Blog July - August 2021 Reflections on the Residential Schools, and a personal piece

    When I was a kid in elementary school, growing up in a small town north of Toronto, I used to subscribe to a little magazine that contained things like Bible stories and various teachings. A big theme would have been the Christian imperative to love all people. I assume that my school was promoting the magazine, and my parents supported it. My memories of it are positive.

    It also happened that one of the Catholic families in the area had a priest who was a member of a religious community. I knew the family fairly well, but I only knew him from seeing him when he came home for visits from the missions. Members of his Order were among the teachers in the northern residential schools (I am not sure which Province), and that is where he was stationed. I remember talking to him on one occasion about the magazine I had subscribed to, and I offered to save back copies to send to him for the children in the schools. He was grateful, and I did that for probably a couple of years.

    I would have been in grade 7 or 8, and I remember being pleased to have this opportunity to do a little work of charity for kids who I imagined would be happy to receive these magazines.

    This was my personal connection to the Residential School system. When I think back on that time now, I have two horrifying thoughts. The first is that these children did not choose to go there, rather they were taken from their families for the express purpose of removing their native heritage from them. My second thought is please God the priest I knew never did anything to abuse those children physically or sexually. But even if he did not do any of that, surely he was aware that it was taking place. And I feel sick.

    We all know that recently in 2021, 215 and then 771 unmarked graves have been discovered at sites of the Residential Schools. It is not known if all of these contain bodies of children, but most likely do. I read that the mortality rate of the children in the schools was very high. Apart from death caused by illness and atrocious living conditions and mistreatment, what I know about separation leads me to believe that it is possible that most died simply from the heart break of unbearable separation from their parents.

    And then another horrifying thought hits me. We hear that church officials removed the markers from these graves, which is the reason they were not discovered until ground penetrating radar technology came along. This says to me that there was an attempt to remove their identity. (By contrast where I grew up, tombstones have dates as far back as the 1700's). Worse yet, the children were stripped of their humanity. Once you are able to do the mental gymnastics involved in making groups of people less than human, you are able to do whatever you want with them. This is the history of slavery and it is the history of the Jewish people in World War II. It is to weep for, and it is so very hard to relate to unless we find those private little exceptions we make for ourselves in the world we live in. It takes incredible honesty, however, to bring those exceptions to conscious awareness.

    Yet another horrifying thought hits me. When these children died, there probably were no native burial rituals - that would be to give back to the children the heritage that was being taken from them. But did they not hold any funeral services for them at all? Catholic funeral rites are so very beautiful with the theme of trusting the promise of the Resurrection as we send the deceased individual home to the Paradise of heaven. Did no one even do this for those children? Did they just bury them? I do not know the answer to this. Nothing in my preliminary searches has yielded any information about burial services for the children. I would like to find out. Because their absence would mark not only a major betrayal of any honour or dignity a Christian person might bring to bear in this circumstance, it also would mark a betrayal of the most fundamental beliefs that a Catholic missionary lives with at the core of their own person.

    In the home town in which I grew up, I was taught by Sisters of a religious community in different grades. I have no bad memories of them, and many of them were extraordinarily beautiful and kind individuals. Teaching or nursing was how they supported their community, and their salaries went to that purpose. My understanding is that the modern Residential Schools system was initiated at the government level and contracted to the religious orders., But the long history also includes the initiatives of the Orders themselves. (Check out this link, for a good overview of the background and the history of the schools: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/timeline/residential-schools.)  In any event, it is mind-boggling that the members of religious orders bought into the vision of stripping indigenous children of their heritage and identity, in favour of a white, Christian substitute. And in the process, convincing themselves that they needed to be strict, structured, and punitive.

    You have undoubtedly heard that a priest in the Toronto area recently complained that no one was speaking of the good that teachers and staff in those schools did alongside any harmful things that were done. Needless to say, the public blowback was swift and furious, and he has resigned. Here is the thing. It is hard for me to imagine that there were never any individual kindnesses shown to any of those children. But whether there were or not, the problem is that the whole thing was wrong! The entire enterprise was unkind! (Look up Sir John A.’s words in Parliament on the matter - you never heard these in your history courses!) Native children and their families were dehumanized to permit the cultural genocide that was the purpose of the schools. It is sickening to think that religious communities found a way to buy into that vision, and that an acquaintance of mine could have been a part of it.

    It has just occurred to me that I had a little part in this with my magazine charity. And continue to do so by not speaking up more. Do your own conscience check. For myself, I apologize to Indigenous people everywhere. I apologize to the people of Canada whose values were betrayed by that school system. And I apologize to members of our faith communities who are horrified (finally?) at what we did to those people. Time now for the relevant Governments to continue to step up. Time now for the Church to step up and live what we believe. Apologize. We cannot continue the betrayal. Platitudes are no longer acceptable.

When it’s over, then what? Blog post June 2021

     I love seeing ideas with different slants on the same topic, in juxtaposition with each other. You find that in politics, in religion, and in discussion with your neighbours. If you keep an open mind you can often grow through expansion of your own thinking. My mentor in developmental psychology, Dr. Gordon Neufeld, points out that the ability to do this is one of our great developmental achievements. A three year old who wants you to come play with him can’t factor in that you are busy talking on the phone. They want you now. (There are a lot of three year olds around, aren’t there?) Neufeld describes the achievement as the ability to do ‘on the one hand..... on the other hand.’ On the one hand I want mommy right now. On the other hand I see that she is busy, so I will wait.

    I came across a couple of reflections that are relevant to the pandemic, notably to its outcome. They are not from the same publication, and only one spoke to the pandemic by name.      

    I will give you some selections, but before I do, what are your own thoughts? Is the world going to be a better place because of the pandemic? Or is it irreparably divided and damaged? Have we grown closer to each other or more suspicious of each other? Have you personally grown in any way or have you become more cynical about life?

    The Washington Post ran an Opinion piece by Salman Rushdie on May 24. Mr. Rushdie is feeling pretty negative, I think it is fair to say. He is cynical about the old adage of good things coming out of bad:

    I didn’t buy any of it, the stuff about divine or earthly retribution, or the dreams of a better future. Many people wanted to feel that some good would come out of the horror, that we would as a species somehow learn virtuous lessons and emerge from the cocoon of the lockdown as splendid New Age butterflies and create kinder, gentler, less greedy, more ecologically wise, less racist, less capitalist, more inclusive societies. This seemed to me, still seems to me, like Utopian thinking. The coronavirus did not strike me as the harbinger of socialism.

    He goes on to say that the damage done by the leaders of three countries in particular has been devastating:

    To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?

    The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.

    Then he hits us where it really hurts:

    It isn’t easy to see how that chasm can be bridged — how love can find a way.

    What do you think? Does he strike a chord? On the one hand. He seems to make a good case. On the other hand .....

    Well, check this out.

    The daily email I get from The Plough and its Daily Dig has an uncanny ability to hit the sweet spot on emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual matters. Here’s the one that caught my eye in juxtaposition with Mr. Rushdie’s piece. It is by Eberhard Arnold, dated April 29:

    It is a simple thing: joy in everything that lives. Anyone who can rejoice in life, in other people, in the fellowship of church community – anyone who feels joy in the mutual relationships of trust and inner fellowship – such a person experiences what love is. Anyone who cannot feel joy cannot live.… Only where there is joy do love and justice dwell. We need the spirit of joy to overcome the gloomy spirit of covetousness, the spirit of unjust mammon and its deadly hate. We can only have such joy if we have faith, and if we believe that the earth has a future.

    I sat with that one for a while. On the one hand.....you can’t have joy and hate at the same time. You can’t have joy and cynicism at the same time. You can’t have joy and gloomy despair at the same time. Self-evident.

    On the other hand ....... you can have joy and love at the same time, You can have joy and faith at the same time.

    If you have joy and love you would seem to be in the sweet spot where the ‘chasm of hatred can be bridged.’ Rushdie, for all his cynicism, seems to want us there.

