Review for Religious - Issue 38.4 (July 1979)

Issue 38.4 of the Review for Religious, 1979.

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title	Review for Religious - Issue 38.4 (July 1979)
title_short	Review for Religious - Issue 38.4 (July 1979)
title_full	Review for Religious - Issue 38.4 (July 1979)
title_fullStr	Review for Religious - Issue 38.4 (July 1979)
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description	Issue 38.4 of the Review for Religious, 1979.
publisher	Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center
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spelling	sluoai_rfr-230 Review for Religious - Issue 38.4 (July 1979) Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus Jesuits -- Periodicals; Monasticism and religious orders -- Periodicals. Gallen Issue 38.4 of the Review for Religious, 1979. 1979-07 2012-05 PDF RfR.38.4.1979.pdf rfr-1970 BX2400 .R4 Copyright U.S. Central and Southern Province, Society of Jesus. Permission is hereby granted to copy and distribute individual articles for personal, classroom, or workshop use. Please credit Review for Religious and reference the volume, issue, and page number and cite Saint Louis University Libraries as the host of the digital collection. Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center text eng Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS (ISSN 0034-639X), published bi-monthly (every two months), is edited in collaboration with faculty members of the Department of Theology of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Robin 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. It is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute; St. Louis, Missouri. © 1979 By REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. Composed, printed and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri. Single copies: $2.00. Subscription U.S.A.: $8.00 a year; $15.00 for two years. Other countries: $9.00 a year, $17.00 for two years. For subscription orders or change of address, write REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS~ P.O. BOX 6070; Duluth, Minnesota 5.5802. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Robert Williams, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Associate Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor July, 1979 Volume 38 Number 4 Correspoudence with the editor and the associate editors, manuscripts and books for review should be sent to REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS; Room 4.28; 3601 LindeH Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; Jesuit Community; St. Joseph’s College; City Avenue at 54th Street; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19131. "Out of print" issues and articles not re-issued as reprints are available from University Microfilms International; 300 North Zeeb Road; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Journey Into Ancestral Fear Mary Grant, L.S.A. Sister Mary’s work in strife-torn Belfast has influenced much of her writing. Last year, Our Sunday Visitor published "’Yes in Belfast" under the title, "Yes Lord," which has proven to be a popular source of meditations for many in the United States. She is also involved in Christian Life Communities. Our correspondence address is through Wilbert Forker; 2 Bristow Park; Upper Malone Rd.; Belfast 9; Ireland. Walking up The Falls, reaching out in my heart to the whole city .... one with the countless people who have trod this ground through many centuries .... Gathering perceptions: sounds, stir-rings of life, the signs ofdeeperlife. Opening up to the signs of death, decay: the burnt-out chimney, the gaping walls--another life, an-other force .... The new trees planted: that they would represent Life--not just trees planted on the green of the dead .... Gathering all into a unity, integrating all: "Listen to the cry of Your People, Lord! My heart cries their cry--the cry of a thousand years is gathered into Your Presence. When I came to live in this city first, my immediate reaction to hesitant queries was, "Of Course I’m not afraid!" Then one night I dropped a friend in East Belfast, a part of the city I’ wasn’t familiar with. I missed a turn and found myself lost. Every tiny street was blocked at the end; every time I turned, my headlights picked up "King Billy" on the walls--and slogans! It seemed.every door opened to see who was in the strange tar: I was seized With nameless terror. I could not get out and ask my way. I felt threatened, trapped, alone! 481 4B2 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 / 4 In that night I realized how the fears of our environment had entered into me, despite myself. I understood the fears of those who walked alone at night, defenseless. I understood the fear of many people who had not left their district for years, never entered the "unknown" behind the barriers. Some children have never seen behind the barriers that their parents have erected. How do we learn to break through these fears? How do we become revitalized from the paralysis which hampers us? It is easy to quote. "Per-fect love casts out fear" (IJn 4)! But the truth is that we are a covenant people who have been unfaithful to that spirit of love and community by which all men were supposed to recognize the disciples of the Lord. I believe we have first of all calmly to acknowledge that fact, without blame or judgment on either side. And, equally calmly, we have to go about creating bonds of community. In these last few years we have talked much of justice. Our chief work of justice, though, involves our relationship to this covenant---our relationship among ourselves. What Are the Causes of Oppression Around Us? Reflecting on that night, on the grotesque forms of the unknown, I came to see that fear wears many guises. If we ponder on the question, What are the real causes of oppression around us?, immediately there come the replies: "British domination," Loyalist selfishness," "Social apathy," "I.R.A. Terrorism," "Unemployment," "Subhuman housing," and so forth. These are the likely response of a great number of people, depending on which side of the barriers they stand. ’ ~ I’m beginning to be more convinced that the~ real ~answer is our-selves--- our memories, our inability to forgive, to be Christlike; to know what to do and how to be as a Christian in the face of injusticei oppression. Our reaction to oppression has been very different fr6m that of the’early Christians. We look back on our Irish history as a people--checkered, erratic: like many anation. But as Christians; how have we fac(d~it? (I mean aH who call themselveS Christian.) We have retaliated with violence, crude-ness, injustice, in just as bitter a way. Some of us say: "We have not thrown bombs! We don’t believe that vio-lence is the answer." But have our hearts changed from republicanism or loyalism to a truly Christian approach to life? These labels really stand for all those people who wish to maintain their status quo, even at the cost of the lives of thej.r brothers and sisters. The death of hope is a high cost to pay for a moment’s security behind artificial barriers. You ~Will Find in People What You Expect to Find . ~ Why is the change so difficult to’accomplish? Why-are we still talking about it, rather than simply living in love? I wonder, have we really listened to what the violence is saying? I think it is only the dreadful symptom of Journey into Ancestral Fetir / what is happening to the heart of our people. I hear it as a’scream for help, the screaming of the voiceless. I see it not as someihing we can meet head-on, but amid a persistent reaching out in understanding love of peo-ple’s’ real needs. I’m convinced of the necessity to get at the cat]se. If not, we’ll become submerged ifi the symptoms which will get wors~ and worse no matter how we cover them up. Such encounters with our ancestral depths make it ciear to me that one of the deep-seated causes is the colonizer/colonized mentalities from which springs the. dividing wall of fear, mistrust, suspicion. The ancestral wounds have not healed. A change of mentality.does not happen overnight. It is the growth of a long searching, a patient understanding and a persevering love. Unless we have the cpurage to risk the leap of faith’towards our brother, whoever he is, (and I’m not talking simply about Loyalist and Republican), we cannot hope to begin this change of mentality. And we all need it. ! need first of all to learn to live with myself. I have to’ learn to live with my brothers,~my neighbors. Then I can open out to.the wider ~zommunity! The reasons which move people to suc.h positioris are mainly historical. But to grow as a people, to be Christian, we have to reach out across these historical, cultural, spiritual barriers and create a climate of acceptance and understanding of each other. And it musi. be two-way: I must address tile barriers of fear. mistrust, hatred, pride, prejudice within me--overcome them in myself first, and then move outwards. But how many of us have learned to live with ourselves? How many of us have integrated within ourselves the various strands of our ancestry? If I take even the first tentative steps in this process of integration, of growth, I discover that there are no ready-made answers in the movement outwards again towards my brothers. I can only share what I have dis-covered in my attempt to follow Christ. ! discover that I learn all the time, from the people I move among. Yes, God is still speaking today. We need to let him change us! ; His peace will not be found in mass meetings for peace, but in changed lives. While that is true, it is also true that many of the mass meetings for peace do spring from the changed lives of thousands of people, a change which has been taking place ~quietly over the last few years. It seems a change of climate has been growing--a springtime. However, unless it springs from areal change of heart it will die do~wn and get nowhere. I’d fear to think of peace as simply the absence of violence among us. When we experience a comparative lull, as recently we did, how do we read it? Is the lull a nursing of our wounds, a hardening of attitudes? Or is it a time of healing? We have had many violent episodes in the past which eventually died down. But our hearts didn’t change. Unless this change of attitude prompts’us to really seek out our brother, to understand him, as he is and not to try to change him, then it is but a caricature of Christianity--you will find in your brother only what you bring, what you are. 41~4 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 /4 Becoming iMore Fully Human The trouble with most of us is that we haven’t fully explored who we are. We transfer to our brother a whole lot of that deep subconscious which we haven’t faced in ourselves.. What is growth, integration, but a process of becoming more truly the person I am not some dream, or ideal, but truly myself. It is not easy to live with a known self, no matter how many angles, or how many depths of light and darkness that self holds. Within the context of what it means to be Christian, I see this growth as a process of Incarnation. Very often we are so close to all that is happening in this .process that we cannot see clearly at all what is .happening while it is happ6ning. Occa-sionally we have to stand back and look from a different viewpoint. Then whole new worlds of meaning light up our horizon. Through a brief en-counter w, ith the East, I myself had some such ~experience. When our separate worlds met (first, second, third), in my being lifted out of my own life experience of p.overty, need, struggle, into a totally "different" world, I experienced "living through Incarnation," not simply looking to it for meaning. I went carrying the burden of this seemingly impossible situation in our country. Would anything the East could teach thl:ow light on that? The situation of other nations was just as appalling. Where might hope be found? I felt saddened by the many who know only a hopeless resignation, and more saddened by those who channel their despair into reckless violence. The presence of Christ assured me that this was only part of the picture, but I had not had the reference ofmy o~vn experience to work on. I had not seen, touched, tasted, so I did not know--I hung on ’to belief. I felt stifled by the polarization of parts of my home-city into ghetto areas which prevents the natural giving and taking in which reaching oi)t and sharing would promote reconciliation. I felt frustrated by the third force which goads each side against the other rather thanwork for peace; The "ancestral fears" of our environment had eaten into us so deeply that I did not recognize them in myself. Yet, in the midst of this atmosphere of defeat, His hope rose up and beckoned more gtrongly, buoying me up. In our sheer need I saw Him at work in broken lives--healing, restoring. But there were so many ques-tions. So much I needed to’learn. In my being lifted out of my own life-exp+ rience of poverty, need, struggle, into a totally "different" world, I felt I lived through this "God becoming man" again. I was not outside, looking on. I became man--human. If I might look for a key word to describe this experience of Incarnation, it might be sharing. Too many have gone from the West to the East to give--to satisfy a nagging sense that "we must do something." We, though, in approaching our hosts with empty, open hearts, found ourselves en-riched beyond measure: reverence for the other; stillness, waiting. Entering into another’s reality means going outside the self. Journey into Ancestral Fear Sharing, Not Distributing If we have not gone outside of self, outside "our" great world, we will remain on the level of doing. We will distribute from our bag of tricks and wonder.why, one day, it runs empty and we haven’t that -powerful" feeling any more. No, to share speaks of equality. Sharing never makes others dependent, never prevents growth, never closes the door to a return. What else is sharing, but the life of the Trinity of love? Christ prayed that we may be one as They are one. Life is not life at all unless it is shared. To share the ordinary things of life gives me an idea of what it will be like to share the life of God. Have we learned to live a little like our God of Love? Could I truthfully say: "All I have is yours"? (see Jn 17:10). In my eagerness to live for the good of my own people, I learned that I had been affected by the Western sickness of wanting to give all the time. In being thrown back on my personal poverty and powerlessness, I have learned better how to receive--graciously, lovingly. It has opened up a beautiful new perspective in regard to all those whose lives touch mine, whether that might be family, work, community, friends, strangers. To all people, I have learned from the East the meaning of the simple, demanding statement: "I am for you.", Simple realities we take so much for granted have assumed a deeper significance: the really deprived among us are those without hope, those who have not discovered the immense riches of their true selves, those who hide behind barriers of fear, mistrust, hatred; those of us who dare not celebrate a life we feel too fragile; those ofus who have lost the festivity and joy of living. "What does it matter if you gain the whole world and lose your true self?." (Mk 8:36). In being evangelized by those people considered "poor" in the eyes of the world, I have become more deeply human--just as I have received my reality as a person also from those to whom I have been sent here at home. There Are No "Them" and "Us" As He turned to his people he felt great compassion: he wanted to reach out. His very desire for their good healed them--he truly "lived with" their need. There are no "them" and "us"--it is always "we together." He wants to free each one of us from our fears, doubts, hesitations, inabilities, limitations. He wants to launch us on his mission, before his healing power can effectively flow through us. 1 think ! lost any trace of the "Messiah complex," of "giving Christ to the world" rather than discovering him present inall peoples, during that time in the East. This true sharing leads to a deep communion. The bonds of community grow in the measure that we share who we are with all men. How do I approach those on the other side of the barriers in our own environment? Is it from a position of strength toward weakness? Is it from a position of "having it all" and needing to satisfy a nagging sense that "we must do something"? Or do those of us who genuinely want to reach out to others, 4~16 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/4 do so from the reality of being grasped by Christ,freed by him, impelled by his love to proclaim that he is alive today--among us? There is something deep within each of us as human beings that makes us want to live in communion with others. I don’t want to approach anyone, or want to break through barriers, with the attitude of "them out there," of "isn’t it awful?," of "what can we do about it?" I would rather like to receive all with an empty, open heart, in reverence, in stillness--in waiting, if need be. Entering into another’s reality means entering into the "why" of the fears, barriers, defenses. Do I live with a sense of equality among all? When we talk of neighborliness, of friendship across the barriers, could I truthfully say to you, "All I have is yours!"