芥子46期 － A Catholic Way of Reading (Charles B. Gordon 神父)

A Catholic Way of Reading
The University of Portland
Rev. Charles B. Gordon, C.S.C.

 

 

Charles B. Gordon 神父

 

I think the subject of this talk – “A Catholic Way of Reading” – is best approached through a wider topic: a Catholic way of living. My idea is that the way we read can reflect the way we live. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I talk about living for a while before I talk about reading.

“As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till he shows us his mercy” (Psalm 123:2). This second verse of Psalm 123 inspires me to want to live my life of faith like that maid watching the hand of her mistress, ready to respond at any moment to her slightest gesture. I don’t imagine the maid as being tense and fearful as she watches. I imagine her attitude as being more like a shortstop as the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand and travels toward the plate. The shortstop is attentive but relaxed, poised to react almost instantaneously based on years of experience and countless hours of practice. That’s how I’d like to live my life – highly attuned to the presence of God and fully conformed to the will of God in my life.

Now, if you hit a sharp groundball to a person who’s never played baseball, their reaction will probably be to duck and cover. Not so the shortstop. After all, this is who the shortstop is. This is what the shortstop does. The ball is gathered up and thrown to the right base without hesitation, and without apparent thought. That’s the way I’d like my relationship with God to be. After all, I’ve been at this for a while. I wasn’t baptized yesterday. By now I ought be able to notice God’s grace active in the world where years ago I might have missed it. And when I find myself in a situation where the ordinary human instinct would be to duck and cover, other habits, cultivated through years of following Christ, should kick in and allow me to deal with it. After all, this who I am. This is what I do. Sure, I’ll make my share of errors. But, by the grace of God, I ought by now to be able to handle my position, and even the occasional line drive or bad hop.

Of course I’m not just talking about myself. I imagine the situation can be the same for all the baptized. We can all live our lives like slaves watching the hand of our master, ready to respond at the smallest sign. We can all be habitually attentive to the presence of God in the world – finding that presence where others might not – whether in the strong wind, or in the earthquake, or in “a still small voice.” (1 Kings 19:12 RSV) Where we find that presence we can seek God’s will and act in response to it. We can bring our God-given gifts to bear upon the moment, in light of our lived experience as followers of Christ. After all, that is who we are. That is what we do.

But perhaps you don’t want to take a slave as your role model. Maybe you’re thinking of the Gospel of John, chapter 15, verse 15, in which Our Lord says, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father.” (NRSV) Okay, let’s think about that. Let’s think about the implications of being a friend of Christ, and by extension a friend of God. How do we act as friends of God – a God who is Love? The short answer can only be that as God has loved us, we need to do our best to love God back. (see 1John 4:8) We need to take everything we know about human love, and apply that to our relationship with God.

Well, one thing that human lovers do is keep one another in mind. A person we love is never far from our thoughts. And we’re alert to their presence. If they’re around, we know it. You’d like to think, wouldn’t you, that if you were at a punk rock concert at the Roseland Theater, and the band was in full cry and the mosh pit was moshing and amidst all the mayhem the person you loved just passed briefly through your peripheral vision, you’d know it? That’s the way it is when you’re in love. It’s a bit like those penguins that can easily find their mates amidst tens of thousands of seemingly identical birds. Couldn’t it be that way between God and us? Couldn’t our love for God make us alert to even the most fleeting evidence of God’s presence in our lives and in our world?

And lovers continually find things that remind them of the person they love. A snatch of music, a certain fragrance, a special quality of sunlight just before dusk – any number of things can bring the beloved to mind. And other odd bits and pieces become precious because of their association with the one we love – a torn ticket found in the pocket of a seldom-used coat, a borrowed handkerchief – just about anything really. Couldn’t these things too have their analogies in our love for God?

So, what I’d like to suggest is that whether it’s as slaves attentive to the slightest gesture of our master, or as avid lovers of the God who is Love, we can live from moment to moment attuned to the graced presence of God in the world, and poised to respond to it.

There may be some specific ways in which Catholicism inclines us to live in just this way. What do you think of when I say the phrase, “the Word of God?” When they hear that phrase, many people think immediately of the Bible. When Catholics hear that same phrase – “the Word of God” – they tend to think first, not of the scriptures, but of our Savior himself: Jesus Christ is the Word of God. The Word of God is found wherever Jesus is present. This tendency to give the phrase wider application might dispose Catholics to be especially open to encountering the Lord outside as well as inside the sacred scriptures.