    Joy is a feeling but it is a bit different from happiness. You may not be happy in times of hardship. But you can be joyful: Anyone who can rejoice in life, in other people, in the fellowship of church community – anyone who feels joy in the mutual relationships of trust and inner fellowship – such a person experiences what love is.  

    The hardships of the pandemic may well continue for a while. On the one hand, we will make them worse with cynicism and hatred, as Rushdie implies.

    On the other hand, he points to the solution, which is love. And Eberhard Arnold tells us how to get there. By rejoicing. Again:  Anyone who can rejoice in life, in other people, in the fellowship of church community – anyone who feels joy in the mutual relationships of trust and inner fellowship – such a person experiences what love is.
 
    You may have discerned by now that many events of everyday life are generally out of our control but that events and reactions are not the same thing. It is so important that we do not give away our control of those reactions. We get to decide in favour of joy. Brilliant, yes? Because with it comes all good things, including the solution to the damage of the pandemic.
    
    On the one hand ....   On the other hand .....

Blog Post: May 2021 Were You Aware?

        How are you doing?

    Everyone is tired, I think.  Most are frustrated. The unpredictability of it all. Schools open.... schools close. Patios open, patios close. Who knows which stores are open, and for what? When will I get vaccinated, I am on the front lines......   

    People have been remarkably resilient for all that. But even in Canada we have had  violent protests against shut downs - as if the decision makers, not the virus, were the enemy of the people.

    However you cut it and whatever your political outlook, this virus chips away at our determination, even at our mental health. Care workers have been magnificent at supporting their sick patients, both CoVid patients and others, all of whom had in common that they could not visit their family members in hospital. But over time the care workers themselves were taking hits. You could hear it in interviews they gave, their pleas for more resources, their alarm bells over burnout.

    I dealt with burnout many many times in my practice. It was always frightening for people to feel they had come to the end of their resources - people who hitherto had been great and confident problem-solvers - but who were now feeling helpless, out of gas.

    All of this came to mind when I read an article on Easter Monday reprinted in the Toronto Star from the Los Angeles Times. The story was about hospital chaplains who were finding a new role in caring for the caregivers, whose morale was suffering in the face of the unrelenting nature of the pandemic.

    What caught my eye was a quote from one of the nurses who had been trying to follow her grandfather’s advice, “Be a caring presence.” She and other staff realized that they themselves needed that kind of attention. The multi-faith chaplaincy staff responded to this need - a new one for their work - and created a space on different wards where clinical staff could come for a cup of tea and quiet. “Two by two, to accommodate physical distancing, hospital staff trickle in, greeted by warm smiles and hot cups of tea. The chaplains may dim the lights or diffuse lavender-scented oils. Sometimes they set up a jar for workers to deposit their stressors, which are written on slips of paper.”

    The point in this, I believe, is the word ‘presence.’ Nurse Katz was already trying to be that to her patients. She surely responded when caring presence was given to her. The word resonates with me because I learned a long long time ago that if you are not present to the person in front of you, if you are not conveying that they matter to you, then nothing happens. And it is remarkable how simple the act of presence can be. A tea cart and quiet set the scene in that hospital, but it was the person of the chaplaincy staff that made the interaction so powerful. There was not even any mention of particular words. Nor did it matter which faith or denomination they represented.

    I love that.  And I mention it because I think that is what many of us right now are doing even when we think we are not doing very much. Yes you are! It is what many of you reading this are doing. A phone call, an email, FaceTime, grocery delivery, cookie drop off! Your faith may be strong or it may be weak or non-existent. You have a sense that the person you are talking to needs your presence. That’s enough. And somewhere in your consciousness you may register this as the work of God. Keep it up. Especially never ever underestimate how important it is and how it spreads healing ripples through the landscape of the pandemic.

    I think it is no accident that this article was published the day after Easter Sunday. It speaks to what the Resurrection was and is all about.  

    But to help make a very gentle connection to the source of this kind of power, here is another reflection contained in one of the daily emails I get, The Plough. This is neat:

    God’s love tears down walls. No longer religion against religion, Christians against non-Christians, but justice against sin, life against death. Therefore, every person you encounter should be your concern. Do not settle for less.                 Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

How’s that Easter thing working for you?

  Blog post Easter - April 2021

   Easter will be in a few days. At time of writing we are just entering Holy Week, the days between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.

    Last year, 2020, Easter Sunday was April 12. We were only just into the pandemic, or at least the declarations of states of emergency. At our house, we were not out of the country when the state of emergency was declared, but we were out of town. We came rushing back home in the middle of March Break week when we heard the news. So did a lot of other people.

    I re-read my Easter Blog post from April 2020. Curious as to what I was focusing on early in an intense situation whose future and duration we could not know. We were staying at home, we were being vigilant, and we were aware among other things that church services were being severely curtailed or cancelled. For the first time in my life my favourite service of the entire year - the Easter Vigil - was actually cancelled. Not only is it the number one service in the church’s calendar, I have had the privilege since 1993 of singing the Exsultet, the great Easter proclamation. Not in 2020.

    But still, didn’t we all expect it to be temporary, relatively short lived?

    My Blog post reflects that, I think. The theme was purification, picking up on one of the great themes of Lent, Passover, and so on. Clearly understanding this as something you go through. And you need to be attentive and intentional about what you are doing. It all has great significance in the faith life of anyone who believes in Jesus and what He is about.

    Here is part of the conclusion to that post:

    It all seems to come together in a most remarkable way. Wouldn't it be terrible if we went through the purification rituals of Holy Week, and then walked away from it all when it was done. And wouldn't it be terrible if we went through the purification rituals that are going on at the hands of the coronavirus, only to later walk away from the experience as if it meant nothing.

    A bit unknowingly prescient, perhaps. We realize that we have much to learn from coronavirus. The monster has forced that upon us by staying in our face for so long and depriving us of contact with each other, depriving us of income, depriving us at times of even a sense of well-being, of feeling safe in the world.

    But it was not going to last. And it has. And even with the vaccine, we are going to need to be vigilant for some time to come.

    Great damage has been done in the meantime. We have lost relatives. We have been unable to say good-bye to loved ones who died even from other causes. We have lost jobs. We have lost businesses. And again we have lost a bit or a lot of our ability to feel safe.

    Which brings me to Easter again. The Resurrection. The triumph of goodness over evil, of life over death. The words of the Exsultet that I used to sing on the eve of Easter Sunday in the dark before the lights came in on the church, are tremendously triumphant in tone. Pick any stanza. Here is one:

    Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
    radiant in the brightness of your King!
    Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
    Darkness vanishes for ever!

    Here is another:

    This is the night when Jesus Christ
    broke the chains of death
    and rose triumphant from the grave.
    What good would life have been to us,
    had Christ not come as our Redeemer?

    Oh really? The pandemic did not stop last Easter. It won’t be done by this Easter. What then does all this mean?

    Robert Barron has a wonderful reflection on the Stations of the Cross, the fourteen images of Jesus’ journey from his trial by Pilate, to his execution and then his burial. The third station is Jesus’ first fall under the weight of the Cross and after he had been whipped with cords that had shards on the ends. So he was bleeding a lot.  It should not be too big a stretch for us to imagine carrying the weight of the pandemic. That we, like him, totally do not deserve.

    In his reflection on this scene, Bishop Barron tells the story of a man who approached him after Mass one day to say that the sermon he had preached - and that Barron thought was pretty good! - on the benevolent love of God, had left the man empty. Oh? Why? The man told about his situation in which his two granddaughters, ages 5 and 7, were suffering from a terminal disease that starts with loss of their eyesight. They both will die. The disease was not understood and could not be controlled. The elder girl had already lost her eyesight and the younger sibling was crying in terror at the fate that awaited her too. The man had been to priests, ministers, rabbis and gurus, to ask the question, Why is God doing this? Barron’s sermon was for the man the most recent in a line of failures to shed any light on it all. Barron notes: “Never had the problem of evil - reconciling the goodness of God with the presence of suffering - appeared to me so concretely and in such a compelling way.”