? Only then can we return to each other the festivity and joy of living. How One Man Became Free In the slums of Manila, where 80% of the people live below the poverty line, they spoke with us about the climate of fear and oppression around them. There was no hint of hopelessness--though one often met with a feeling of powerlessness. This was brought home to us as one group told us how they had come across the wife and family of a well-known political prisoner. ~ This manhad been in a position equivalent to the opposition. Since the introduction of martial law he had been in prison, and denied the right to ordinary legal proceedings for a trial. A military tribunal hearing was to begin the following day. His wife pleaded with us visitors to. come with her. With some apprehension as to possible consequences, we did, and’ were amazed to find the courtroom nearly filled with priests and sisters morally upholding the prisoner~ The hearings of his challenge to the tribunal was an outstanding example of real strength against injustice. A remark he made during the trial has echoed in my mind through all the weeks and months which followed: My cell door, ironically, has been my door to freedom. Having walked through it, I have lost my fears. It became my door to freedom when I finally acknowledged its threats as the promise of liberation and truth .... I cannot yield to you my spirit and my conscience. I am yielding to might but not to right .... After four years in confinement, 1 have finally realized that man must fear most the prison of his own making--the prison of fear itself.... Freedom From Fear I returned with renewed’faith--God, who has begun this great thing, humanity, and Christianity; will see it through. Sharing in his love for all those whose lives touch mine, I dare to believe that he can use even me to bring life to a world without hope. And, when I am united with you.., and you.., who believe, the kingdom of God has come among us. "There are no experts, only disciples who learn by doing." ~An’d, when we are given the courage to launch out into (he deep, we don’t know where Journey into Ancestral Fear that "doing" will end! When Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, he gave him ~over to the people wh6 surrounded them to be unbound. So, as he raises us, he gives us to each other to continue the unbinding--receiving our reality from each other, giving each other our freedom--in dignity, simplic-ity, beauty, hospitality. "Yes, we are a happy, carefree people, but something is happening to our hearts which we do not understand." The worst form of poverty is to be alive without hope. To be without hope is to be without Him---our Savior. But where He is, there is no fear: "Perfect love casts out fear" (1 Jn 18). I came away from the East free of a fear which had paralyzed and prevented all aspects of my life. And so I understood the fear in our environment here at home. The historic wounds are so deep, part of the very fabric of our lives--so deep we might not recognize ourselves without them. As God touches our beings personally, gradually, gently., leading us toward personal wholeness in him, so he touches us as a people. He, as it were, goes back into history and heals the wounds history has left behind. This is the healing we need as a nation. ~ This freedom from fear enables us to proclaim by our lives: "Serenity--knowing we are loved, assured, at peace with him and our-selves; Stability--God is God, let Him be God. He holds all, hand it over to him. Tranquillity---overflowing from an abiding sense of his presence among US. Capability--his power in our lives, his power overflowing to others. This is our service--to be open to all: the fruit of the Spirit of peace among us. We need to speak for God in these our troubled times as reso-lutely as the prophets of old. We need to proclaim joy, hope, peace in the midst of the many disasters round about. Real hope dawns when there is no other possibility than absolute dependence on God---our foot constantly wearing out his doorstep! The Brotherhood of Man is Possible! Already, as I was learning these truths more deeply, thousands of peo-ple were rising up at home and speaking fearlessly for peace, forging stronger ties towards reconciliation. Since then, freedom has been pro-claimed again and again, echo6d by a thousand voices. In the past, gather-ings in war left bitterness, hatred, division festering in age-old wounds. And then enough people said, "We have been governed by fear" to enable gatherings in peace, and joy, forging links of reconciliation. Yes, I learned how to face our fears, turn my back on them, and reso-lutely turn towards all that builds up a climate of reconciliation, strength-ened not by any ability but by my weakness and dependence on His strength. It was worth going to the other end of the world to learn that alone ! 488 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/4 I have felt great sadness at these gatherings too. How effective they will ultimately be depends on how many present have risen out of their fear, how deeply and how realistically each one becomes peace. Too many are carried along on waves of emotion! Yet the brotherhood of man is possible---even here! The answer to the divisions, exploi/ations, war, hatred, rejection, hunger, fear-in-the-world is our Christ of the Beatitudes, with his call to share. There is only one human family. But if we have never experienced human love, can we offer love, or understand what struggle for another involves, or live a life of communion with God? And how can anyone know love--unless you and I love? In the past I have been constantly strengthened by the beautiful expressions of love and hospitality, of generosity, of sharing that I have known among our people here, daily witnessing to the fact that even in our shattered lives the spirit of love is at work among us. Iam filled with more hope than ever. And I am very, very, grateful at being placed near people in .need--at the heart of my people’s search for him; at the point of their desire for him. Life has always been beautiful and full of the surprises of God: that beauty has been increased a thousandfold for me. I feel hope rising in leaps 6f Joy: Expect the impossible! Believe the unbelievable! Proclaim the truth !--For God is with us! Each, returned to his own Galile~i, can proclaim fearlessly that which we have seen, touched, tasted (1 Jn 1:1). He is here. He is with us. Hope makes us live. ForHe is our peace. Sitting It Out With Job: The Human Condition Mary Catherine Barron, C.S.J. Sister Mary Catherine is a frequent contributor to these pages. Her last article appeared in September, 1978. She resides at 91 Overlook Ave.; Latham, NY 12110. For a long time now, he had haunted me, this acerbic little man-- haunted me and annoyed me. He seemed so utterly sore: ulcerous wounds on the outside, bleeding heart on the inside. Who needed it? Who also needed his words--thunderous, vehement complaints~de-nouncing life, God, man. Quite honestly, who wanted to tangle with all this writhing agony? It might underscore the already too familiar. So determinedly, I put him aside and concentrated on other things: the joy of Joseph, the fidelity of Ruth, the.trusting surrender of Esther. But they occupied my time, not my mind. For behind them all, there he sat, that angry, implacable figuremstinking, screaming, wildly gesticulating. Ulti-mately, against my will and better judgment, he antagonized me to his side--flies and all. To be candid, I hate flies. And odors like disease and manure, And unmitigated complaining. And pseudo-sympathy. It all talks and walks like death. So I didn’t really like Job in his utter humanity. It was too graphically prophetic. That was the haunting part. The annoying part is that, in spite of all of it, I stayed. So now there are two of us si~ting in the noonday sun--hot and stubborn and mad. Eventually, someone will have to speak. In the end it was Job who broke the silence and cursed the day of his birth (Jb 3:1). 489 490 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 / 4 Just like that--for twenty-six verses--spewing out anger. Why was he born? Why couldn’t he die? Words filled with dread of the future, sleepless-ness, lament. Grief has a way of doing that, you know. Utter stone.., then the crack across the surface. A few heaves--abruptly a mountain becomes a volcano, lava of words and emotion searing out everywhere. Shock on the faces of onlookers st.ampeding to take cover: "Spare us your painful fire, please. Please.’~ While the volcano rages on. And then.., the deathlike stillness ¯ . . followed by meaningless words trying to make meaning. A survivor gasps: "Then Eliphaz of Teman spoke: ’If I were as you are, Job . . .’ " If ¯ . . if. Through all the wreckage and debris... "If I were as you..." if. The irony of those words: Who can be like Job, when one is sound and whole and safe, free from loss, darkness, despair? Speaking out of loved ones alive and farm lands intact, what can such a one as Eliphaz know of unanswered questions, heartrending supplications? For him, do they even exist? Silence. Then, imperceptibly, a stirring from the ashpit, a flicker of the eyelash. Job speaks: If only my misery could be weighed .... What wonder then if my words are wild? The arrows of Shaddai stick fast in me .... My spirit absorbs their poison (6: I-4). Ah yes--those poisonous arrows of Shaddai; those intimations of doom from Sheol that stick deep. into the soul; the-certain knowledge- that never again will there be innocence and joy. And always there ~are the bitter questions asked over and over of self: Will I be able to go on? Why go on anyway? Where are my friends? Why can’t they understand? Fear and loneliness. The Underworld. Someone creeps near to draw out the stir~g, to touch the cracked skin. It is Bildad. He urges humility: You too, if so pure and honest must now seek God, plead with Shaddai (8:4-5). These are soothing words indeed: "ff you are honest." This is an answer with insight!?’Seek God; plead with Shaddai." How is Job to do this when Shaddai has disappeared? Where is God to be found for Job, the sufferer? A lull ensues. The hot breeze blows. Flies buzz. Then a voice. And Job said: Your own hands shaped me, modeled me: And would you now have second thoughts and destroy me? (10:8). The appeal and bargaining begin. Who hasn’t done it? Bargaining with self; Sitting It Out With Job: The Human Condition / 49"1 bargaining with God. And the panic: how dare oppose the Almighty’s will? How dare question Yahweh God Omnipotent? Suppose I am right? Wha.t difference would it make? Suppose I am wrong? What then? Yet, what is there to lose when one has already lost everything? "Yahweh, give a little happiness before death." Is this too much to ask? Appeal and bargain-ingwwho hasn’t done it? .Zophar apparently. For he queries pontifically: Can you claim to grasp the mystery of God, To understand the perfection of Shaddai? It is higher than the heavens; what can you do? It is deeper than Sheol; what can you know? (11:7-8) Truth--unadorned and stark. What can you do? Nothing. What can you know? Nothingwabsolutely nothing. That is the darkness, the pain. Help-lessness in the face of the abyss--the human condition. What can you know? What can you do? Nothing--nothing except to confront Yahweh. Despair--the human condition. Then, convoluting tortuously, comes the rush of Job’s words, ejaculated with the vehemence of despair, discharged with the agony of futility, resolute like one,maddened: I mean to remonstrate with God; I will do the talking, whatever may befall me. I put my flesh between my teeth, I take my life in my hands. Let him kill me if he will (13:3-15). The pathos of those words, the frenzy! The "last-chance syndrome." Where have we heard it before? From what corner of the universe has’it n0t cried out? V~e havehea’rd it on the lips of the dying; in the hearts of survivors; from the tomb called old age and rejection; out of the spectral ¯ stare of disease and starvation. Who has not, at some point in life, taken one’s flesh in one’s hands, remonstrated with God? But Eiiphaz cannot understand. Not yet having plumbed the depths of misery, never having drunk suffering’s cup to the dregs, he cannot fathom .the pain that would drive a man to contend with God. He only sees the obvious: anger and rebellion. And sohe says: ~’See how passion carries you away!" Passion--that double-edged sword of grief and joy, the ecstasy and bestiality of man, the most cherished and most despised of gifts. Passion. Who has not longed for its transforming unity? Who has not wept over its fragmenting discord? Passion. I watch him--Job~as he masticates Eliphaz’s words. He chews them carefully as one chews a fish with bones. He moves his teeth cautiously around them and just as cautiously his t6ngue. But he will not swallow 492 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 / 4 them. He holds them in his mouth, in one corner of his cheek, and stares ahead at emptiness. "Swallow them," I plead silently, urgently, "or spit them out. Don’t hold them lest they choke you." But there is nothing-- only that awful bulbous cheek and the empty stare. It is mid-afternoon, the height of heat and sun, reason’s siesta time. Perspiration drips. Things swim before the eyes: mirages, desert visions, subconscious creatures from the soul. The universe crumples like a folded fan. The breeze pants hot across inert bodies, creating the sense of being played upon, fretted. And then, heartrendingly Job cries out: He has shattered me! He has pierced me! He has breached me! He has borne down on me! Every fibre of my heart is broken! I weep! I cry out! Still he shoots his arrows into me! I am overcome! (16:17) The Litany of Passion, divine passion. Good old platitudinous Eliphaz has finally hit the mark. Unerringly, unknowingly, Job has be’en ravished. In the nakedness of a cloudless day, we have seen him vanquished, embraced. He gasps and swallows. The lump travels to his throat and lodges. Is it possible that loss is no longer what he wails? Could it be that he and Yahweh are suddenly bartering for surrender? Without