, I come back to the question that hopefully unites them: what has been my spiritual odyssey? Here are the important components, in my estimation:

a. I am persuaded that examining the relationships of power and control between men and women, between priests and nuns, and between priests and children, is of critical importance. Pope Benedict has expressed his suspicion of the social sciences. But it is the social and psychological sciences that have ripped open the veil that hides so many traditional arrangements that run counter to mission of Jesus that all in the kingdom are equal and without distinction. All churches bear the weight of sexist arrangements, and all need to be open to prophetic voices. And sometimes the prophets wear skirts.

b. When one can learn to love the other who is different, and to refuse control over them, one learns the meaning of peace and the presence of the divine. The presence of God in the world is the presence of a God who stands beyond our language and understanding, and who has purportedly revealed a message of peace to the lowly and the humble, to those who are outsiders and outcastes. I found it of interest that Buddhism originally refused the validity of the Hindu distinction between the clean and the untouchables, the unclean. This is an important meeting ground of these two religions, whatever differences may characterize them otherwise.

c. In the end, belief in the existence of God is not an attempt to explain the universe, but an admission that no matter how severe the order of the universe, there is something like grace inspiring hope in the novel possibilities we find around us.

d. I do not have a working synthesis of all the religions, despite having studied many of them, and despite my deep feelings of appreciation and more for some of them. We live in an age where the religions of the world are meeting up with one another, sometimes with better results than when political leaders meet up. The meeting of world religions can only occur on the ground of openness to discussion and reflection. While I am always interested in this meeting, I remain someone who has tried to see at least what good did come out of Nazareth, and to ask how much of any of the churches came out of it. I am an odd mix of loyalty and openness.

e. If I have been on a spiritual journey, an odyssey, I have no certainty that trip has come to a final resting place. Spiritual odysseys are always in medias res, in the middle of things. And in truth, spiritual journeys are not mere aimless wanderings, like the original Odyssey in Greek literature. What is important about any kind of personal and moral journey is the way in which the threads of one’s beginnings are always being refined and re-visioned, as they are woven into a new and distinctive cloth. Our lives are more like the work of an artist, than a recounting of historical facts by an historian. I know my own odyssey is still ongoing, and I cannot be sure what lies ahead. But I know I have more than enough to reflect upon for the rest of my life.
Gene Bales