    He replied to the man that he did not have a concrete answer to the problem. But he could see the man was still searching for God, and “if you follow the question all the way, you will be led to the heart of the Christian mystery, which is that God the Father sends his Son into the very worst of our suffering, into what frightens us the most. And in that we have the answer ..... a deeply spiritual answer: that God doesn’t take away our suffering, but he enters into it with us and thereby sanctifies it.”

    The triumphal language of the Exsultet is exactly that - the paradox of triumph arising from the torture, the death, the resurrection of Jesus. He was not spared, and that is where the sanctifying comes from. For believers, the resurrection does not take away pandemics, it removes their sting, their ultimate power over us. The resurrection shows us that they do not get the last word. We are invited to believe that and to trust it. And when we do, we sing the Exsultet and announce it to the world.

    I have experienced family tragedies in my lifetime, challenges to faith. But by far the biggest challenge to believe this resurrection stuff came in October 2015 with my diagnosis of lymphoma. That is when Easter/ resurrection/ Exsultet became real. Really real. I trusted the message, and I felt what that triumph is about. At the Easter Vigil 2016 when I was in the middle of my treatment and too weak to walk on my own up and down the two steps of the sanctuary at St. Paul’s, I sang the Exsultet with a weak voice and a strong spirit of hope. Lymphoma did not get the last word even though I did not know what direction it was going.

    This year we join the old man with his granddaughters and weep for them and for him. We join everyone affected by the pandemic and feel our hearts break a little. And then we let Christ enter. And we sing. 

Talking to Mr. Anxiety

 Blog March 2021

    The pandemic with its stay at home orders and shut downs and school closings has truly rocked us. Mental health issues have appeared and there is a lot of anxiousness around. I thought I would reflect a bit on some of my work with anxiety.

    Here is a scene that played out in various ways many times over the years:

    Every time someone yelled at her or even got upset with her, she would start shaking. At work, she would shut down and retreat into herself. She was in a responsible job, however, and so she learned to forge ahead and try not let anyone see the extent of her distress. She was paying a great price for this strategy and one day she could just not do it anymore. She had to take time off work. Her boss was very concerned and puzzled. Listening to her, he thought she was depressed. He suggested she get help, and called me himself.

    The employee - male or female - in such a situation would feel embarrassed and humiliated. But also relieved to be able to finally share how difficult it had been all this time. Difficult because of the distress itself, but equally difficult in the realization that people did not understand what they were going through. Friends, co-workers and even family would ask if something was wrong. Men in this situation often conveyed the impression that they were angry.

    My client told her story, including her history of having been yelled at when she was a young child. She grew up thinking that she was not smart enough or capable enough or good enough. So she had to work extra hard to not only succeed but to excel at everything she did. She recognized the price she had paid, and it was not a big leap for her to connect at least some of that to her background. The problem was that it still felt very real to her that she might actually not be smart enough or capable enough or good enough. And that people knew it or soon would.

    And therein lies the heart of the matter.

    Two terrible things had happened to her in her psychological development. She was not responsible for either of them (do you remember that great scene in Good Will Hunting? Robin Williams says to Will twelve times, “It’s not you fault........ it’s not your fault ..... it’s not your fault.......”). First, the emotional reaction (fear) to being yelled at gave rise to the cognitive reaction (‘there is danger here’) of not being ‘good enough.’ Second, because that sequence had been laid down often, she (us, maybe) could not tell the direction of causality. Did the danger give rise to the fear, or did the long history of fear keep finding dangers? In this case, the fear found/ created the danger, not the other way around. But she and we do not register it that way when it happens. Our conscious experience is that we are afraid because there is a terrible danger that we have to avoid. It is heart-breaking to see and hear that history play out.

    To make matters worse, when the danger is evoked, we have no defense against it, it seems so real and familiar and legitimate. And so we do our best: we deflect, deny, obfuscate, become a perfectionist, get quiet, get angry - anything to avoid the danger of people seeing that I truly am not good enough here.

    Here is the good news. There is a defense.

    First a little side-bar. I went through this myself, and did not get to deal effectively with it until I was done grad school and was actually out practicing. Talk about humiliating! I had gone all the way through elementary and high school with a very high expectation bar set for me. The result of reminders of the great accomplishments of aunts, uncles, etc etc in religion, medicine, law, and other fields. My greatest fear would arise when I  would be told I had done something wrong, didn’t understand something, failed a test! Danger! Everyone will see I am not capable enough - not good enough. The voice told me don’t ever put your hand up in class. Even if you give the correct answer, someone might laugh thinking it was the wrong answer. And the fear and the danger would again be evoked.

    The anxiety was terrible. I at least recognized it as anxiety. It often presents as anger, or burnout or depression (if you live long enough with anxiety that you cannot master, you will become a candidate for depression) with the individual not being aware of the underlying anxiety. At that point it is accurate to say they do not feel their emotions.

    The defense, the one that works, is to learn to talk to the fear signal before it creates the danger. Or even while it is evoking the danger. I created Mr. Anxiety for this purpose. I would say, “I see you there, telling me I can’t speak up” or whatever I was too anxious to do. “I see you there, but today I am in charge. I am going to do it anyhow.” And I would. Mr. Anxiety eventually gave up and lost his power to manufacture dangers.

    But, you say, some of the dangers are in fact real, as when you are threatened by someone or when you come down with a very serious illness. Good point. Mr. Anxiety cannot create those dangers. What he can do, though, is convince you that you are helpless, that your life is over, and there is nothing you can do. Notice? (S)He has taken away your power again. So we address him/ her in the same way: “I hear you there. But you do not get to determine the kind of day I am going to have. I do. I am not giving that power away to you. I am going to be active. I am going to contact friends or a helping person. I am going to spend time on my hobby ....... I am going to live .......”

    I loved helping people develop their own version of Mr. Anxiety. One 12 year old boy created an image of an anxiety balloon that floated near the ceiling, and he would talk to it, and tell it that he - the boy - was in charge today.

    It occurs to me that the “Let’s Talk” campaign of earlier this year is a very worthwhile resource. And in keeping with the spirit of it, there could be some things in the stories I just told, that you can use or suggest to someone you know. In the particular example of anxiety - which may be observable but may also be disguising itself - talking to someone about it and then talking directly to it, may bring significant relief. I can tell you I own the t-shirt on that one.

    If you are a person of faith, you have another dimension to work with, namely the knowledge that you are supported by a God who loves you to bits. Sometimes you will recognize that support (usually after the fact) in the form of persons who come into your life or into your day. Sometimes you will recognize it in the quiet interior nudges that encourage and point to new directions. I will close with this hopeful little reflection that speaks beautifully to that. I re-posted it recently and it had appeared in the Loyola Press Daily Lenten Reflections: Have another look. The ending is beautiful. https://www2.loyolapress.com/webmail/39532/1133776403/b787d08f36b001ce70de6610cd3d8dc8d9310c4cb96bf55b979791968a38a9bb

Transitioning and believing

Blog Post February 2021

    What a year this has been, and we are only a month into it! Covid persists and stay at home orders or lock-downs become necessary. Business people, employees, health care workers, students, teachers, parents, struggle and experience everything from grief to fatigue to anger, to depression and burnout.  Politicians waver, hoping that the vaccines will bail them out. All of us try to maintain hope but some days that is in short supply. And when we turned to our faith community, we found that we were prevented from gathering with them other than by video link. Most understand that this is a health and safety issue, however, not a rights and freedom issue. In any case, it is one of the losses of the times.

    Fortunately, people are also writing about positive things that have come from the pandemic, the ‘hard gifts’ we mentioned here in a previous post. Fortunately, too, people are learning what the term ‘Common Good’ actually means. That learning has been prompted by moral and ethical issues about whom to vote for, who gets vaccinated first, why I should wear a mask, and so on.

    All in all, the history of the 2020's will provide fodder for academic analysis and learned papers for many years to come. We will tell our grandchildren that we lived through a frightening time.    

    You cannot comment on anything this year, though, without mentioning the January 6 assault on the Capitol in Washington D.C. Timed to coincide with the certification of the U.S. presidential vote, the transition period of the leaving of office by one president, and the inauguration of another.