moving an inch, Job has traversed a terrain. I swallow too. Silence impregnates solitude. No one stirs. The sun moves impercep-tibly. A shade begins. Coolness trickles down my brow. ’I close my eyes and wipe the damp. I feel like sleep. Or death. I feel like dying, if dying is so much a pouring out. I feel like.sleep if sleep is like release. I feel ...... Mournfully into the dusk, Bildad speaks, musing: Driven from light into darkness man is an exile from the earth (18:18). "Driven from light into darkness." Like the sun’s course. Like the ocean’s tide. Like the season’s change: Like life’s pattern! Dawn, noon, night. High, ebb, low. Fertility, fall, winter. Birth, life, death. "Driven from light into darkness." Man. The mood is infectious. Night hedges in. Animal cries echo. And Job takes up the refrain: God, you must know, is my oppressor and his is the net that closes round me. He has covered my way with darkness. My kindred and my friends have all gone away. The hand of God has struck me (19:6-21). Sitting It Out With Job: The Human Condition / 493 "Driven from light into darkness." And suddenly, like a meteor across the sky, Hope flares briefly: But this 1 know, I, Job, that my Avenger lives, and he, the Last, will take his stand on earth. He will set me close to him, and from my flesh I shall look on God. He whom I shall see will take my part; These eyes will gaze on him and find him not aloof (19~25-27). It is the song of the prisoner, the condemned. It is the avowal of the sick man, dying. It is the prayer of the faithful soul, deserted. "I know that my Avenger lives." His words fall into the air dropping like snow on velvet, glistening and hushed. The moon rises and clouds over; the stars wink and disappear. It is the inky time of night. Absolute aloneness. Total isolation. Simple breath-ing is intrusion. And I think: "Enveloped by the darkness, shall we quietly slip away’?" The eternal temptation of friendship: to quietly slip away. Will he even know we’re gone, so absorbed is he in pain? Will he even care, since, in fact, we cannot help? Is there any point to vigils when the heart lies already dead? Truly, how far does fidelity go? How deep does commitment bind? Ironically, Job gives the answer: fidelity is radical. Its presence is an absolute grace; its absence, an absolute sorrow not to be compared. Job has known the calamity of loss, the pain of bereavement, the suffering of illness. Yet, none of these hold the anguish of desertion and infidelity which is the dark night of the soul; the index tingler of Yahweh scraping across the heart; the Ruah, his breath, blowing in the memory, tantalizing, near, but indescribably far away. From this void of absolute emptiness, Job laments in prayer: That heavy hand of his drags groans from me. If only 1 knew how to reach him, or go travel to his dwelling! If I go eastward, he is not there; or westward--still I cannot see him. If I seek him in the north, he is not to be found; invisible still when I turn to the south .... For darkness hides me from him and the gloom veils his Presence from me (23:2-17). This is Psalm 139 prayed backwards. Even in desolation, Job is a good Israelite. And how accurately he speaks. When human friends depart, the griefis great, but who can measure the torment which ensues when God withdraws? "Under cover of darkness, Yahweh, have You, too, slipped away?" So I sit and wait and rest. The night leaks out drop by drop. Minutes become ages, then cease. It is the hour of desolation, which is timeless. 4~14 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 / 4 Inevitable. "And Job continues his solemn discourse. He says:" Who will bring me back to the months that have gone, and the days when G~d was my guardian; When his lamp shone over my hi~ad~ and his light was my guide in the darkness? I cry out to you and you give me no answer (29:1-4; 30:20). How does one deal with that--the silence of~non-response, the answer of the void? Does one walk away dejectedly or does one catapult into the abyss? There is death either way. And thus, Job carefully considers, examines his days and his nights, probes his heartaches and ecstasies, fingers his hopes and his dreams. Is their memory worth silence or speech, retreat or confrontation? And then with a mighty leap, embodying faith and despairJob issues the challenge, directly, forcibly, to God: Who can get me a hearing from God?~ I have had my say from A to Z; now let Shaddai answer me~ When my Adversary has drafted his writ against me, I shall wear it on my shoulder, and bind it round my head like a royal turban. I will give him an account of every step Of my life, and go as boldly as a prince to.meet him (31:35-40). With this ringing declaration, argumentation ceases; lament is done. "End of the words of Job" (31:40). A tremulous pause. Terror grips. Awe invades. The e]arth turns over and I am sick, my senses reeling. Roaring thunder, thickening night. "My God! My God! We are strangling to death. Our words regurgitate." The desert sand flails. I cover my face; I grovel on the earth; I burrow into the dirt. "And then from the heart of the tempest, Yahweh gave Job his answer" (38:1). In fifty eight questions! And Job replied to Yahweh: My words have been frivolous; what can I reply? 1 had better lay my finger on my lips. (40:3-4) God has a way of doing that--giving questions for answers. He has shown himself divine Socratic: And Yahweh God called to the man: Where are you? (Gn 3:9). Yahweh asked Cain: Where is your brother Abel? (Gn 4:9). YahWeh asked Abraham: Why did Sarah laugh? (Gn 18:13). And the one who wrestled with Jacob said: Why do you ask my Name? (Gn 32:29). And Yahweh answered Moses: Who makes man deaf or dumb, gives him sight or leaves him blind?Is it not I, Yahweh? (Ex 4:12). In fact, all through Salvation History we have been closing our mouths Sitting It Out With Job: The Human Condition / 495 with our fi .ngers~too late. Job is in good company. I relax and come up for air,. And Job gave answer to Yahweh: I know that you are all powerful: what you conceive, you can perform. I am the man who obscured your designs with my empty-headed words. 1 have been holding forth on matters I cannot understand; on marvels beyond me and my knowledge (42:1-3). Humility. Man before the divine. Nature kneeling to Transcendence. The mystery of God. And Job replied: I retract all I have sa!d; In dust and ashes, I repent (42:!-3). The beauty of humanity. Its capacity for enlargement. Its yearning for completeness. Its ability to change. Because 1 knew you then by hearsay, but now I see you with my own eyes (42:5). Knowledge of the heart. Contemplation and surrender. Incarnation re-versed: man entering into God, Peace. My pulse resumes. My heart begins to beat. I can see that I am stained. I can see that I can see.t A mist of rose gathers in the east. A breeze sighs. Or is it Eliphaz? And Yahweh God said to Eliphaz of Teman: ’I burn with anger against you and your two friends for not speaking truthfully a~out:me as my servant Job has done. So now find seven bullocks and seven rams, and take them back with.you to my servant Job, and offer a holocaust for yourselves, while Job, my servant, offers prayers for you. I will listen to him with favor and excuse your folly in not speaking of me properly as my servant Job has done.’ Eliphaz of Teman, Bildad of Shuah and Zophar of Naamath went away to do as Yahweh had ordered, and Yahweh listened to Job with favor (42:7-9). So now there are two of us sitting in the morning’s dawn, tired, and joyful, and reborn. Someone will have to speakmbut no one does. There is only the echo of a deeper silencemthe silence of refrain: Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Who decided the dimensions of:it; do you know? Have you ever gi~,en orders to the morning? Have you journeyed to the sources of the sea? Which is the way to the home of light? Where does darkness live? Has the rain a father? What womb brings forth the ice? (38; 39) Riddles. Unsolved riddles. Man, and mystery, and wonder. Pain, and suffering, and death. The human condition. Riddles. Unsolved riddles. And 496 / Review for Religious, Volume38, 1979/4 always the eternal unyielding question: "Do you really want {o reverse My judgment and put Me in the wrong to put yourself in the right?" (40:3) I stretch and rise to go. Job never notices. He is wrapt in prayer, I suppose, for Eliphaz, Bildad, and Teman. 1 shake out my robe, flex my toes inside my sandals. I start across the sand. The dusty road coils away and flows into the sky; the air trembles with the weight of birds; the grasses caress the soil. Love and infinity. Providence and care. The human condi-tion. I plod on down the road, humming as I go: Has the rain a father? What womb brings forth the ice? Now Available As A Reprint The "Active-Contemplative" Problem in.Religious Life by David M. Knight Price: $.75 per copy, plus postage. Address" Review for Religious Rm 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, Missouri 63108 Jungian Psychology and Christian Spirituality: I Robert M. Doran, S.J. Father Doran delivered three lectures at Creighton University last year as part of a Spiritual Enric.hment Program. This isthe first one in article form. He resides in the Jesuit Community; Creighton University; 2500 California Street; Omaha, NE 68178. Christian Spiritual Transformation: Self-Transcendence and Self-Appropriation This is the first of three articles on the subject of Jungian psychology and contemporary Christian spirituality. The present article will focus on the latter of these two items, on Christian spiritual transformation as this is understood at the present moment in the life of the Church. By concentrat-ing on two terms frequently employed in the works of Bernard Lonergan, self-transcendence and kelf-appropriation, I hope to provide a context for the next two articles, which will deal more extensively with Jung. This first article will treat, first, Christian spiritual tranformation as self-transcendence; second, Christian spiritual transformation as growth in self-knowledge orself-appropriation; third, the levels of consciousness that can be discovered when one enters on the way of self-appropriat!on; and fourth, the relation of feelings and symbols to these various levels or dimensions of consciousness. This fourth topic locates that element of our interior lives in regard to which Jung’s insights become pertinent for our spiritual self-understanding. I have discovered that any such treatment of Jung as the present one eventually brings me into that form of discrimination which, in Ignatian 497 4911 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/4 spirituality, is called the discernment of spirits. Jung is a religiously contro-versial figure. Not only does my own treatment and evaluation of Jung tend to arouse rather than quell the arguments that surround his person and his work, but, more significantly, my critical response to Jung always ~arries me to the heart of the Christian exigence to differentiate the true call of God from the subtle attractions of the force~ of evil as these two contrary tendencies compete for the allegiance of men and women involved in the renewal of the contemporary Church. Why this is so will hopefully be-come clear in the subsequent articles, especially in the final one. But perhaps I can offer now some indication of the difficulty. First, then, Jung ih a religiously controversial figure. The religious significance of his psychological insights is variously interpreted. John A. Sanford and Morton Kelsey are two well-known authors who have drawn on Jung to promote and understand Christian self-discovery.~ On the other hand, James Hiilman has. maintained that Jung’s guidelines to "soul-making" are of a completely different order from the well-known paths to spiritual transformation in Christ and from the insights of the other major religious traditions of the world,z Martin Buber entered into direct conflict with Jung, claiming that the psychology of individuation and Yahwistic faith are diametrically opposedorientations.of the human spirit.3 Jung him-self, as we shall see, gives some indications of his own that the process of individtiation will lead the cognoscentes to the position of being able to dispense with all forms of traditional religious involvement; but he also attempted to offer his psychology as an aid to the pastoral care of souls.4 What ’is one to make of these differences and ambiguities? Obviously, some framework must be found to enable us to enter on the kind of process that Lonergan calls dialectic and foundations: the process, namely, in which we not only assemble and review alternative interpretations, but also evalt~ate and compare them, reduce their affinities and oppositions to their underlyin~ roots,.determine which, if any, of.these roots stand in dialectical ~See, for example,~John A. Sanford, Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1968); Healing and Wholeness (New York: Paulist Press, 1977); Morton Kelsey, Dreams: The Dark Speech of the Spirit, A Christian Interpretation (New York: Doubleday, 1968); Encounter with God: A Theology of Christian Experience (Minneap61is: Bethany, 1972). 2See James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972). I quote from p. 21: "The spiritual-director models of guru, rabbi, oflgnatius or Fenelon, of Zen master, are only substitutions on which we lean for want of surety about the true model for psychology." 3See Edward C. Whitmont, "Prefatory Remarks to Jung~s ’Reply to Buber,’ " in Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology andJungian Thought (1973), pp. 188-195; and C; G. Jung, "Religion and Psychology: A Reply to Martin Buber," ibid., pp. 196-203. 4Compare C. G. Jung, "’Is Analytical Psychology a Religion?" (notes on a talk given by Jung, in Sprihg, 1972, pp. 144-148) with Jung’s "Psychotherapists or the Clergy," in C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1933), pp. 221-244. Jungian Psychology and Christian Spirituality: I / 499 opposition to one another in such wise that only a radical transformation of the basic horizon can achieve reconciliation, and, finally, choose that basic horizon and those resultant positions and interpretations which we will make our own.5 Such a framework is what I hope to offer in theopresent article. Secondly,- my own judgments and decisions regarding the potential spiritual fruitfulness of Jung’s work are themselves controversial, at least in the sense that they will please neither Jung’s detractors nor his enthusias-tic followers. For I will sharply differentiate the process of Christian self-transformation from the way to individuation that .lung maps out for us. But I will also insist with equal force that there is much that we not only can, but indeed must, learn from him in developing both a theology and an ascesis of" spiritual transformation in the context of the contemporary world. Thirdly, the only final arbiter of the kind of discrimination that I find necessary is what we have come to call the’discernment of spirits..lung’s theological A.mbiguities, and thealternative interpretations and evaluations that are offered of his work, are symptomatic of an underlying spiritual conflict that can be mediated only in the context of the dialectic ofgrace and of sin, of the Standards of Christ and of Satan. David Burrell has indicated correctly that one cannot fail to meet God if one goes on the inner journey to individuation.6 But one will also meet much.that is not God, and that is even opposed to God. Not only does Jung not help one to discriminate these forces as they operate in one’s psyche, but he also contributes to and even encourages the confusion’that can be experienced in such moments that call for discernment, and thus mires one in the conflictual forces that wage an ultimate battle in the depths of one’s psyche. Jung’s work, if left uncriti-cized, leads one into a psychological cul-de-sac that can assume demonic pi’oportions. Christian Spiritual Transformation As Self-Transcendence ~ ’ There are many diverse and quite useful approaches to the understand-ifig’of spiritual transformation. I have chosen to focus on two terms that have been developed by Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan’s thought has achieved a great deal of notoriety due principally, it would seem, to its difficulty. I have no intention here of repeating the subtle intricacies of his full argumentation. I will rather present in what I hope are quite under-standable tdrms (he results of that argumentation, and will deal with more 5Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), Chapters Ten and Eleven. 