Of course, the place apart from the scriptures where Catholics are most accustomed to encountering their God is in the Eucharist, where Jesus Christ is really present in the consecrated bread and wine, as well as in the worshipping community. This notion of Sacraments as signs that truly contain what they signify, leads to a sacramental approach to life in general. The conviction that Christ is really present in the Eucharistic species inclines Catholics to seek, and to expect to find, other presences of Christ in other aspects of Creation.

Finally, Catholics are accustomed to employ all their senses in their lives of faith. We’re famous for our stained glass windows, incense, statues, ashes, fish on Fridays, Stations of the Cross, throat blessings with candles, Gregorian chants, hot cross buns, manger scenes, living rosaries, Advent wreaths – a whole panoply of sights and sounds and tastes and smells and textures that are integral to the way we lean into the world. That’s the way we roll. As a result, we’re alive to the idea that all our senses can afford access to the sacred. This must make us more open to encountering God in the evidence of our senses at any moment.

So where does this leave us? I hope it leaves us with a sacramental understanding of the world, relaxed but attentive, with all of our senses alert to the to the possibility of meeting with the graced presence of God in Creation, and ready to respond when we do. If this is the way that we live, couldn’t it also be the way that we read – even when what we are reading isn’t the Bible?

Years ago, I tried to teach C.C.D. to junior high school students. I remember being annoyed that, whenever they could, they interpreted what they read or heard as a reference to sex. You couldn’t refer to a “sextet” or a “penal colony” without the class erupting in sniggers and giggles. I wonder whether we ever really graduate from junior high in this regard. Some of us can remember back to the days when there were still people around who would say things with obvious sexual connotations and be blissfully unaware of the implications of their words. Alas, those people are mostly gone now. These days, after countless episodes of situation comedies and innumerable late night TV monologues, everyone gets the joke. Seemingly no sexual reference or double-entendre is too subtle or obscure for us to grasp. Should we make fun of those who see Jesus’ face in a potato chip or the silhouette of Mary in a shadow on the side of a grain silo, when we see a phallic symbol in the Washington monument or the capital dome as a big breast?

It occurs to me that if we were to live in the way I’ve been suggesting in this talk, instead of automatically picking up every sexual implication in what we experience, we would instead effortlessly notice every instance of grace. When we ran out of beer at a Super Bowl party we’d think of the wedding feast at Cana. When our dog showed up with a guilty expression on its face, after being missing for days, we’d think of the prodigal son. The top of a telephone pole visible from our bedroom window would remind us of the Cross. And there would be analogous moments in our reading, whether our text was J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, or Bruce Jay Friedman. When these graced occasions occurred, we would cooperate with them. We’d let them change us – let them move us to act.

These moments of grace might be of different kinds, and different degrees of magnitude, but right now I want to talk about just one kind. I’d like to say something about those occasions that we usually refer to as “moments of revelation.” We’re surprised when these moments happen. When they do, they don’t usually reveal something entirely new to us. Rather, they give us deeper insight into something, or someone, we thought we knew already. And a great deal that we have already experienced suddenly makes sense.

These moments tend to be very powerful, but extremely brief. When one is triggered, a person is often flooded with a feeling of profound peace and the conviction that they need never be afraid of anything again. This can be accompanied by the certainty that as soon as they have a chance to think about it, every question they have ever puzzled over will be answered. And the answer will be something very much like, “love.” But by the time they are able to engage their brain and start to think, the moment is over. The answers are gone.

Moments like these are not confined to Catholics. They are experienced by persons of all religions and of none. Outside the context of faith they’re often called “peak experiences” (Abraham Maslow). While it isn’t intended, there’s a kind of pun in the term “peak experience,” because in the history of Western thought and literature, moments like these have often been associated with mountain peaks, chasms, glaciers, and other spectacularly beautiful, but treacherous places. (See R. Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, London, Granta 2003) Beginning in the eighteenth century, Europeans of a poetic turn of mind would seek out such places hoping to stir up a feeling that came to be called, “the sublime.” The sublime was associated with dangerous things contemplated from a position of safety. It was sometimes colored by feelings of submission in the face of the awe-inspiring. When this feeling was evoked on the printed page, it was called the “literary sublime.” It’s easy to see the sublime as a kind of secular analogue of a religious experience.