    In all of this, in the long list of terrifying issues we have been faced with, one has troubled me greatly for a long time, and that is why I am writing now. I have referred to it in recent posts, and who knows, we may face it again. That is the role of religion in the ascendancy of the outgoing president of the United States. More specifically, the role of Catholics in that ascendancy. In trying to talk about it, one enters into the domain of both topics you never bring up at a dinner party: politics and religion. Both are emotionally laden, and both are important elements of the identity of each of us. We do not alter course easily. So forgive me.

    But there is something urgently important in this instance. Very well meaning and sincere people really believed the last president was an answer to what they thought was the only issue that mattered, namely the abortion situation in the U.S. Because you could see, right?, that he was pro-life. They were willing to look past the list of public offenses he has committed and bragged about. They were willing to look past his cynical desecration of St. John Episcopal Church and the statue of Pope St. John Paul ll in Washington. All because he would act on abortion. All because he was going to root out socialism. All because, for some people, he was going to save the world from the pedophile ring led by Hillary Clinton in the basement of a pizza shop. I will spare you the name of the movement if you don’t know it. Its members were front and centre on January 6.

    I refer you to a recent article that is important reading for Catholics and Christians of all stripes, I think (it includes the photo of the Trumps standing in front of the statue of Pope St. John Paul ll): https://www.ncronline.org/news/people/how-catholics-got-conned-donald-trump.

    Here are a couple of brief excerpts from the article, written by a Franciscan Sister and a Catholic priest:

    It was never about "pro-life." Many Americans, including Catholics, voted for Donald Trump because they believed he was "pro-life." Those who did were conned by the con artist himself. Others knew but did not care that his recently claimed "pro-life" stance and his revolving membership in the Republican Party were born less of personal conviction and more of political expediency.......

    The authors talk about Trump’s apparent sociopathy:  Using real-life examples from Trump's life: a sociopath has no qualms about separating babies from their mothers, mocking a disabled reporter, ridiculing public figures or firing others at will. He will stop at nothing to get what he wants, including inciting violence........

     They go on: But what about Catholics? How do we explain the fact that nearly 57% of white Catholics voted for Trump in this last election? Or that many Catholic bishops likely cast their ballots for him as well? How did the leaders of the Catholic Church and so many of its members get pulled into this quicksand of resentment, this hijacking of the Gospel?

    The authors suggest a number of reasons for the move that took place among Catholics. In the last item on their list they call out American bishops who in part got to their support of Trump through their opposition to Pope Francis: 

     This, in turn, has given encouragement for right-wing Catholic movements to become more vocal in their opposition to Francis. Timothy Busch, the Napa Institute, the Knights of Columbus, William Barr, Steve Bannon and the Federalist Society now lead the lay resistance to Francis and the opposition to finishing the work of Vatican II.

    On the other side of the ledger, Catholic friends have indicated they would never vote for Joe Biden, a practising Catholic who has not condemned the politics of abortion on demand. An article in the Globe and Mail by Michael W. Higgins titled ‘The unassuming Catholicism of Joe Biden prepares him well for the hard journey ahead,’ paints what will be a study in contrast between the two presidents.  

    Again, a couple of excerpts:

    He doesn’t showcase his religious convictions with dubious sincerity – as did, say, Bill Clinton when he carried a Bible with him during his impeachment controversy, or Donald Trump, who visited an Episcopal church for a photo-op after protesters in the area were cleared by armed police in riot gear – nor does he theologize with the cognoscenti, as Barack Obama did with Marilynne Robinson. He just carries his rosary, attends mass regularly, publicly delights in singing 1970s Catholic hymns and credits his faith as the bedrock of solace during those times of bereavement when he lost two children and a spouse........

    If some in the U.S. hierarchy are distrustful of his commitment to his faith, the Bishop of Rome is not among their number. In fact, Mr. Biden and Pope Francis have spoken on several occasions. Mr. Biden is on record as sympatico with the Pope’s prioritizing of the poor, prophetic teaching on the climate crisis, hypersensitivity to the social and economic upheaval of forced migration, and he remains deeply grateful for the pontiff’s personal accompaniment at the time of the death of his son Beau.

    There is a pro-life vision here that Trump abhors and that Pope Francis endorses. People that see this pro-life vision in the context of Catholic teaching on the Common Good (see my last post) will be able to support Biden even with his blind spot. People who do not, and especially those with the double barrel animus that involves indignation at Pope Francis, will not. I am a tad embarrassed for their Catholicism.

    Here is the conclusion from the NCR article ‘How Catholics got conned....’:

    How are we to respond to this painful reality? We offer not advice, but an image of active hope. Late Wednesday night, following the riots in the Capitol, U.S. Rep. Andy Kim spent almost two hours on his knees picking up debris on the floor of the Rotunda before returning to the congressional caucus to certify the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Kim is the first Asian American congressional representative from New Jersey.

    His response is a challenge to each of us. What can we do now? We can kneel and pick up the broken promises of justice, the scattered pieces of the Gospel. We can kneel as humble servants to clean up the debris of fear and hatred. And we the people, all the people, can stand together in the long road of healing.
 
    That is the U.S. We in Canada watched it all unfold. The last four years, the last four months. We were affected by it: we resonated to large pieces of the turmoil, and we have been repulsed by much of it. We can certainly heed the advice of the authors’ conclusion. We can, above all, kneel and pick up the ‘scattered pieces of the Gospel.’ The Gospel got brutalized in the last four years. We Catholics - all of us, including bishops and organizations called out in the article - can also reaffirm our allegiance to Pope Francis, the duly elected, legitimate successor of Peter. He is our best guide to living the Gospel, and he is our best protection against ever being misled like this again.

Honouring 2020?

 Blog Post January 2021

    Back in the 1980's and 90's I used to give talks on stress management. Inevitably, one of the hot topics would be the stress people were experiencing from corporate change. I recall reading (I believe it was in Tom Peters book In Search of Excellence) that Matsushita Electronics -  which became Panasonic - had a corporate saying that no change was so valuable that it would be implemented before a ritual honouring of what had gone before. That bit of wisdom struck me as a good thing to remember when change was happening. So you preserve a sign from the old shop. Or you tell old stories about funny events. Maybe brag about achievements in the previous structures.

    This stuff came to mind in the past couple of weeks as we approached the end of 2020. People were talking more and more about the urgency of getting this year over with. It has been a difficult and hurtful and .....(fill in your own descriptor)  year.

    Funny, though, the stress has been in what we are leaving behind. Hopefully less so in what we are going towards, especially with the arrival of the CoVid vaccines. Nonetheless there is a big psychological transition happening. And that means change. The health care system will be doing a lot of review and soul searching. Long term care facilities will take a hard look at their preparedness for something like this in the future. Businesses will plan for hybrid delivery structures for their products. Any or all of these reviews and adaptations are capable of producing their own stress.

    But what can we honour about this painful year 2020 as we leave it?

    Pope Francis has just released a book titled Let us Dream: The Path to a Better Future. In it he says this:

"These are moments in life that can be ripe for change and conversion. Each of us has had our own “stoppage,” or if we haven’t yet, we will someday: illness, the failure of a marriage or a business, some great disappointment or betrayal. As in the Covid-19 lockdown, those moments generate a tension, a crisis that reveals what is in our hearts.

In every personal “Covid,” so to speak, in every “stoppage,” what is revealed is what needs to change: our lack of internal freedom, the idols we have been serving, the ideologies we have tried to live by, the relationships we have neglected............

If we are to come out of this crisis less selfish than when we went in, we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain. There’s a line in Friedrich Holderlin’s “Patmos” that speaks to me, about how the danger that threatens in a crisis is never total; there’s always a way out: “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” That’s the genius in the human story: There’s always a way to escape destruction. Where humankind has to act is precisely there, in the threat itself; that’s where the door opens.

This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities — what we value, what we want, what we seek — and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of."

    Key points in this little excerpt: everyone will experience ‘stoppages’ in their life; the stoppage will reveal to us what is in our heart; it may lead to a change in our life; and (the critical point), “ Where humankind has to act is precisely there, in the threat itself; that’s where the door opens.”