6David Burrell, Exercises in Religious Understanding (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), p. 221. 500 /ReviewforReligious, Volume 38, 1979/4 subtle points only to the extent that they are necessary to clarify my basic position.7 I choose Lonergan’s approach to the issue of Christian spiritual trans-formation for several reasons. First, it is the approach with which I am most familiar and the one that 1 personally have found most helpful. Secondly, Lonergan explicitly takes his stand in human interiority. And, when we are talking about either spiritual transformation or Jungian psychology, we are talking about the realm of interior experience, about the data of conscious-ness, about such events as insights, judgments, decisions, and, as we will see, dreams. All of these happenings are items that we experience. But we experience them interiorly. None of us has ever seen an insight or a feeling. But I trust, too, that none of us would claim that he or she had never experienced a feeling or an insight, never judged that some proposition was true or false, never made a decision. Moreover, I hope that we all know the experience of wanting to understand, wanting to be reasonable in our judgments, wanting to be responsible in our decisions. For it is in the realm of that desire, and in being faithful to that desire, that Lonergan locates what it is to be an authentic human person. But our experience of these events and of this desire occurs, not in the realm of outer sense, but in the domain of human interiority. It is in interiority that, through these events of understanding, judging, and deciding, we "process" reality. Sensations come in; language goes out; but between sensations and language there is, as Lonergan has formulated it in some recent lectures, the mysterious "little black box" of our interiority. The workings of that little black box are the domain that we concentrate upon in Christian spiritual theology, in Jungian p§ychoiogy, and in any attempt such as the present one that would relate spirituality to psychology. I should mention, in addition, two other advantages that accrue from employing Lonergan’s framework for understanding interiority? First, his stress, as I have already indicated, is on human desire, and desire is the area of our being that is illuminated by the explorations also of the great depth ps~ychologists, including Jung, Secondly, and most importantly, Lonergan emphasizes that spiritual development is not something that oc-curs in some realm that is isolated from the insights that we have into the events of our everyday life, from the judgments that we make as to the truth or falsity of the most mundane propositions, from the anxieties we feel and the decisions that we make regarding our orientation and actions as beings-in- the-world. God’s saving purpose is a will to save the world itself, to redeem the time of our lives, as Eliot would put it. It is not a dimension of 7There are, of course, dangers in such a procedure, for the reader can easily take the results of Lonergan’s explorations as a series of concepts that could dispense one from the task of insight into oneself. There are no short-cuts to the self-appropriation to which Lonergan invites one. But precisely because there are no short-cuts, I can only ask the reader interested in pursuing the process to go to Lonergan’s works themselves. Jungian Psychology and Christian Spirituality: reality that is totally extrinsic from the events of understanding, judging, and deciding, that we experience every day. On the other hand, our relation to God is not to be collapsed into a secularistic denial of the supernatural character of grace. Rather, grace is offered in its supernatural character within the events of our everyday lives. So the perspective offered by Lonergan is neither a fundamentalism or extrinsicism that denies the this-worldly character of our lives, nor a secularism or immanentism that ne-glects the absolutely transcendent origin and finality of the relationship to the divine in which we stand at every moment of our lives. What, then, is Christian spiritual development? Lonergan’s treatment of this question is provided at the end of a lengthy analysis of human cognitional and moral development that concludes with the realization that the flowering of human potential, the sustained development of the human person, the solution of such social ills as injustice, alienation, and the dominance of totalitarian aspirations in both~the West and East today, are impossible on the basis of human resources alone. We are confronted with a problem of evil in our development as human persons and in the social organization of human affairs. This problem is rooted in our very constitu-tion as human subjects, in our finitude, in the tension between our always limited possibilities and our aspirations to transcend these limitations. I will not go into the intricacies of Lonergan’s analysis of the roots of moral impotence. Suffice it to say that he argues persuasively that we are faced with a problem of evil that we are powerless to resolve. If there is going to be a solution to the problem of evil, it must come in the form of redemption. Either there is a divinely originated solution to the problem of evil, or there is no solution at all. If God exists, if God knows of our plight, and if God is good, then there is a divinely originated solution that is offered to our freedom, one that we can accept or reject, and that, if we accept it, will involve us in a whole new area of growth and transformation, an area which we would not even know in any explicit way if God had not come to meet us. This distinct area of development is related to our cognitional and moral development. It is not the product of our knowing and our choosing. It is not something that we vainly imagine, or that we produce by wishful thinking. Rather, it is offered to our knowledge and our freedom as agift. And, if we accept it, it transvalues our values, and provides a new context for Our knowing~ a new atmosphere or environment that enables us to be truly intelligent in our questioning and genuinely reasonable in our judg-ments. This new context is faith, which Lonergan defines as "the eye of love," the eye of the love that is ours, that is the atmosphere in which we live, when we know ourselves as unconditionally loved by, and rooted in, the love that is God’s alone.8 8See Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (paperback edition, New York: Harper and Row, 1978), Chapters Eighteen and Twenty; Method in Theology, Chapter Four. 51~2 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 / 4 The divine solution to the problem of evil, then, is God’s gift of his love that is poured forth into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.~ Our desire for this love is a natural desire: with Thomas Aquinas, Lonergan insists that we have a natural desire for the vision and love of God.t0 He insists, too, that our subjectivity is mutilated or abolished, unless we are stretching forth towards God: There lies within [our] horizon a region for the divine, a shrine for ultimate holiness. It cannot be ignored. The atheist may pronounce it empty. The agnostic may urge that he finds his investigation has been inconclusive. The contemporary humanist will refuse to allow the question [of God] to arise. But their negations presuppose the spark in our clod, our native orientation to the divine." , Being in love with God, then, is for Lonergan the basic fulfilment of the deepest human desire, that desire that he calls "conscious intentionality." That fulfillment brings a deep-set joy that can remain despite humiliation, failure, privation, pain, betrayal, desertion. That fulfillment brings a radical peace, the peace that the world cannot give. That fulfillment bears fruit in a love of one’s neighbor that strives mightily to bring about the kingdom of God on this earth. On the other hand, the absence of that fulfillment opens the way to the trivialization of human life in the pur.suit of fun. to the harshness of human life arising from the ruthless exercise of o, power, to despair about human welfare spnnging from the conviction that the universe is absurd.~ God’s love is offered to all men and women at every time and place. This universality of God’s self-communication (a notion that he has in common with Karl Rahner) Lonergan speaks of in terms of God’s inner word, the word that God speaks in the solitude of our hearts, drawing us to himself. But this love is also embodied, incarnate, revealed for all to see, in the outer word of the life, preaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus.~.’~ "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, shall draw all men to myself.’’~4 The disciples of Jesus through the centuries constitute that community whose task it will.~ be until the end of time to give explicit witness in external words and deeds to the offer of divine love as the only resolution oLthe otherwise hopeless human dilemma of personal incapacity to grow, of social injustice and alienation. As another superb contemporary thinker. Eric Voegelin, has labored for thirty years to argue, no social order that is not permeated with the love of the unseen measure that Christians call God can be just or humanly fulfilling.~5 In language current among those who have followed 9Rm 5:5. ~°See Lonergan. "The Natural Desire to See God." in Collection: Papers by Bernard Loner-gan (New York: Herder and Herder. 1967), pp. 84-95. t~Lonergan. Method in Theology, p. 103. ~21bid.. p. 105. talbid., pp. 112-115. t4jn 12:32. ~sSee Eric Voegelin, Order and History, four volumes to date (Louisiana State University Press, 1956-1974). Jungian Psychology and Christian Spirituality: l / 503 recent deliberations Within the Church, faith and justice are inextricably linked in the mission of the disciples of Jesus in the world.16 Christian spiritual transformation, in this context, is thus a matter, first~ of a process of conversion that involves a growing intimacy with the source and fountain of redemptive love, an intimacy that takes the form of being evermore patterned after the example of Christ; and, second, of a growing commitment and ability to participate in the mission of Christ, which is also the mission of that community.whose task it is tb render explicit to the whole world the fact that,.in Jesus the Christ, God has definitively revealed the saving action that he is always working in the world. To be in love with God is also to be sent by God. To grow in the love of God is also to grow in participation in the mission--the saving and revealing mission---of Jesus. Christian spiritual growth thus involves a number of elements: a) One comes to a developing familiarity with God, so that one is able ever more readily and ever more easily to find him and to participate with him in his redemptive work after the pattern of Christ, the suffering servant of God. b) One grows in the ability to discern precisely what it is that God wants of oneself and of one’s community, and in the willingness to do what it is that God asks, confident that what one is doing is not one’s own work but God’s. c) Summing up all of what this development involves, one grows~in self-transcendence. This is the first key term that I take from Lonergan. One grows in self-transcendence, until, in the saint, there is reached a point of the union of one’s own understanding, reason, and desire with the knowl-edge and love of God, a union that can only be broadened and heightened, deepened and enriched, but not gone beyond; and a point of self-abnegation and humility that rejoices in sharing the lot of the poor, despised, and humiliated Son of God himself, in his mission of establishing the kingdom of God on earth. Christian spiritual transformation is a matter of continual conversion to self-transcendence, within the community of the disciples of the Lord that is the Church, until there is reached the point where one’s understanding, one’s judgments of fact and of value, one’s desires, and one’s choices, while not ceasing to be one’s own, are a participation in the understanding, the judgments, the desires, the choices of God himself, working in and through oneself and one’s community, to continue and to spread the redemption of the world that only God can effect. If, then, we are talking about Christian spiritual development as a trans-formation of our insights, our judgments, our desires, and our choices, we ~6See the document of the 1971 Synod of Bishops, Justice in the World. See also the Docu~- merits of the 32nd General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, and especially Decree 4, "Our Mission Today." 504 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 /4 are speaking of it as fundamentally a transformation of our interiority, of our basic horizon. The difference that God’s solution to the problem of evil makes in the social world, in the world of economics and politics, in the world of institutions and organizations, is a function of the difference it makes in persons, in the unity of personal consciousness, in people’s vision and choices. Christian spiritual development, considered most radically; is a transformation of one’s understanding and of ~)ne’s willingness, so that these two are brought into harmony and cooperation with God’s redemp-tive purpose in Christ Jesus and through the community of his disciples. The transformation, once again, is in the direction of self-transcendence, so that, by accepting God’.s offer of both salvation and vocation, one becomes ever more God-centered and Christ-centered in one’s apprehensions of value and in one’s decisions, in one’s pursuit of meaning and truth, and in one’s affective engagement with other persons in the dramatic situations that constitute the stuff, the setting, the stage, of one’s own personal story and of history itself. Christian Spiritual Transformation as Self-Appropriation Now, besides serf-transcendence, there is another term that Lonergan uses when he speaks of development. That term is self-appropriation. Self-appropriation is a matter of self-knowledge, of self-discovery, of self-understanding. One can bE quite self-transcendent, quite loving and generous, quite genuine in one’s relations with others, quite sincere about wanting to understand things correctly, without being very adept at intri-cate and precise self-knowledge.~ One can be, in Lonergan’s terms, quite religiously and morally converted without being intellectually converted. 18 Intellectual conversion is a matter of knowing precisely what one is doing when one is pursuing understanding, reaching for truth, trying to decide in responsible fashion. Many people genuinely try to understand, and succeed in doing so, without being able to say precisely what they are doing when they understand, .how their insights are related to their sensations, their questions, their beliefs, their .images, their concepts, their feelings. One can also be quite religiously and morally converted without being what I have called "psychically converted.’’