But it’s the explicitly religious experience that concerns us here – moments of revelation understood as graced encounters with the Divine. How can such moments be understood? I think the question is best approached through the Christian concept of “kenosis.” Kenosis is a Greek word meaning “emptiness.” In its theological usage it refers to self-emptying. It’s rooted in the great Christological hymn in St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (Phil. 2:5-10). The hymn begins, “though he was in the form of God, [Jesus] did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness…” Starting with St. Paul, the Church has taught us to follow our Lord’s example. Inspired by him, we too need to empty ourselves. But before we can empty ourselves, it would be helpful to know what it is that we are full of. The short answer is, ourselves. We’re full of ourselves. Oh, we have our better moments, of course, but our default mode is willful selfishness. (It’s mostly as a result of that unfortunate incident with the apple in the Garden of Eden.)

Look at it this way: If God is who we Christians say God is, and has the characteristics we attribute to the Divine, you’d think that we’d be aware of God all the time – that our every waking moment would be a prayer. But let’s face it; we are perfectly capable of forgetting about God for days at a time. It can only be that something is distracting us from the Divine. And it must be pretty big if it can blind us to God. Oh, it’s big all right. It’s our ego. Each of us is the center of his or her own universe, and we regard everything and everyone else in relation to ourselves. Is it a threat to me? Could he be useful to me? What does she think of me? This is where kenosis comes in. If we can get over ourselves, through old-fashioned humility or some other means, even for a fraction of a moment, God’s grace can come crashing in to fill the space we’ve managed to free up.

Kenosis can happen when we are jarred out of our complacent egotism by a realization of our real place in the scheme of things. That’s one reason why it can be occasioned by experiencing prodigies of nature like mountain peaks, chasms, or skies white with stars. The contrast between our customary self-importance and the feeling of personal insignificance that an encounter with these things provokes can be kenotic.

Dangerous things like mountain peaks can trigger kenosis in another way as well. We all know that we will die one day. But for most of us, most of the time, that fact is an abstraction that doesn’t move us very deeply. The experience of something dangerous, at enough of a remove that it doesn’t make our mind blank out in abject terror, can cause us to experience the reality of our mortality as something more than an abstraction. Kenosis can ensue.

Another way to achieve kenosis is to love someone. If we can really love another person for his or her self, and not merely as an object of our desire, we will overcome our self-centeredness and become other-centered. That’s kenosis, in spades!

So, what I’m suggesting is, God is there all the time, but we are ordinarily too full of ourselves to notice. When we achieve kenosis, however briefly, and by whatever means, a cataract of God’s grace rushes into the space left empty. At this point, a moment of revelation can occur. Perhaps the reason such moments tend to be so brief is that we can’t sustain selflessness for any longer. As soon as the moment occurs, I think, “I am having an amazing spiritual experience!” Right away it goes back to being about me. No more kenosis, no more revelation.

How might this apply to our reading? Adventure has been defined as danger recollected from the perspective of safety. By this definition, when you are knee deep in crocodiles it isn’t an adventure. It becomes an adventure later when you are telling your friends how you managed to survive. In reading about adventure, danger is experienced at another remove. But the element of danger might still be sufficient for kenosis. It could be because our reading about nineteenth century Antarctic explorers as specks of humanity trudging across a featureless white world of ice prompts an insight into our relative unimportance in the order of nature. Or, the unexpected death of a beloved character in the second volume of a trilogy might make us feel the reality of our own mortality.

More generally, kenosis could occur whenever literature affords us one of those moments that “ring true” about the human condition. Emotion laden insights of this kind, whatever their specific content, are bound to offer a corrective to the conception of things that is implicit in the smug self-sufficiency through which we customarily filter our experience. When literary truth punctures our pretensions, we are emptied of our delusions and grace can rush in and fill the void.

One more way in which literature can occasion kenosis was signaled a moment ago, by my use of the phrase, “beloved character.” In good literature, fictional characters can feel “real” enough to us that we can come to love them and their worlds. Thousands of readers begged J. K. Rowling not to kill off their favorite characters in Volume VII. When The Two Towers was first published in the U.S., the apparent death of Frodo left readers grief-stricken – not to mention the anguish loosed through the centuries by the fictional deaths of Cordelia, Desdemona, Little Nell, or Sherlock Holmes. The love people feel for these characters is enough to draw them out of themselves, so that grace can get in. I’ve been speaking about kenosis occasioning God’s grace. By grace I mean God’s own presence in a way that is perceptible to our senses. God initiates the kenosis, just as God initiates the consequent outpouring of grace. God is in control here, not us. All we can do is cooperate. We cooperate by living our lives of faith in the way I’ve described in this talk. And what held for our living holds for our reading. Accustomed by our sacramental worldview to expect to find God’s presence in the world by means of all our senses, we come the text alert but relaxed, ready to be changed by what we read, and prepared to let that change move us to action. That is who we are. That is what we do.