    In the threat itself is where the door opens. If this is true - and it surely is - then this pandemic and by extension the year itself and the bad things in it, need to be seen as what my Jesuit director refers to as a ‘hard gift.’

    Immediately I think of the cancer experience as exactly that. I became aware in the middle of it that this was the most spiritually fruitful time of my life. When I finished with all the treatment, I was able to honour the experience even before I moved in to remission. I am applying that as best I can to 2020. Can you do the same?

    Other writers have this topic on their mind. A story in the Toronto Star on December 24 by Steve McKinley (“Hope”) quotes psychologist Steve Joordens discussing the optimism created by the CoVid vaccine while at the same time the numbers are going the opposite, wrong, way. There is a tension, “and the journey from here to there is going to be very dark and very difficult.” “But that dark and emotional place can also be transformative.”

    There it is again, the same theme as in Pope Francis’ writings. Joordens adds: “To some extent, it is a bit of a rebirth when we come through the other side. It may cause a lot of people to have a serious reflective moment and there’s going to be some lifestyle changes imposed because people have just lost their previous way of existing.”

    Where humankind has to act is precisely there, in the threat itself; that’s where the door opens.

    The honouring that we will be able to do - will need to do - is in the new awareness these hard times have given us, of where we have lost a part of ourselves. Perhaps our generosity, our kindness, our patience.  Maybe our awareness of just how much we need each other, in a world where we act as little gods unto ourselves.

    That awareness is happening at the international level. The World Council of Churches has just released a document titled Serving a Wounded World in Interreligious Solidarity. The Vatican was a signatory to this document. Right in the preamble there is this statement: “This document aims to offer a Christian basis for interreligious solidarity that can inspire and confirm, in Christians of all churches, the impulse to serve a world wounded not only by the Covid-19 pandemic but also by many other wounds.”

    You can see the CoVid awareness of our lack of unity that has developed in this group. It is an awareness that helps us to honour the hard gift of 2020.

    The awareness is happening at the organizational level. My own parish of St. Paul’s has realized that we have to rethink who we are in this world, in this community. The venerable but ‘same old’ practices that serve as the foundation of the parish, we have come to realize, actually are self-referenced and are about maintenance. The awareness has grown that parishes, ours included, have to have a missionary mind-set that reflects Jesus’ directive to his disciples, “Go out .....” That mind-set has to become our foundation or people will stop being interested. This is another awareness grown in the hard gift that is 2020. We certainly honour it.

    And yes the awareness happens at the individual level. Back to Pope Francis and his wonderful insight into what life ‘stoppages’ can do for us personally, what the stoppage of Covid-19 can do for us:

    “In every personal “Covid,” so to speak, in every “stoppage,” what is revealed is what needs to change: our lack of internal freedom, the idols we have been serving, the ideologies we have tried to live by, the relationships we have neglected.......”

Wonderful opportunity, this hard gift. The best stress management, I think, will come from owning the moment and having the freedom to honour the awareness we have just developed.

Happy New Year 2021, everyone! Don’t forget to bring with you the hard gifts you have just received.

Issues raised by the candidacy of Catholic Joe Biden in the US Presidential election

    The election is over as this is being written. President Trump is soon to be Former President Trump, having pretty much exhausted his legal recourse. Which is not to say he has conceded.

    I do not wish to write a political reflection as that is beyond my pay scale. But I thought it timely to review an issue that was raised during the election, and that is the contradiction in Joe Biden’s Catholicism. On the one hand he is fervent and public and a believable practitioner of his faith. On the other hand, he is clearly a pro-choice politician. He is seen as decent and as empathic, and it is predicted that he will repair some of the great harms that have been done during the previous administration, in the areas of immigration, race relations, climate change, and others. Many evangelical Protestant and Catholic believers focused on his pro-choice and his social justice stands, however, and branded him as a heretic and a socialist. There are notable You Tube videos of Catholic pastors railing against the notion of any Catholic voting for him. More than one Bishop supported such pronouncements.

    So with this piece today, I just want to highlight some writings about a topic that we do not necessarily hear a lot about, and that is the Common Good, and especially the Catholic Church teaching on the Common Good. Are those righteous pastors correct in their interpretation of church teaching?

    U.S. Catholics weigh in with mixed reaction on Biden win NCR Nov 9, 2020:
“The day after the results were announced, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, congratulated Biden on the win.
"We thank God for the blessings of liberty. The American people have spoken in this election," Archbishop Gomez said. "Now is the time for our leaders to come together in a spirit of national unity and to commit themselves to dialogue and compromise for the common good." (Italics added.) ...........
Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago said that "as we now have the results of the election, it is good to remember that our strength in America lies in our unity."
"We commend all who had the courage to compete in the electoral process and participate in our democracy," the cardinal said. "We pray that the Lord will enlighten and sustain those elected in their service to all the people of our country.
"Let us also ask God to free our hearts of regrets and resentments, of pride and contemptuousness. Particularly in this time of pandemic, we must set aside whatever partisan concerns have divided us and turn our energy and passion to serving the common good."(Italics added.)”

    So what is the Common Good? It turns out that it is not an American invention. If anything, Americans are individualists by ethos, and that may be a big part of the reason why they are in such turmoil right now.

    Here is some background on Common Good in Catholic moral teaching.

    Jared Dees in The Religion Teacher. Apr 2017

     "At the foundation of Catholic Social Teaching is the concept of the “common good.”
Here is a definition drawn from Pope St. John XXIII and quoted in the Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes: the common good is “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.”

    By common we mean all people. To pursue the common good is to work towards the greatest good for all persons, not the greatest good for the greatest number and certainly not the greatest good for only a specific group of people. There is a difference between the good for a majority of people and the good for all people."

    David Cloutier | Aug 19, 2013 | From the Field |

    “The notion of “the common good” may be the most familiar concept of Catholic social teaching. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church*  cites it as the first principle of CST, and as something “to which every aspect of social life must be related” (164), and as the “primary goal” of society (165). It may also be one that is subject to the most misunderstandings. ....

    Thus, “the common good” while not the ultimate good, is nevertheless the central aim of our social lives, as affirmed by Gaudium et Spes (#75). We do not exist for ourselves. Pursuing our own private goods, while it may have some positive spillovers, eventually degenerates into an order where only the strong survive, where only those who “play to win” can “make it,” and where every shared enterprise is merely a vehicle for my own personal advancement. In many ways, all our social problems can be seen in the light of our temptation to believe in this awful myth of “survival of the fittest.”
*published in 2004 by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the request of Pope John Paul II.

    So here is an argument applying the Common Good principle to the election of Joe Biden:

    Michael Sean Winters: US bishops need to recalibrate their stance toward the culture NCR, Nov 13, 2020.

    “As the bishops prepare to welcome a new administration in Washington, they need to be guided by that concern for the common good and abandon the culture-warrior approach that has plagued their public posture for too long.

    President-elect Joe Biden is now the most prominent Catholic in the country. He speaks powerfully about how important his faith is to him, usually in the context of the monstrous suffering he endured, losing his wife and daughter in a car accident, and then his adult son to brain cancer. He also ran a campaign that highlighted some of the pillars of Catholic social teaching — human dignity, the common good, solidarity — and he did so explicitly. He is not coming at the bishops looking for a fight.

    Yes, from a Catholic perspective, the president-elect is grievously wrong in his support for liberal abortion laws. We Catholics are rightly horrified whenever any group of people, no matter how powerless, is denied legal protection. The taking of innocent human life is wrong no matter the circumstance. But how a politician approaches the issue of abortion is not the only thing to know about them.

    Biden is a man of decency who is wrong, not an indecent man, and if the bishops welcome his presidency in the same nasty, combative way they welcomed that of President Barack Obama, they will live to regret it. They need to abandon the zero-sum, legalistic approach they have followed in recent years ..........
 