~ Psychic conversion is a matter of know-ing what one is feeling, of being able to tell one’s story, and to tell it as it is. One,can have a quite genuine and even beautiful life of feeling without being able to tell what he or she is feeling, how this feeling is related .to that, how both feelings are related to the objects they intend, how one’s feelings 17See Lonergan, Insight, p. 475. 18On intellectual conversion as self-appropriation, see Lonergan, Method in Theo!ogy, pp. 238-240. ~gSee Robert Doran, Subject and Psyche: Ricoeur, Jung, and the Search for Foundations (Washington, D. C.: University Press of Ainerica. 1977), especially pp. 240-246~ Jungian Psychology and Christian Spirituality: I / 51)5 are related to one’s images and symbols, to one’s questions and insights, to one’s beliefs and ideas. In other words, one can have a quite profound and genuinely self-transcendent interiority without being able to articulate one’s inner life with any notable clarity and precision. We all know wonderful and holy people who are quite unsophisticated when it comes to self-knowl-edge, or who will put their self-knowledge in very common sense terms-- people who make at times heroic decisions, but who, when asked why they made this or that decision, or what went on in their minds and hearts which led them so to decide, can answer only, "I don’t know; it just seemed to be the right thing to do." Such genuine self-transcendence without self-appropriation is by no means to be disparaged. It is the condition of most good and holy men and women down through the ages, the source of most that is good in human history. But there are factors at work, especially in our age, that seem to indicate that self-appropriatiot~, in addition to self-transcendence, is becom-ing ever more necessary if one wishes to choose responsibly, to judge reasonably, to inquire intelligently, or just if one wishes to know what God wants and does not want. Perhaps there was a time when common sense wisdom and homespun practicality were enough for most people. Perhaps, too, there was a time when the only addition to common sense that some people needed was a good dose of theoretical understanding that was basically in harmony with the Gospel. But there are a number of indications that would seem to argue persuasively that we are now living in a world where self-transcendence, backed up by a common sense framework, or even by a cogent and brilliant theory, is simpl~, not enough; where religious and moral conversion must be complemented by intellectual and psychic conversion; where self-transcendence must be aided and helped, complemented and augmented, by self-appropriation, by precise and even technical self-knowledge, by an ability to articulate just what is going on in one’s "little black box." If this be the case, then spiritual transformation today is a matter not only of growing self-transcendence, but also of ever more precise and technical self-knowledge. What are some of the indications that would back up this conviction that I share with Lonergan? Let me talk first about the insufficiency of common sense, and then about the ambiguity of theory. And let me do so within the context of the Church’s recent pronounced recognition that the promotion of justice is a constitutive element in the preaching of the Gospel. The paper that issued from the 1971 Synod of Bishops, "Justice in the World," and the statement of Pope Paul VI, Octagesima Adveniens, mark the beginnings, I believe, of a substantial leap forward in the Church’s social, political, and economic insight and praxis. One of the few public statements that Pope John Paul I had a chance to make was to the effect that we need a new and worldwide economic order. The achievement of that 506 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/4 order, I believe, is going to demand that we take our stand, and that we enable others to take their stand, not on practical common sense, and not on theory, but on the self-appropriation of our interiority and especially of our orientation to value. Why do I say this? Well, let us treat common sense first, however briefly. One of the cha~’acteristics of practica.I common se.nse is that it not only is incapable of.treating complex, long-range, and ultimate issues and results, but also that it resentfully brushes aside and ignores any attempts to raise questions that are concerned with such issues. It has the world’s work to do. and it cannot be bothered by questions that would take time away from doing that work.z° The person exclusively operating from prac-tical common sense is concerned only with "getting the job don~i." Every-thing else mo.tivation, rationale, social organization, interpersonal communication--is oriented to that end. The question of whether the jo.b is worth doing at all. or whether the most expedient way of. doing it is also the most authentic way, is,a bother, yes, but more than that: it is a threat, a subversive question t, hat could overturn the ~ntire project. Rejection pre-cisely of such kinds of questions is what is responsible for the fact that our objective world-situation today can be characterized in terms of opposed totalitarianisms: the totalitarianism of the multinational corporation, pred-icated on the assumption of the need of automatic progress and expansion; and the totalitarianism of the communist state, rooted in the assumption that class conflict can bring the social o, rder into harmony with what is right.2~ Both myths neglect the fact that there are religious, personal, and cultural values that must be pursued in an integral fashion if there is to be a just social order that really provides for the basic needs of all the mem-bers of a society. In both systems, however much theory may. be involved in their establishment, we see operative the bias of practical common sense against the kinds of questions that must be asked if the job is to be done, not only expediently, but also humanely, genuinely, authetically. The ques-tion of integrity is. not just overlooked, but actively repudiated and re-pressed. _ Nor is theory sufficient to reestablish the significance of that question. For there are theories that support the question, but there are other theories that discredit it. The theories of B. F. Skinner or of orthdox Freudian psychoanalysis are just as coherent, just as thorough, just as all-encom-passing, and, for many,just as convincing, as are the theories of a Christian philosophy and theology. The Church’s reliance on theory as the ground of praxis arose in the Middle Ages, more specifically with scholastic philosophy. One of the interesting things about that period, though, is that there were not many ~°See Lonergan, Insight, pp. 225-242. ~lbid. Jungian Psychology and Christian Spirituality: theories from.which to choose, and there was not all that much to be learned in order to piece together a convincing theory. Even the disputes in the world of.theory did not touch, as they do today, on the really basic issues, such as the existence of God, the fact of revelation, the ethical end of the human person, the value of a virtuous life, and so on. Right down into the Renaissance, there was so little to be learned that it was possible for one person to be at once an artist, a natural scientist, and a man of practical affairs and we have Leonardo da Vinci to prove it. The need for specialization to master one tiny dimension of reality is a distinctly modern phenomenon. And while one is spending most of one’s time specializing in one’s own area, one’s contemporaries are adding theory upon theory in their specialized domains. And these theories sometimes contradict one another on the most fundamental issues, on issues that every developing adult must confront. But how is one to take a stand, if one has to devote all of one’s energies to his specialization? There are issues on which we must judge and on which we must decide if we are to live a human life. Yet there is simply too much to be learned before we can judge and decide.22 Unless we find a ground beyond theory--for it will not do just to fall back on common sense--our situation becomes one of hopeless relativism. It is my contention that this ground-beyond-theorydies in the self-appropriation of human interiority. This point about the need for,a quite technical self-appropriation can be developed at great length; we do not have space to do that here. The point I wish to make in the present context ,is that only through such self-appropriation can one discover the precise relation that obtains between re,!igio~us, personal, and cultural values on the one hand, and the social value of a just economic and political order on the other hand. And one needs to discover these relations, not simply in the abstract, as through some theory of value ,"but in the concrete order in which one is called upon to judge, to decide, and to act. And so I return to my general statement: Christian spiritual transformation is a matter of self-transcendence that, at a certain point, calls fo’r a movement to self-appropriation. Christian spiritual development is a matter of ongoing cbnversion, and ongoing con-version means today not only religious and moral, but also intellectual and p~sychic conversion. The Levels of Consciousness There are five levels of operations that one discovers when one enters upon the project of the self-appropriation of interiority.2"~ Inner and outer sensations, memories, andimages constitute the level of empirical presen- 22Lonergan, "Dimensions of Meaning," in Collection, pp. 252-267. 23On the levels of consciousness, see Lonergan, Method in Theology, Chapters One and Four. Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 / 4 tations. These empirical presentations are organized by understanding, which is a second level of consciousness. For example, if you are reading without any understanding of what I am saying, you are operating at the first, empirical level of operations. If you are reading and understanding what I am saying, your understanding is organizing the empirical presenta-tions into some kind of intelligible whole. You are processing what you hear by the operations that go on in your "little black box." You are operating not only at the first, but also at the second level of o~perations. If, moreover, you not only understand what I am saying but are also trying to judge whether it is correct or not, you have added a third level of operations, where we either assent to, or disagree with, something we have understood. These three levels of operations are what make us to be human knowers. Lonergan calls these levels experience, understanding, and judgment. But we are not just’knowers. There are times in our lives when, after we have made a judgment, "This is t~rue," a further question arises, "What am I going to do about it?" Then we have to decide. And decision constitutes a fourth level of operations. Finally, there is another whole dimension of interior reality that is not dealt with by speaking of the empirical, intelligent, rational, and decisional levels of consciousness. There is a fifth level of consciousness that is a matter of being addressed by and in relation to God. There is the experience of mystery. There is the reality of falling in love with God. There is prayer, worship, mystical experience, the dark night of the soul, the living flame of love, the search for and discovery of the holy, the gift of the divinely originated solution to the problem of evil. Religious self-appropriation, obviously, is a matter of articulating what is going on at that fifth level of consciousness. The means of discovering oneself in one’s relation to God are many: there are spiritual direction, retreats, various methods of keeping a journal, and so on. But what is important for us also to appr6priate is the manner in which experience at that fifth level of consciousness has an effect on other levels. The influence of God’s grace moves downward in our consciousness. It changes our values (fourth level), so that it provides us with entirely new orientations for our decisions, and enables them to be more self-transcendent. It changes our view of the world, our vision, the way we understand and judge things (second and third levels), and provides us with a determination to under-stand thoroughly and to judge reasonably; and it brings about a harmony and peace at the level of inner sensation, a peace that "the world cannot give," so that our inner being and our bodies rest securely in the love of God. Symbols, Feelings, and Drama Such is the pattern of interiority that is discovered when one enters upon the way of self-appropriation: five levels of consciousness, each related to Jungian Psychology and Christian Spirituality: I / 509 the other, whether we move from~below upwards, or from above down-wards. And now, finally, we are able to locate with precision the region where Jung’s discoveries become significant for spiritual development, especially for self-appropriation. For all of the operations that we are talking about--sensing, imaging, remembering (first level), inquiring, understand-ing, putting our understanding into words (second level), reflecting, weigh-ing the evidence, judging (third level), deliberating, deciding, acting (fourth level), praying, worshiping (fifthlevel)--all of these operations are per-meated by feelings. We have feelings about the objects of all of these operations. The operations themselves are always dramatic. When you try to understand, it is because you are confused. When you succeed in un-derstanding, the confusion ceases and you experience satisfaction, maybe even excitement. When you want to know whether you understand cor-rectly, it is because you are not satisfied with just a set of bright ideas; you want to get things right and not just go about spouting opinions. When you have to make a decision, the drama of the situation stands out clearly. Some decisions can be agonizing. All decisions have a great deal of affectivity accompanying them, for we are dealing in decisions with questions of value. And value is something we feel before ever we judge about it or act on it.z4 Finally, fifth-level religious experience has those peculiar sets of feelings that we call "consolations" and "desolations." In sum, we are not just structured conscious operators. We are~also the subjects of a drama, pre-cisely in and through these operations. There is a story to our operating, because there are feelings that permeate all of those operations. Let us focus a bit more on this drama, because it is more complicated than I have so far indicated. In addition to the desire to understand, there is also aflight from understanding (second level). I can flee insight just as passionately as I can pursue it. Moreover, I can resist the truth just as strongly as I can intend it (third level). I can try to escape responsible decision and live a life of ease or of drifting or of hiding my talents, just as persistently as I can conscientiously examine every situation to find the best course of action (fourth level). I can flee contact with God just as passion-ately as I can seek to find him and do his will (fifth level). ~ There are feelings that permeate not only genuine performance at each of the five levels, but also inauthentic actions at each step of the way. The ultimate drama of my life, in fact, is this drama of authenticity and inau-thenticity. The authentic person is the person who pursues understanding, who seeks truth, who responds to what is. really worthwhile, and who searches for God and his will. The inauthentic person is the person who flees understanding, who runs fi:om the truth, who resists further questions 241bid., pp. 31-33. 