    They should look to lower the temperature in the culture wars and reach some accommodations with the Biden administration on the issues where they disagree with the president and work together on the many, many issues about which a Democratic administration is much closer to the teachings of the church than the outgoing administration was, starting with immigration and climate change policy.”
 
    I leave you to weigh that up.

    In the meantime, a Common Good issue has arisen very recently in the matter of Covid-19 vaccines that are being developed. The moral issue raised is that the vaccines were developed using cell lines that date back to the 1960s and 1970s in which tissue was taken from aborted babies. Some of the same anti-Biden voices are arguing that Catholics therefore cannot use these vaccines. Here is one response to that argument:

    Use of Pfizer, Moderna COVID-19 vaccines is morally acceptable, say bishops. NCR Nov25, 2020
“Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine, and Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, addressed the issue in a memo to their brother bishops.

    A copy of the memo was obtained by Catholic News Service Nov. 24.

    "Neither the Pfizer nor the Moderna vaccine involved the use of cell lines that originated in fetal tissue taken from the body of an aborted baby at any level of design, development or production," the two prelates said. "They are not completely free from any connection to abortion, however, as both Pfizer and Moderna made use of a tainted cell line for one of the confirmatory lab tests of their products.

    "There is thus a connection, but it is relatively remote," they continued. "Some are asserting that if a vaccine is connected in any way with tainted cell lines, then it is immoral to be vaccinated with them. This is an inaccurate portrayal of Catholic moral teaching." .........

    For Dr. Robert Tiballi, an infectious disease specialist in Chicago and a member of the Catholic Medical Association, this indirect use raises an ethical issue for Catholics.

    "The fetal cell lines were not directly used in the Moderna vaccine, but they were indirectly used several steps away from the actual development of the vaccine," he told "Currents News" in a separate interview.

    Any such cell lines were derived from tissue samples taken from fetuses aborted in the 1960s and 1970s and have been grown in laboratories all over the world since then.

    In its 2005 study, the Pontifical Academy for Life said Catholics have a responsibility to push for the creation of morally just, alternative vaccines, but it also said they should not sacrifice the common good of public health because there is no substitute.

    "Catholics can have confidence if there is a great need and there are no alternatives, they are not forbidden from using these new vaccines," Brehany told "Current News," but he added: "There is much the church calls us to do in seeking out alternatives and advocating for alternatives."

    I will leave it there. I trust the voices I have cited here. There are many others arguing in different directions. It can get confusing for sure. Watch out for hidden agendas in what you read, and be sure to stay grounded in church teaching.

“ In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” St. Augustine

How do you deal with controversial topics?

Here is an example from history. Discussions about Baptism were a really big deal in the fourth century. I remember reading years ago the great writings about the necessity of Baptism, and the inclusion of infants in that consideration. The necessity of Baptism hinged on the reality of original sin. The inclusion of infants was controversial in light of an early belief that Baptism washed away all sins a person had committed up to that point. Some argued, therefore,  that people should wait for Baptism as long as possible in their life, so as to not lose the effect of Baptism for whatever sinful pattern might be present in their lives.

St. Augustine (354-430AD) got right into it. But he researched and argued from the teaching authority of the church, right back to apostolic times three hundred years earlier. Infant baptism was there, and so he was adamant that in his own writings he was not introducing anything novel into our faith.

Moreover, he refers at length to St. Cyprian who wrote extensively on the matter of Baptism but who added that in all such discussions, we must attend to St. Paul’s familiar exhortation, “(T)hough I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I have become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”  Augustine comments: “He (Cyprian) had therefore imperfect insight into the hidden mystery of the sacrament. But if he had known the mysteries of all sacraments, without having charity, it would have been nothing. ..... (W)ith imperfect insight into the mystery, (he) was careful to preserve charity with all courage and humility and faith.....” What a lovely insertion into the dialogue.

Why this little history lesson?

Two reasons: one, we have lost respect for the teaching authority of the church. In so many quarters today in and out of the church, those who disagree with Pope Francis so often go straight to branding him a heretic, and wishing out loud for his papacy to end. One impertinent bishop recently dared the pope to fire him.

The second reason is obvious from the first. The charity urged by St. Cyprian has been replaced by politicized, agenda-driven ideological attacks on the pope. Which means on the teaching authority of the church.

If St. Augustine were alive today, that is where he would start.

Full disclosure: I am a huge supporter of Pope Francis. His challenges to all of us to return to the social justice roots of the Gospel are nothing less than inspired and led by the Holy Spirit.

St. Augustine stopped and considered his position on Baptism in light of church authority. The successor of Peter in 2020 merits that same consideration. This is especially true given that the issues the pope tackles are very big: urging realignment of political and economic policies based on relationships and on human need rather than on power and economic dominance; establishing real pro-life mindsets (ie, supporting mothers with young children) not just pro-birth; rethinking the God-given rights of same sex persons to live in families; advocating for stewardship of the environment, and on and on.

I told you these are big! Don’t you feel it as you read that list? The same intensity undoubtedly drove the writings on Baptism from Augustine’s time! There were big issues in there! But remember, he anchored himself in two things: the tradition of the apostolic teaching authority of the church, and Cyprian’s enunciation of ‘without charity we are sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.’

Political and church leadership in various quarters around the world has introduced and fostered divisiveness, bitterness, and anger as in perhaps no other time in history. In our families, in our governments, and elsewhere we shout and threaten. And we know what topics not to bring up.

Really??

Time for Catholics and Christians of all stripes to dial it down and return to the Gospel. Suck up the disagreements and talk. And listen. Because if we believe anything at all, it has to include that the Holy Spirit will lead us. The job of God has been taken. We are embarrassing ourselves and betraying what Augustine showed us when we act in any other way.
 

Telling our News

    It is probably appropriate to refer to our present time as the age of the pandemic. It is no longer simply the pandemic incident. It has gone on too long for that. Moreover, at time of writing, the numbers are trending upwards again around the world and in our own province. Experts are saying that the dreaded second wave is here.

    What this means is that the pressure we all have felt to adapt our daily schedules and patterns is now not merely an emergency response. It is rather the challenge to look forward to new patterns altogether. For the foreseeable future, we and those we elect have to plan everything with a view to keeping us safe.

    One context that is deeply affected by all this and causing significant pain is that of our inability to enjoy full open gatherings for community worship. Unfortunately, some have mistakenly cast the pain as resulting from a violation of our rights and freedoms to worship.  (This is a quintessentially American response.) That of course is not what is happening. The challenge to adapt in the interest of safety is what is happening.

    As it turns out, the pandemic is looking like an example of what my spiritual director used to refer to as one of the "hard gifts." In this case, great opportunity. I have noticed that the dialogue among church commentators has increasingly turned to the question ‘what does the church need to look like coming out of all of this?’ I mentioned that in my previous post where I referred to discussions of the need for the church to return to its fundamental identity as a mission church. At the heart of the Christian Scriptures is the message that followers of Christ are sent out to proclaim the Good News of our salvation.

    My own parish of St. Paul's is taking this time as a perfect opportunity to re-examine who we are. The literature guiding the effort is the book by Fr. James Mallon, titled Divine Renovation.

    This book was written six years ago – way before the pandemic – but wouldn't you know, Fr. Mallon appears to be prescient In spending a whole lot of effort on the need for our churches to return to their root identity as missionary in nature. In making the case for the changes that he introduced in his own parish, he argues that Catholics have become passive, immature, and complacent. The background for this is multifaceted, and he does a great job laying it out. One of the factors jumps off the pages, however, and that is clericalism. Not necessarily the aggressive, powerful form that we have heard about in some instances, but rather the kind that happily assumes responsibility for the entire spirituality of the Christian community. That community in turn is only too happy to cede the responsibility, leaving them with only the obligation to attend Sunday Mass.

    Here are a few excerpts in Fr.Mallon's own words:

        In our parishes of today, in spite of all the years forming lay ministers, most Catholics remain unawakened, passive consumers of "religion lite."......

        After about 1650 years (from the Peace of Constantine in 315 to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s), this Christian culture has now ended. We now find ourselves in a situation like that of the first Christians. It is once again unpopular to be a Christian. It is risky, costly, difficult, fulfilling and exciting. It is a time of rediscovering the essential identity of all the baptized to be missionary disciples, called to know Jesus and make him known. It is time for all who follow Jesus to heed the call to maturity and to be equipped for service within the community of the Church that takes them far from the altar from which they are sent every Sunday.
        The Church's deepest identity is to be a missionary Church, called to form baptized believers into missionary disciples who go forth, through the grace of God, to build God's kingdom.........

        If belonging is the key, then it opens the door to faith. Behaving, which is discipleship, takes place when the person walks through the door.........

        (In commenting on Jesus' interaction with the rich young man): The expectations of Jesus were not limited to the commitment of becoming his disciple. Once that decision was made, he continued to expect more. He said that "from everyone to whom much has been given, even more will be demanded." (Luke 12:48)  

    Fr. Mallon's words present a great challenge in a time of great opportunity. But here is the thing. Who is going to come and listen to these words and take up this challenge? Some fear that even our regulars may have lost their sense of belonging and so will not be among those numbers. It is already well documented that young folks exited from "formal religion" some time ago. These, however, are the people who will get behind a worthy cause, especially if it has social justice attached to it. They are the people we want to reach. Social justice conflates nicely with mission.  

    We will never reach them, however, if we tell them that we are coming to evangelize them. Or that we want them to be part of an evangelical project. I can just see the eyes rolling. On the other hand, I have always found that people listen respectfully when I tell them of my own experiences and how I believe that the Lord was somehow involved in the outcome. If they show further interest in that, I will get the opportunity to tell them that the death and resurrection of Jesus are our guarantee that we matter to God. I am content to leave it there for them to mull over and for the Spirit to work.

    All of this is to say that we have the opportunity to get clear in our heads that our desire to return to Sunday Mass and resume our usual, familiar, and comfortable pattern of worship, has been brought into sharp relief as a betrayal of our Christian identity if we go home and leave it there.

    Telling our news. Telling our story. We can come out of an otherwise terrible time with a much better sense that this is what Christ asks us to do. Not on the street corners, but in the multiple opportunities that arise every single day to say who we are and what we believe.

Big Questions

My mother had several mantras for her children. We knew them well and we not only heard them growing up but even after we left home. One of them was, "Remember who you are." She would bring that one out when we were whining or otherwise taking the low road in reaction to some perceived grievance. The mantra was a coded directive to claim the honour but also to live up to the challenge of what she considered was our family legacy. We knew exactly what she meant, in any case.

Looking back on those interactions, I see now that her directive was genius in its own way. She was not telling us exactly what to do, she was rather challenging us to buy into our identity. Who would turn that down? And yet if you accepted the premise of the mantra, you were in fact committing yourself to a course of action, certainly to a noble outlook on what to that point was a grievance or a worry.

Something similar would have happened if she had come at it from a different direction, with a question. What if she had said in the middle of our anger and argumentative interaction with her, "Well who am I then?" There is only one answer to that question, "You are my mother." Once again, however, in giving the answer, we children would have been making a commitment to what that stands for in the moment as well as what she stands for as a member of the extended family. It would be very difficult to give the answer and then to walk away saying, "Well I really don't care."

These kinds of thoughts ran through my head last week listening to the gospel and the ever so familiar question Jesus asked his disciples: "But who do you say that I am?" After all these years of hearing the answers given, doesn't it become clear that Jesus is not asking about himself, he is asking about the disciples. Once you have given the answer, you have made a commitment.

I recall when I was in my late teens and attending a seminary in the US, being saddened at seeing guys leave, and becoming aware that some of them were leaving the seminary, the church, and their faith, all on the same day. I do not know what process they were going through, but it would make sense if some of the problem was that the commitment to their answer to Jesus' question had become too onerous.

In our present day and age, there is arguably a significant fear of Jesus' question. There probably always has been. We sense just before the words come out of our mouth that we are about to make a big commitment to follow what Jesus stands for, and to follow Jesus himself. Too much, I can't do that.

And so we might hedge, as is very popular in our culture, by espousing a nonreligious spirituality, complete with a commitment to social justice.

Other hedges, popular in Christianity, certainly in Catholicism, are liturgical piety and ecclesial clericalism. The former is bound up with ritual, the latter is bound up with power. Both claim vociferously that they are following Jesus. Both are more likely to be ways of avoiding Jesus. They need to stand beside Peter and dwell on Peter's answer to Jesus’ question.

The era of the coronavirus pandemic, I think, is challenging all of us to stand beside Peter. We are post-resurrection people: we would have no trouble agreeing with his answer. (“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”) We would quite possibly, however, have a lot of trouble letting the answer expand, letting the dough rise, as it were, into its full significance for us.

Remember who you are.

Out there in the everyday world are thousands and thousands of people who are hungry for a meaningful, active spirituality. They are not coming to church to satisfy that hunger, because it feels like the church is the purveyor of empty, repetitive ritual. Inside the church are people, including and especially in leadership, who are wringing their hands over the declining numbers in the worshiping congregations. Isn't it obvious, the question that is being begged here? Two groups are missing each other, two groups that have the potential to provide a synergy that would light up the world! Oh. Isn't that what the gospel is about? Isn't that where Peter's answer to Jesus question will lead you? If you spend time with it.
     
Sadly, there is division in the church on how to approach this. Some want to double down on preserving the liturgy in its purity even going so far as longing to bring back Latin. Others say that if we do not become a mission church we will have no one in the pews anyway, and we will have lost our relevance. The divide was addressed in an article I read recently, by Fr. Victor Codina, S.J., The article appeared in the Jesuit publication America, in September, 2019. The title of the article is: Why do some Catholics oppose Pope Francis? I won't try to summarize the article here, but Fr. Codina speaks to the pastoral flavour of the theology of Pope Francis. The article resonated with me, because it seems to me that Pope Francis was standing beside Peter when Jesus asked the question, Who do you say that I am? Pope Francis immediately thought of the poor, the sick, the lost, the wayward, that Jesus had been loving and supporting.

Here is a short excerpt from the article. If we are going to revitalize the church, if we are going to attract people to Jesus, then this commentary is on the mark.  

“It bothers people when he (Pope Francis) says that we should not build walls against refugees but bridges of dialogue and hospitality. He is annoying when, following in the footsteps of Pope John XXIII, he says that the church has to be poor and exist for the poor, that the shepherds have to smell like sheep, that it has to be an outgoing church that reaches out to the peripheries and that the poor are a theological locus, topic or source.”

For those of us who feel like we are clinging to our pews, the answer to building our communities is here. But we really will need to dig deep and remember who we are. Mom had that part right. It starts with ourselves, the leaders will follow us.

Leaving Anatevka - What to take?

    There is a great scene in Fiddler on the Roof in which the young tailor Motel Kamzoil - who marries Tevye’s daughter Tzeitel - celebrates the ‘new arrival’ of a sewing machine. The people of the village gather around and congratulate the couple as though they had just given birth. Times are changing and this machine will be very important to them. Coincidentally, there is a new current of independent thinking among the youth, and Tevye the father fears that this will destroy their traditions, their way of life. To add a further huge complication, the Jews of the area are under attack from the Russians who are doing their best to take away their livelihood and force the Jews to find new ways to survive. For many, this involves leaving the area. The sewing machine will become important in the transition. It itself is not the transition, but it surely marks it. The couple will never forget the times in which they received that sewing machine.

    Peggy and I were excited like Motel and Tzeitel when our new baby arrived: a new gym style treadmill. The sewing machine image readily came to my mind. And as I thought about it over the next few days, it occurred to me that the image fits more closely than I had imagined at first.

    The Coronavirus has attacked our way of life. It has changed our ability to freely go places, it has robbed many of their income. Like Tevye and his family, we lost even our freedom to worship in the way to which we had been accustomed.