510 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 /4 about his or her decisions, and who tries to escape God. And those feelings never go away. They are present in the entire drama. They are precisely what make it so dramatic. What. then. are feelings? Feelings are energy-become-conscious. Feel-ings are a~matter of psychic energy. Feelings are the basic sensitive compo-nent of every human operation. Feelings make of spirituality a story. To know one’s feeling is to begin to tell one’s own story. Feelings are the drive and momentum of the life of the human spirit. Feelings join the spirit to the body in a conscious unity. There is one further aspect to this matter. Feelings always enter con-sciousness through being connected with some representation. Now, the, most basic form of representation lies in symbols. A symbol, Lonergan says, is an image of a real or imaginary object that evokes a feeling or is evoked by a feelingZS; what this means is that there is never a feeling without a symbolic meaning; never a symbol without a feeling. To name one’s feelings is to discover the dynamic images, the symbols, that are associated with them. To have insight into one’s feelings is to understand the symbolic association. To tell one’s story is tomarrate the course of one’s elemental symbolizing. And where does one’s elemental symbolizing occur in its purest form, untainted by the biases that. in waking life, can lead us to distort our story? The place of elemental symbolizing is in our dreams. It is in the dream that we first are conscious, and it is in the dream that we find a "story" going forward that we cannot distort without being aware that we are doing so.z6 If we want to know our -story" the story of insight, the story of judgment, the story of decision, and the story of prayer--we can find it in our dreams. There is a psychic conversion that puts us into contact with that story. It affects us deeply once it has occurred. For it enables us to judge ourselves in our waking life as authentic or inauthentic in our pursuit of understanding, in our.seeking of truth, in our decisions, and in our search for God. In the next article I will situate Jung’s psychology of individuation within this context of the discussion of self-transcendence, and, especially, of self-appropriation. In the third article, though, I will use this same frame-work to criticize .lung’s psychology. For Jung did not have an accurate understanding of the structure of our operations as human subjects~ur understanding, our judgments, our decisions, and our search for God. His basic philosophical and theological standpoint did not take its stand on a notion of authenticity as self-transcendence. And this basic flaw renders his contributions to Christian spiritual .development very ambiguous until these contributions are transposed into some such context as I have tried to indicate in the present article. 251bid., p. 64. 26See Doran, "Dramatic Artistry in the Third Stage of Meaning," forthcoming in Lonergan Workshop 11, edited by Frederick Lawrence (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979). "Matchwood, Immortal Diamond"-- Reflections on Death and Resurrection John Renard, S.J. Father Renard is on the faculty of St. Louis,University. A previous article of Father Renard was entitled "Islamic Spirituality" which appeared in the November, 1978 issue. With:the bitter:sweet clarity that came to him in his illness, ~ohn Donne wrote, "Therefore that He may raise, the Lord throws down.’’~ The poet expresse_s a wisidom most of us would rather flee than surrender to; bui our flight from mortality is not always and necessarily a flight toward immortal-ity. Ernest Becket explains the dynamic of the "Jonah Syndrome" by saying that the fear of life often menaces human beings as relentlessly as the fear of death. The "Jonah Syndrome" involves escape from both the apex and the nadir of human potential. It issues in a frantic sear.ch for control of one’s destiny to the smallest detail; it deems abstinence from the heights of ecstasy a fair price to pay ’for a shorter fall; it shuns the awesome lest it happen upon the terrible,z Both extremes of the fear ~eem to be rooted in a dread of extinction, whether as annihilation wrought by weakness confronting the ultimate ~This and all other selections of poetry quoted in this paper may be found in the.Norton Anthology of Poetry (’Revised, New York, 1975). "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness," p. 251. 2Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York, 1973). Term coined by Abraham Maslow; pp. 48 ft. 511 512 /Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/4 power, or as humiliation wrought by shame in the face of the ultimate glory. I would like to explore both of these aspects of the "Jonah Syndrome." First we will look at the extreme that presents itself more immediately, and which is a more readily recognizable feature of human experience. In that context we will talk of two preeminent characteristics of the experience of Weakness, Shame, and Mortality. Then we will turn to the experience of power, glory, and immortality. In both instances our guideg will be the struggle of great poets to comprehend, the insight of Paul into the incompre-hensible, and the example of Jesus’ surrender to the "impossibility" of a life lived across the full spectrum, from being to nothingness and back. Weakness, Shame, and Mortality At the beginning of his chapter on "The Terror of Death," Ernest Becket quotes Sigmund Freud: Is it not for us to confess that in our civilized attitude towards death we are once more living psychologically beyond your means, and must reform and give truth its due? Would it not be better to give death the place in actuality and in our thoughts which properly belongs to it, and to yield a little more prominence to that unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed? This hardly seems indeed a greater achievement, but rather a backward step.., but it has the merit of taking somewhat more into accou.nt the true state of affairs,a Two factors seem most to contribute to a sense of impotence and of the inability to achieve quite enough in one lifespan--and hence to the half-wish for immortality. They are, first, the feeling of time’s inexorability, and, second, the conviction that to make a lasting name for myself I must make it for me alone, me the autonomous, me the independent. These twin cliffs of mortality both spell weakness and shame, for the sheer faces of time and of di~sire for self-fulfilment cannot b~ scaled head-on. Nevertheless, the summit is not entirely unattainable. It merely requires the acceptance of "time" and the rejection of encapsulation in oneself. John Donne writes in his "S..atire on Religion:" He’s not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best, To ’adore, or scorn an image, or protest, May be all bad; doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill, Craggrd and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go, Ahd what th’ hill’s suddenness resists win so; Yet strive so, that before age, death’s twilight, thy soul rest, for none can work in that night. Hard deeds, the body’s pains; hard knowledge, too "Matchwood, Immortal Diamond" / 513 The mind’s endeavors reach, and mysteries Are like the sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.4 The poet does not advocate pretending the mountain does not exist, nor does he counsel over-confidence as to its vincibility. He does suggest that the most important of attainments are precisely not those which can be attained, but rather those which are allowed to be apparent. It is a question of not denying the obvious, but’ also of not taking the obvious for granted. Donne suggests further that mysteries are the very stuff of this life: one had best confront them now, for they set at death’s twilight. Time itself is not the poet’s nemesis here; the prospect of an untimely death is. As we shall see in the second section of this paper, John Donne found a solution to the problem of time’s "unperturbed pace," in his hope of resurrection. As other poets attest, however, not everyone escapes the conviction that time is a vacuum. ,’ The Emptiness of Time Many a great poet has written of the vain struggle to deny the marauding burglar of time access to his house. Scarcely a Shakespearean sonne~ but talks of Time’s "fell hand," and his "bending sickle’s compass," and of the "best jewel from Time’s chest.., hid." Time is "sluttish,’~ "wasted," "balmy.’’5 The young John Milton reflected, "How soon. hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!" Time was for him, along with the will of heaven, his guide toward his mortal end.6 John Keats, also twenty-three, wrote in a similar vein of his fears that he might "cease to be before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain." His fearful reflections led him to stand alone on the shore of the wide world till Love and Fame sank to nothingness in the face of Time’s inevitability.~ At twenty-seven, W. B. Yeats wrote "The Lamentation of the Old Pen-sioner." The aged and discarded man sits sheltered from the rain under a tree and reminisces about how he had once held the center ~f attention in fireside chats "Of love or politics, ere time transfigured me." Though young men once more prepare for combat, the pensioner’s "contemplations are of Time thht has transfigured me." Though no woman now turns to look upon him, ’he summons up remembrances of loves past and concludes, "I spit in the face of Time that has transfigured me.’’s In his magnificent "Fern Hill," the thirty-two year old Dylan Thomas wrote of his heedless youth when: Nothing i cared, in the lamb-wfiite days, that time would take me Up to the swallow throng.ed loft by the shadow of my hand, ’tNAP p. 246. 5Sonnets 64, 116, 65, 55, 106, 107, NAP pp. 212 ft. SNAP p. 323 rNAP p. 700 SNAP p. 918 514 / Review for Religious, Volume38, 1979 / 4 In the moon that is always rising, Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him (Time) fly with the high fie!ds And Wake to the farm forever fled from the childless ’land~ Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though 1 sang in my chains like the sea) ,~ Thomas compressed an entire lifetime into the image of a day, born with the birth of the sun and dying forever under an ever-rising moon. Time was his master: the poet both knew it too,well and, denied it. He was green, but dying; fettered, but singing as though free as the sea. ~ The Fullness of Time Jesus, too/was keenly aware_through his life of the.. imminence of an auspicious, even ominous, hour. John’s Gospel portrays Jesus early in his public ministry as conscious that hishour would come soon, but had not yet (Jn 7:6 and 30). His later recognition that "the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified" occurs at.the theological, literary, and even geo-graphical center of John’s Gospel (Jn 12:23). It is preceded immediately by. the raising of Lazarus and Mary’s anointing of Jesus for burial, .and it is followed immediately by the analogy of the grain of wheat that ~must die. in order to give life. In the Synoptics, too, this crucial hour’s striking marks the turning point in Jesus~ life, the fullness of his time. In the Synoptics, however, the theological, literary, and geographical pivot is signalled by Peter’,s confession.of Jesus as the Christ and Jesus’ decisive reorientation for the journey to Jerusalem (Mr 16:13if; Mk 8:27ff;, Lk 9:18ff). Mark, Matthew, and Luke indicate that it is Peter who is troubled, most of all, by Jesus’ prediction of his death, and who tries to dissuade Jesus from his intended course. John, on the other hand, more insistent than the SynOptics on Jesus’ awareness of his "tim~ and hour," emphasizes Jesus’ own anguish that his time has now come: "Now is-my soul troubled. And what shall Isay? ’Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come.to this hour’s’ (Jn .12:27). It is an hour of glor.y, but not for Jesus "personally." It is the hour in which his Father’s name will be glorifie~l again (Jn 12:28), At this juncture we turn to the second factor that .makes human mortality seem so impotent and dishon6rable--the forever frus-trated yet die-hard desire to make a name for oneself alone. Making a Name: The Delusion of Self-Proclaimed Glory Several years ago a cartoon in a national magazine depicted a handsome young couple in togas seated in an idyllic lakeside glen. The young man gazes into the mirror-smooth lake, and the lady asks, "Is there.., someone else, Narcissus? .... Everyone," notes Ernest Becket, "enjoys a working aNAP pp. 1166-7 "Matchwood, Immortal Diamond" / 515 amount of basic narcissism,"~° which amounts to a drive for self-protection and self-creation. The more that drive becomes the central life project, however, the moreoenslaving and suicidal it becomes. Chapter two of the Letter to the Philippians is the New Testament’s most remarkable.state-ment of Jesus’ surrender of his own name for the glorification of his Father’s name.~::’He did not count equality with God a’thing to be grasped., but emptied~ ~himself, taking the form of a slave being born in human likeness. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, death on a cross’: (Ph 2:6-8). By "becoming sin who kflew no sin" (2 Co 5:21), Jesus engaged in the ultimate ec-stasy. He rejected the Godly power which alone is immune to the need for striving, in favor of human weakness with its constant struggle for freedom. He rejected the Godly glory which alone is~truly autonomous and peerless, in favor of the shame of common slavery. Power and glory in God are Godly; in human~beings they are merely the produc’t of self-aggrandizing,, narcissistic wishfulness. Power and glory in God are His awesomeness and attractiveness; in human beings~they are a pathetic grasp-ing after invulnerability and control, needlessness and Unrelatedness, free-dom from risk.~ That, in the. words of Shakespeare, amounts to "Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame. .... lust in action. In his choice of slavery and emptiness Jesus had even to divest himself of the faintest hope that it would all’ have world-redeeming consequences. He had to abandon himself unreservedly to the powerlessness and anonym-ity of the human condition. The colossal irony of his surrender is that, because Jesus forsook his, own name and status, "God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that atthe name of Jesus,every knee should bend.., and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Ph 2:9-11). A classic of Chinese tradition called the Tao te Ching spe.aks simply and insightfully of the nature of this paradox: Reality is all-embracing. To be all-embracing is to be self-less. To be self-less is to be all-pervading. To be all-pervading is to be transcendent.~3 Paul elucidates further~ the’implications ~of Christ’s self-lessness ~or us. Thb’,~ib~e~’ness of self-~areservation must "yield to the folly’ of the Cross, "For~tlie. fo61ishness~ of God is wiser than humankind, and the Weakness of l°op. cit., p. 22 ~For further excellent discussion of power and autonomy, see John Dunne’s The Way’of All the Earth (New York, 1972), pp. 4-26. ~aSonnet 129, NAP 216 ~aChang Chung-yuan, Tao: A New Way of Thinking (New York, 1975), p. 42. 51!5 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/4 God is stronger than humankind." Self-proclaimed power and glory must yield to a confession of "shame and confession," as in the meditations on sin in St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, for "God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are" (1 Co .1 and 2, quoting 1:25, 27). Jesus’ own acquiescence in the arrival of his "hour" and his preference for namelessness led him to the folly of the Cross, that our "faith might rest not in human wisdom, but in the power of God" (1 Co 2:5). And all the heavenly host shouted: "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and giory.