    For the two of us, the ability to move around in the community had included daily visits to the gym, high priority given our health histories. Those visits ceased, and we were left with walking in the community. Perfectly ok, but the weather has a lot to say about how and when you are going to do that! In particular, snow and bitter cold will be here in no time. Anticipating that, we made a big decision to transition to a new routine that would protect us in two ways: against exposure to the enemy virus in a gym, and against the weather elements that stop us from participating at all. The new routine is the treadmill in the basement.

    By itself, this is not at all noteworthy. But it is a bit like Motel’s sewing machine. It occurs as part of a transition to a new era. It does not make the transition, but it does mark it. As with many events in our lives this year, we will never forget when this took place.

    What was life like for those Jewish communities that had to leave everything behind? If you have seen the movie or play, you know that no matter how bad things were ever going to get, what they possessed to give them balance now and forever, was tradition. No-one could take that from them. The challenge, however, was how to incorporate it into the new reality of starting from scratch, and at the same time dealing with the perennial roiling that comes with kids growing up and thinking for themselves.

    Goodness, some of this sounds very familiar. My dad was greatly distressed by the changes brought by Vatican II in the mid 1960's. He kept asking me ‘What were we doing that was so wrong?’ I was so gung ho with Vatican II that I am not sure I gave him a full hearing. But he was upset.

    We are not in a Vatican Council circumstance right now, but we surely have experienced change in liturgies, starting with our ability to attend them. In the course of dealing with the disruption, parishes around the world have learned to stream their liturgies, and to get good at it. The upside of this is participation even if a step removed. The downside is no physical community gathering and no Eucharist. The convenience factor does not at all make up for those two losses. I think there is consensus on that.

    The next evolution - we are in the middle of it - has been the slow reopening of churches for liturgies, with limited seating capacity, strict social distancing rules, and significant limitations on the spoken and sung word by all those present. There is Eucharist, and there is community. And there is greatly slimmed down liturgical celebrations. Where is all that leading us?

    Not too long ago the National Catholic Reporter ran a series in which it asked the question, What next? The Church after Coronavirus.

    To my surprise, the authors and the people interviewed focused almost not at all on the details of the liturgies, as I might have expected they would. They focused instead on the nature of the communities, and what our gatherings are even supposed to be for. Massimo Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University worried that with our ability to choose the community we want to tune into online, we may be inclined to seek out groups with whom we resonate, rather than contributing to the local community of which we are a part. 

    Jesuit Fr. Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator who is president of the Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar, cautions against too much insularity wherein we look inward and end up trapped in bureaucratic and clericalist structures as before. This is an opportunity he argues, for us to look outward to those we have not included. After all, that is central to the teachings of Jesus. In saying this, he is anchoring all our changes in the biggest tradition there is - the Good News of the Gospel.

    Julie Hanlon Rubio is professor at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. She marvels at the ability to form or join whatever community one wishes, through Zoom. She adds: “Yet I also strongly believe in the idea of a local parish, where you show up to worship with people who aren't like you, but to whom you are connected as members of the Body of Christ. I'm grateful for Sunday mornings that feel like opportunity instead of struggle. But I'm worried about what will be lost when we choose the church we prefer over the one down the street.”   Again, she is pointing at the heart of the Gospel.

    I think that what is coming through here is that there are a lot of changes that may amount to transitions. Those transitions may well include changes within the liturgy. But that is not the emphasis these writers are discerning. Rather, there is a shared excitement that maybe, just maybe, the Church will return to its roots in the social/ redemptive mission of Jesus Christ, which is to bring all people together in love - no-one left out. In the words of Fr.Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator: “I am minded to dream of a post-coronavirus church with doors open to a new Pentecost that blows social distances away and frees consciences of bureaucratic, clericalist and hierarchical structures and certainties in which we were schooled to place our trust. I dream of a church receptive to new ways of practising solidarity and compassion in response to Jesus' commission to be women and men for others.”

    Isn’t this interesting. Doesn’t it hit you that if we emerge from all this with our eyes open and our minds attentive to who we are and to whom we belong, the liturgies will line up just fine? Changed or not.

    We are leaving Anatevka. Dangers of various kinds have forced that upon us. It turns out that difficult as this may be, and as unsettling as the experience has been, this is also a great opportunity. I am not sure what our sewing machine would be as we make our transition. But if we listen to voices such as I just referred to, we would have found our balance in the middle of change. Tevye said it well. Change all around us, anchored by a precious possession. Tradition.

Freedom and CounterWill in the Pandemic

In the middle of March break this year we heard that Ontario had declared a State of Emergency because of CoVid 19. Here we are now at the end of June, over 15 weeks later, and the State of Emergency has been extended into July. That is a long time to be living with serious restrictions on movement, shopping, and gathering.

And I suppose the big news at this point is not even that extension. It is that in some jurisdictions the infection rates are exploding again. Why? Because people got tired of waiting. People got angry at being told to wait. And people then refused to wait because they now turned the issue into one of 'rights.'When my rights are being violated by orders to stay indoors, to close my business, to wear masks, etc., than my freedoms are being violated. I will not tolerate that.

On Canada Day what a great time to reflect that somewhere along the line, a huge misunderstanding of freedom has taken place. Don't you hear the echoes of the three-year-old, "You're not the boss of me, I don't have to do that." Don't you hear echoes of the 15-year-old, "I'm old enough to make up my own mind. I'm going to go where I want."

Both of these protests are perfectly normal developmental events. Handled properly they resolve just fine, and healthy development continues.

But the objections we are hearing in the pandemic are not from three-year-olds or 15-year-olds, they are from supposedly mature adults. "You can't tell me what to do."

The largest age group I saw over the years in my practice was the 15 year old group. Parents would be at their wits end, and the kids were angry at the arbitrary, rigid directives from parents who used to be so loving!

That age is a time for everyone to develop an understanding of freedom and ownership.

I used to take the youth to the window of my office and asked them to look out on the street.

Me: "What side of the road are the cars on?"

Youth: "The right side."

Me: "How did they get there?"

Youth: "It's the law."

Me: "What if they decided they didn't want to be told where to drive? That left side might be nice today."

Youth: "There would be accidents."

Me: "Yes. And so the drivers are showing you one of the really important things about growing up. Namely, that you do things because you know they are the right thing to do. If someone told the driver to be sure to drive on the right side of the road, they would reply, 'Why are you telling me that? That's exactly what I was going to do.'

 Growing up, it turns out, involves doing things in a particular way all day long, in spite of being told to do them, because you were going to do it that way anyhow. And in the process you are exercising your freedom to take ownership of a rule, a directive. You will also smoothly learn how to object, to problem-solve, and to negotiate.

The person who recently threatened to have a doctor arrested for issuing a wear-mask order, has not gotten through the adolescent stage yet in which he or she understands that their freedom includes the right to follow that order and take ownership of it. Instead, they are stuck in what we call "counter-will;" the impulse to do the opposite of what I've been directed to do, just on the basis of having been directed to do it.

Our faith is one massive exercise of our freedom to make our own something that has been given to us on authority. I have mentioned previously that the post-modern movement objects to religion partly on that very basis. "I'm not going to be told what to do or what to think. I am my own guide for all that."

I recently heard a wonderful motivational speech in which the speaker said to be true to yourself, don't let anyone else tell you what to think or what you have to be. Partly correct, but incomplete. Jesus said something more or less like that, but what he was referring to was the self that you become when you follow me, when you accept and make your own the truth that “I am the way, the truth, and the life." Using your freedom you then stand firm against anyone or any power that would try to move you off that. Of course, if you haven't moved past the counter-will stage of your life, you will be easy pickings for anyone who says "Why are you doing/ believing all that stuff? They sold you that all your life, time for you to grow up and reject it all! Be your own person!"

The thoughtful person of faith says "Thank you but this IS who I am. I have made it my own. Freely!"

The thoughtful person of mature citizenship has no problem freely accepting the authority of a stay home or don't open or don't gather or do wear a mask order. The counter-will person, by contrast will succumb to the impulse to defy that authority.

In a faith community, the counter-will person may cause you to lose your faith.

In a pandemic, the counter-will person is going to make you sick.

What lessons we are learning. Don’t miss them!

And Happy Canada Day everyone! What a great country we are blessed to live in!