~... And the four living creatures said, ’Amen’" (Rv 5:12, 14). Power, Glory and Immortality If reflection on the ravages of time and change is a common theme in the great poets, musing on what may lie beyond death are no less prominent. "Death once dead," says the Bard, there’s no more dying then.’’14 Shake-spearc’s is a rather cold resignation in that poem. A more hopeful note is heard in Wordsworth’s "Intimations of Immortality": 0 Joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive.15 Another facet of "nature’s memory" is the subject of "The Root Cellar’" by the twentieth-century poet Theodore Roethke. Observing nature’s stubborn refusal to become extinct, he tells of how in a lowly earthen dungeon all things strain after survival. In that cellar "Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath."16 In "The Far Field," Roethke writes of how "All finite things reveal infinitude." I am renewed by death, thought of my death, The dry scent of a.dying garden in September, The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.1~ The same W. B. Yeats who had written about the Pensioner who spat in the face of Time, later wrote a play called The Resurrection. The p~lay climaxes with a song about the demise of the ancient rites at~the appearance of the Risen Christ who now stands on the stage. The song is a different kind of reflection on how the passing of time exhausts human power and glory to make way for Christ’s power and glory: t4Sonnet 146, NAP :p. 217 ~SNAP p. 603 ~6NAP p. 1131 ~TNAP p. 1138-9 "Matchwood, Immortal Diamond" / 517 Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.: Love’s pleasure drives his love away. The painter’s brush consumes his dreams; The herald’s cry, the soldier’s tread Exhaust his glory and his might: Whatever flames upon the night Man’s own resinous heart has fed.Is Few poets have prayed in our tongue more fervently than John Donne. In the"Holy Sonnets" Donne vacillates between terror in the face of death and the hope that death will lose its sting and concede victory to the Resurrection. "Thou hast made me, and shall Thy work decay?" he asks his Lord.~° Ever awareof his need to ask forgiveness, the poet exhorts the angels to trumpet into resurrection all mortal humanity "At the round earth’s imagined corners.’’2° Donne then becomes a seventeenth century Paul in one of his best known sonnets: Death, be not proud, though some have call6d thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so; For those whom thou thinkst thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee dO go, Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery. Thou ’art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy’ or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke; why swellst thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally ’ And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.2~ For the original Paul, all that the poe.ts have hinted at, pined for, groped after, and, perhaps, found, is embodied in Christ as image of the invisible God. Christ "reflects the glory of God" and "sustains the universe by his word of power" (Heb 1:3). By that word we are "strengthened with all power, according to the glory of his might" (Col l:l l). The "small breath" of the earth in Roethke’s "Root Cellar" is the treasure we carry "in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us." We carry in our bodies "the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in oOr bodies" (2 Co 4:7, 10-11). Our universal experience of being "thrown down" in the wasting of our outer nature can-not quench’Wordsworth’s "embers" of renewal in our inner nature (2 Co 4:16). It is merely a thorn in the flesh, a reminder that God’s "power.is made ~SNAP pp. 927-8 19Sonnet I, NAP p. 248 2°Sonnet 7, NAP p. 249 ~Sonnet 10, NAP p. 250 51~1 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 / 4 perfect in weakness." For that reason Paul could happily boast of his weakness so that the power of Christ might rest on him (2 Co 12:9). The exultant herald’s cry and the victorious soldier’s tread exhaust their power and glory. Christ’s defeat on the cross manifests his all the more, "For he was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God." As a result, Christ now deals with us not in weakness, butin power (2 Co 13:3-4). Paul therefore prays that he be able~ to accept his humanity and its impo-tence, in order to~ know Christ and the, power of his resurrection, which will "change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by,the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself" (Ph 3:8-H, 21). The Apostle prays for,us, too, that we might share in that power and glory and life. Speaking of his own suffering as the glory of the Ephesian Christians, Paul prays That acc6rding to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power interiorly through his Spirit... ; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend.., the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think, to him be glory .... (Ep 3:13-21). Paul further clarifies the nature of the revivifying power of Christ’s love as he describes the different degrees of glory proper to the various earthly and heavenly bodies. Using the same metaphor of sowing and growth suggested in Ephesians in the words "rooted in love," the author writes in 1 Co 15:42-3: "What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in shame, but raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, but raised in power." The full mystery and many-sided paradox of how weakness becomes power; shame glory, and mortality immortality is beautifully summed up in John Heni’y Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermon entitled "The Cross of Christ, the Measure of the World." Newman says that the Cross has brought together and made consistent all that seemed discordant and aimless. It has taught’us how to live, how to use this world, what to expect, what t~ desire, what to hope. It is the tone into which all the ~trains of this world’s music are ultimately to be resolved.22 To resolve th~se discordant strains, Chris~ endu,red,every paradox. To teach us how to live with ambiguity and in~.security, Christ put mystery in place Qf what we would otherwise try to solve as a mind-teasing puzzle. To unburden us of the curse of the Law, Christ became accursed o~n the Tree. To obtain for us that which we most grasp at, Christ unhanded ~l~i. To transform our folly into wisdom, Christ became foolishness. To free us from sin, Christ became sin. To loose the bonds of our servitude, Christ became 22Parochial and Plain Sermons, London, 1875, Vol. 6, p. 85. ° ~ "Matchwood, Immortal.Diamond" / 519 a slave. To empower our impotence, Christ became weakness itself. To ransom us from bankruptcy, Christ became poverty. To glorify our dis-honor, Christ became shame. To fill our vacuum, Christ emptied himself. All of which prompted G. M. Hopkins to write in his poem, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection": "In a flash, at a trumpet crash, ! am at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, is immortal diamond.’’23 23NAP p. 905 Now Available As Reprint An Apostolic Spirituality~for the Ministry of Social Justice by Max Oliva, S.J. Price: $.50 per copy, plus postage. Address: Review for Religious Rm 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, Missouri 63108 St. Luke’s Use of the Temple Image Frank X. Reitzel, C.R. Father Reitzel is a member of the Congregation of the Resurrection who has spent most of his active years in his priesthood teaching English literature at the high school, university and seminary levels. He has also done considerable work in counseling, spiritual direction and retreat work. Presently he is on a sabbatical leave doing research study at the Gregorian University in Rome. His address on leaving Rome will be: Resurrection College; Westmount Road North, Waterloo; Ontario, Canada N2L 3G7. Father Reitzel hopes that the present article will form the chapter of a projected book on the concept and image of the Temple as a means of prayer. Part I he Odyssey is most often mentioned as the classic example in literature of the use of thenliterary device or symbol of a journey within which to frame a story. It is important, however, to remember, that every journey has a goal or end to be attained. For Ulysses it was to return to his homeland and there to lay rightful claim to his kingdom, his queen and his home. The traditional name for such a story is epic. St. Luke’s Greek cultural back-ground is sufficient evidence on which to base a presupposition that he was familiar with this story form of a journey ending in a kingdom reclaimed. Both his Gospel account and The Acts of the Apostles have epic qualities built on the basic image of a journey. The intention of this paper, however, is to focus attention on the goal of that journey, the Temple at Jerusalem, as Luke uses it in his Gospel in order to show that an awareness of this image can aid a reflective and prayerful reading of the text of the third gospel. The journey theme and the Temple image are equally evident in Acts; but I shall refer to these only in passing. 520 St. Luke’s Use of the Temple Image / 521 The Journey It is now generally accepted that the journey theme is an important factor, in the literary structure of Luke’s version of the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In every epic the arena of the journey is vast, sweeping from one end of the known world to the other; for Jesus it really begins in heaven and ends there. The action that takes place on earth within the limits of time and space tells of his journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem. At Jerusalem is the focal point and goal of the journey, the Temple. By using principles of literary criticism we can discover that Luke has artistically placed his references to the Temple at significant places in his narrative. I suggest that the position of these references clearly and deliber-ately divides the text of the Gospel, for artistic and meditative purposes, into a five-part structure that is similar to that of classical epics and dramas. Paradise Lost, for example, is constructed in twelve books or movements in which the poet John Milton retells the tragic story of the loss of paradise by Adam and Eve. The number twelve, referring to the twelve months of the year, symbolizes a full-life span or a life’s journey. In his second epic, Paradise Regained, Milton uses the more compressed five-movement structure to tell the story of.Christ’s cosmic struggle with Satan. In every case the artist freely chooses what he considers to be the proper and fitting frame for his work or story. In order to enhance his retelling of the inspiring story of Jesus that had been-handed on to him Luke employs a similar five-part structure. Later, in his account of the beginnings of the Church, he describes the missionary journeys of Peter and Paul in a two-part structure similar to that of many modern dramas. Moreover, in both works Luke uses carefully placed refer-ences to the Temple at Jerusalem as a central image which unifies the structure and the story of the Gospel as Luke presents it to us. An aware-ness of this image and its function can aid us in using Luke’s Gospel as a guide to prayer and a means of personal growth. Reliable Scripture scholarship has shown that the author of the third Gospel was a man of Greek birth and culture who wrote for a Greek Christian audience. Like Paul (arid like ourselves) Luke had not been a contemporary eye-witness of Jesus. He had learned and been inspired by the story of Jesus as he had received it from the apostolic eye-witnesses such as Peter. He wrote to Theophilus, to persons of similar culture and background, that is, to all those like Theophilus in the world. But if we are his audience why does he use the center of Jewish worship as one of his main images? The Temple Image Temples have played a pa.rt in almost every culture; but they differ in one significant feature from the Temple at Jerusalem. A temple for all 522 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/4 pagans (gentiles) was a holy place; it was the house of the gods. But for the Israelites, Yahweh, the One True God, actually manifested his presence in his chosen dwelling place on Mount Zion. The Israelites were prepared and they were often called upon to protest that belief with their lives. They did not just casually believe this--they knew that God dwelt in their midst. No matter where he might be, the devout Israelite could face east to the Temple and enter into prayerful communion.with his God; he could experience an immediate and personal realization of the presence of Yahweh. The ideal, of course, was to make the journey to Jerusalem and there actually present oneself to God, as he had. commanded: "Three times a year all your men-folk must present,themselves before the Lord Yahweh" (Ex 23:17)? Similar references to. this belief and practice in the Old Testament are numerous. The visions of many of the prophets took place in the Temple. It was there that Isaiah (Is 6) and Jeremiah. (Jr 1) w.ere commissioned by God to go forth on their prophetic journeys to .his people. The prophet Amos had condemned the unjust and unprayerful uses that some people made of the place of worship, emphasizing, thereby, that God’,s presence, not the bricks and mortar, was of importance. Whenever his people turned to false gods and rejected him, Yahweh abandoned them and their Temple. Each time in history that the bricks-and-mortar temple was destroyed it graphically symbolized Yahweh’s displeasure with his ~.people and his ab-sence from them. Through the psalmist as through the prophets, Yahweh insisted that the Temple was sacred because he chose to dwell there. He promised to be with his p.eople as long as they were faithi’ul to him; if they betrayed him, he would withdraw his presence and the Temple, no longer sanctified, would be destroyed. That history and thai faith, were a part of the Judaeo-Christian heritage handed on to Luke. That is evidenced by the fact that his Gospel ends,with the statement that praying and worshipping in the Temple at Jerusalem continued to be a normal practice of Christ’s followers after the ascension. And at the beginning of Acts Luke indicates that the same mentality and practices continued to prevail. The disciples, he tells us, went up to the Temple each day at the prescribed liturgical hours to pray (Ac 2:46; 3:1). A shift was beginning to evolve, however; Luke says that for "’the breaking of the bread" they met in private homes. They were Christian-Jews; though a gradual change was "taking place in their worship, they had n6t broken away from their Hebrew. Temple-centered roots. That break would Occur later. But at the time of Luke’s writing the Temple was still regarded as the House of Prayer, the place where God made himself manifest among his l~eople. ~Biblical quotations in this article have been made from The Jerusalem Bible (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966); and from The R. S. ’V. Interlinear Greek-English New Testament, by Rev. Alfred Marshall (London: Samuel Bagster and Sons Ltd. 1978). St. Luke’s ’Use of the Temple Image / 523 The Literary Structure It is perfectly acceptable in literature to use poetic devices to emphasize certain features of the text. Luke artistically uses repeated references to the Temple.in order to draw the listener or reader to a more reflective and prayerful attention,to the words and the story action o,f his Gospel. Luke’s story of Jesus of Nazareth, which has as one of its themes the struggle between good and evil, is based on a five-part.division. An aware-ness~ of this structure and its main themes can assist us in a reflective and prayerful reading of this account of the gospel. It is important to note that this dramatic and reflective outline (given below) does not run counter to nor violate the exacting topical outline that exegetes suggest for study of the text. This literar~y and meditative approach emph~asizes the dramatic quali-ties of the cosmic struggle between Christ and Satan and recognizes the artistic unity in Luke’s use 9f the Temple as a focal image. An Outline For Meditation For careful study of the text, commentaries generally outline Luke’s Gospel in the following way:2 ~ (1) The Prologue 1:1-4 (2) The Infancy Narrative 1:5--2:52 (3) The Preparation for Ministry 3:1--4:13 (4) The Galilean Minis~try 4:14---9:50 (5) The Journey Na~ative .~ 9:51--19:28 (6) The Jerusalem Ministry 19:29--21:38 (7) The Passion and Glorification 22:1--24:53 ¯ This can be a valugble g~u.ide to discover what Luke tells us about Jesus, his teaching and ’his ministry. It acknowledges the importance of the jour-ney, but only as a pan,of the outli.ne rather than as a theme throughout the entire gospel. According to his introduction, however,. Luke wrote for a prayerful and reflective audience in an artistic way so as to spark the imagination, the feelings,jthe..heart of his readers and to focus attention on the Person of Jesus in order to open their ears and eyes to respond as fully as possible to the message of the Lord as Luke presents it to them. Jesus taught his disciples that his ’message is best heard in prayer and the graces to respond to it best received in prayer. For such a prayerful consideration and use of Luke’s text of the gospel I suggest the following outline. PROLOGUE: 1:1-25 ’ (a) Introduction: why and to whom he writes. (b) Milieu: time and pl~ce. 2James A. Michener, The Source (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1967), p. 266. 524 /Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/4 Zachariah; the Temple scene, in the sanctuary. ACT I: Infancy: Prepare for life. Begins in the Temple: Pre-sentation. Introduces John the Baptist; then Jesus. Closes with the Temple scene. ACT II: Preparation For Mission: ~ Mission, decision, conflict. Career of John the Baptist; genealogy of Jesus. The temp-tations, ending with the Temple image. A hint that Jesus and Satan will meet again.. ACT III: Journey and Ministry: Jesus, led by the Spirit, begins his journey toward Jerusalem; He commences his public teaching. A special mention of the Temple (18:10). The section closes with Jesus taking possession of the Temple. ACT IV: Temple and Contest: Jesus teaches daily in the Temple. His enemies plot to kill him. Example of the widow’s offering. At night Jesus withdraws from the Temple to the Mount of Olives. 1:26-2:52 3:1-4:13 4:14-19:48 20:1-21:38 ¯ Act V: Conflict: 22:1-24:52a Passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. Signal phrase: "Satan enteri~d." Judas goes to the priests. Trial; condemnation; death. Veil of the Temple is torn. Resurrection and ascension. EPILOGUE: ~ 24:52b-53 The apostles begin their journey in the Tem-ple. The Good News for Prayer In my outline of Luke’s gospel, I have indicated that each of the major divisions end witha’specific use of the image of the Temple. In every case of these references the use flows smoothly and naturally out of the thought and action of the story. Artistically, the Temple image serves the same purpose as a major refrain in a symphony or opera; the audience hears it in the background and is reminded~of a principal character or of the primary theme of the work. Like an organist, Luke is able to play on three manuals at once. He uses the image of the Temple, repeated at significant moments in his text, to weave into a unity the principal themes of the life story of Jesus of Nazareth. St. Luke’s Use of the Temple Image / 595 The Temple image establishes the goal of the journey theme and gives it a continuity throughout the whole of the gospel as Luke presents it. Moreover, this image repeated at important instances in the narrative emphasizes and gives a continuity to the main theme of the story of Jesus: his life, death and resurrection. In the course of his journey to Jerusalem, Jesus makes allusions to and direct prophecies, of his death, and resurrec-tion, such as: "The. Son of Man" he said "is destined to suffer grievously, to be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and to be put to death, and to be raised up on the , third day" (Lk 9:22). But it is the carefully placed references to the Temple that hold this theme of death and resurrection before our eyes throughout the text of this gospel. For at the end of each major section, designated in the outline above, when reference is made to the Temple something ends and something new begins; death and resurrection are symbolized. In the end the Temple of brick and mortar would be destroyed, as Jesus prophesied, to be replaced forever by the eternal Temple of the Risen Christ. Evidence in Greek Terms The literary prologue (1:9-25) ends with the priestly action of Zachariah in that sacred area of the Temple, the sanctuary, while the people wait outside praying. The events recorded in this episode are interpreted as a signal of the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New. It is significant that in the Greek text Luke uses the specific term "sanctuary" or "holy place" (naos) three times in this prologue as his reference to the Temple: (1:9;22). He does not use this term again until after Christ,s death on the cross when he, tells us dramatically, with the tearing of the veil of the "Temple" (naos), that the old has ended and the new has begun~(23:45). There are, however, some instances in the course of his narrative in which Luke makes reference to the Temple or to the sanctuary :with a more general Greek term "the house of God" (oikos theou), because the refer-ence at such times is not essential to the narrative structure. When, for example, Jesus speaks o.f. the prophet "who was murdered between the altar and the sanctuary" (Lk I1:5 l), Luke uses the Greek term, "the house of God" (oikos theos). When, however, the reference is made to the Temple proper and is essential to the narrative structure, he uses the precise Greek term the Temple (hieros). This is the word which he uses at the end of each of the major sections that I have designated as acts in the above outline, as well as in the last verse, the literary epilogue, of his gospel account. Accord, ing to scholars3 Luke.was following a reliable tradition in his use of these 3The Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, Roland E. Murphy (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 119, 44:19. (For subsequent notes this will be referred to as JBC.)--There is a°good outline of Luke’s Gospel for meditative reading in The Gospel According to St. Luke. ed. Alois St6ger (London: Burns & Oates, 1969), two volumes. 526 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 / 4 Greek terms,, and should not be accused of inconsistency. Of importance in the present consideration,~ however, is Luke’s use of the term "the Tem-ple" (hieros), with all its sacred and imaginative connotations from the Old Testament as well as its Christian ,associations with the life of Jesus. This is the" term which Luke uses when he refers to the Temple scene (2:46) with which he completes his narrative o’f~the infancy of Jesus. Simi-larly, he ends with this same Temple image what \| have designated as Act II, which describes Jesus’ preparation for his mission:" Jesus rejects the third temptation 6f Satan who had led him "to the pinnacle of the Temple" (4:9) and begins his public ministry. With one special excepiion (18:9-14), Luke does not use this precise term for the Temple again until the ehd of the third’section of his narrative (indicated as Act III)when Jesus enters the Temple and forcefully takes possession of it as his Father’s house (19:45-46). In e~,ery case when Luke uses this term; we notice that there is an end and a beginning; the life-death-resurrection theme is symbolized in the Temple. At this part of the narrative (19:48) the actual suffering and death of Jesus are imminent, for the growing opposition of his enemies has become a calculated decision to destroy him. Throughout Act IV Jesus teaches daily in the Temple area (hieros); but at night for his own safety he withdraws to the Mount of Olives. He continueS to use the Temple for his mission, but he has begun to abandon it; it is no longer a place of safety for him. In Act V, his rejection of the Temple of bricks and mortar is completed in ~he violent tearing of the veil of the Temple (23:45) to signal the beginning of the reign of Christ. In the epilogue, Luke tells us that the apostles went to the Temple after the ascension of Jesus to await, in, prayer, their call to journey and mission. Each dramatic section of this outline of’the action 0f Luke’s gospel closes with a precise use of the image of the Temple which, I ~uggest, holds up before the reflective reader the main theme ’of the life, death and resurrection of the story of Jesus. A reflective and careful exami-nation of even a few’ of these sections will bear this out. The Prologue As Prayer ’ Luke says that although his readers are familiar with the story of the life bf Jesus, he intends "to write an ordered account." I Shggest that his purpose is to write :an artistic and’ meditative account of the Gospel in order to lead his refiders to prayer and a deeper consideration of the events o~ that story. The prologue (as I have designated it, verses ! to 25) can be used as a unit for prayer which inv~olves the whole person of th6 reader. For study purposes exegetes rightly identify as prologue 6nly the first ~our°verses~, because theseare writtenin very stylized and formal-Greek. That is proper to a formal introduction; but a literary prologue, besides’addressing the work to the~hudience, also links it to the past and gives.th’e~ audience some hints of the principal themes in the action that is to follow, The formal introduction, that is the first four verses, appropriately ,addresses the St. Luke’s Use of the Temple Image / 597 Gospel to Theophilus anti to everyone who professes a love of God. Verses 5 to .7 make the link: this is not going to be. a Gr~eek story, but one set in Israel. The first personages to whom we are introduced are two of the finest people that culture and religion produced: "Both were just in the sight of God and scrupulously observed all the commandments and observances of the Lord" :(1:6). Every word of this quotation is rich in history, meaning and imagery. The word "just," often translated as "righteous," "worthy," -"virtuous," is a summary of the history of God’s dealings with the Hebrew people. We should also be aware of the suggestive power of names such as Zachariah: "His name means ’Yahweh has remembered’.TM A note of tragedy is sounded with the words that Elizabeth was barren; but the author hastens to set his scene for the main action and to suggest his main themes. It is the solemn hour of, w9rship in the sacred dwelling place of the True God. It is one of the great moments of Zachariah’s priestly career; he has been chosen by lot to offer the incense in the sanctuary. While the faithful outside continue in prayer, Zachariah is plunged into a deep mystical ex-perience. Luke’s mention of the angel Gabriel (1:19) is regarded as a signal that the new age is about to begin? The same angel had commanded the prophet Daniel to tell his people that their exile and oppression were at an end and that a messenger would come to herald the advent of a new era (Book of Daniel, chapters 9 and 10). By drawing attention to several pa~al-lels between Zachariah’s experience and that of Daniel (such as the evening hour of prayer and their being left speechless6) Luke implies that God is about to fulfill his promise and begin that new era. With this incident in the Temple Luke also symbolizes the coming to an end of the Old Covenant and the beginning of the New. This. of course, will be developed and made increasingly more clear as the narrative unfolds. For the moment, this is the hour for which the whole world has been waiting. God is about to enter into the history of man. By closing the prologue with a reference to the Temple (l:.22).Luke esta~blishes a pattern for his symbolizatio.n of a life-death-resurrection t.heme which will be repeated throughout the gospel-story at the end of each significant dramatic section. Use of Imagination in Prayer A studious reading of the Gospel is important to avoid mere flights of 4Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. ed. Gerhard Kittel; trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. E~rdmans Publishing Co.. 1965). For "hieros" see 111. pp. 221-247. For "naos". IV, pp. 880-890. (Subsequent references m these notes will be to Kittel.)~Klaus Baltzer, in "The Meaning of the Temple in the Lukan Writings.’" Harvard Theolog!cal Review (Misso~ula. Montana: Scholars’ Press) 58 (1965), pp. 263-277. regards Luke’s use of terms for the Temple as "inconsistent." 5JBC, p. 121, #44:27. 6JBC, p. 121, 4#44:28. Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979 / 4 fancy, and the use of a good commentary can be of invaluable help. But,a prayerful approach through the use of imagination and other faculties will prevent the opposite errbr of regarding the Gospel as a mere intellectual exercise book. St. Luke’s Gospel is a prayer book of the highest merit. But we must bring to it our whole selves as human beings; all our senses and faculties must be employed in our praying. The passage designated as the. end of Act II (2:41-52) is an exemplary unit of action and dialogue which can be momentarily lifted out of the context and used for meditation which involves our whole person in it. ThE opening sentences immediately direct our thought and imagination to Jerusalem and draw us into the journey of Jesus. "Every year" and "Passover" should be equally significant words to us as they were for the people of Jesus’ own day. The first activity"is in the world of human, every-day affairs and should alert us to the fact that prayer begins and take~ place in the world of events, circumstances, and persons in the course of our daily lives. Hence, we take our place among friends and acquaintances, with Jesus and Mary. We, too, are going up to Jerusalem, to the Temple, for a joyful celebration. The text, of course, leaves the details of the visit to our imagination. Our prayer at this level might valuably draw us to dwell upon ’what happened at the Temple when Jesus celebrated his entry into adulthood. However,~that can only be surmised; we should not allow our-selves to be sidetracked by it. The text urges us to follow more closely; it puts the emphasis on what occurs after the ceremony of Jesus’ Bar Mitz-vah, The return trip to Nazareth is usual and all that might be expected after aj0yful visit to the Temple. Again, it is the world of everyday experience. Jesus was not with his parents, but "they assumed he was with the cara-van." They were conscientious parents and looked for him. No panic is suggested in their action: "They sought him among acquaintances and relations." Where else would one look for a normal twelve-year-old boy who had just experienced the excitement of receptiofi into adulthood? However, "when they failed to find him," anxieties City of Saint Louis (Mo.), http://www.geonames.org/4407084 http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/rfr/id/230

Review for Religious - Issue 38.4 (July 1979)

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