Robert Brophy, an emeritus professor of English at Long Beach State
University, entered the Society in 1946 from St. Ignatius High in San Francisco,
and left in 1968 from the University of San Francisco.
I found the “facilities” and menus to be counter-signs. We were
discussing the Jesuit dedication to an “Option for the Poor” while
meeting in a quarter billion dollar building the likes of which I have seldom
seen. We were eating from menus featuring fantastic meals such that I never hope
to see again. And I had a suite of rooms that served silence and panoramic
wonderment.
“University Hall,” our meeting place, was breath-taking --
totally palatial with its miles of marble floors and decorative walls, its
escalators and elevators, and its triumphs of design. I wondered whether there
was not a better place to meet, one that could accommodate all and yet remind us
at least remotely of the life of barrio and paramilitary. In ensuing
conversations, I heard that LMU had to snatch the building at a considerably
lesser price so that Pepperdine University would not move into it and intrude on
LMU space. True?
Regarding the food, it has always been a question with California Jesuits,
right ? Did Master of Novices Francis Seeliger ever adequately explain how and
why we had first class feasts that few of us would have experienced outside?
Poverty of Dependence, I think he used to say. I can hardly repeat it without
smiling.
I also wondered why none of the fantastic Justice Jesuits were on any of our
programs. If there was no space on the program, I wanted to see their efforts
listed and described – as attesting to what outstanding works of Justice
and Peace were already being pursued under their dedication.
-- John Baumann’s PICO was mentioned but not highlighted enough.
-- Steve Privett’s impact on USF (a hellhole of militarism, Vietnam
patriotism, and Vat2-subversion in my day), needed notice, USF now having a
Peace Review, a Peace Studies minor, and a Peace Center, headed by a
world-renowned specialist in Mid East affairs, Steven Zunes. If Steve didn't do
all that himself, he certainly sustains it.
-- Greg Boyle and Mike Kennedy at Dolores Mission working with gangs and
underemployment in the LA Ghetto got no forum.
-- The California Jesuit response to injustice in the Jesuit Family seminars
and protest at the School of the Americas by Jesuit universities, high schools,
and parishes — rising to that effort at no less than radicalization (in a
good sense) of youth — needed kudos.
-- The Verbum Dei community, getting students to graduate high school in
Watts went unmentioned.
Steve Kelly was there. He had entered the Society in 1982 and had spent seven
years in various local and federal prisons for protesting the U.S. nuclear
weapons program. That delayed his tertianship; federal judges haven’t
taken to his justifications for pouring blood on delivery systems. I saw him at
the Convocation, but he seemed more of an embarrassment than a hero. Now
finished with his tertianship, he was then “Awaiting Assignment”
(probably out of province). I am an outsider and don’t know Steve's story,
I think he is California’s Dan Berrigan. If he is too soft –spoken,
it seems to me someone should have spoken for him. He is probably a pain in the
butt to superiors; he is unrepentant, refuses to accept probations, is very
austere, vegetarian, uncompromising. And, as he told me, he’s not a
poet.
When I raised these questions to one Jesuit whom I respect, he said this was
the start of things, an attempt to create a community on which to build justice
issues. It was not to preach but to dialogue. The fact that some unlikely
Jesuits showed up not only to the pre-prandials and dinners but to the sessions
made me suspect he was right. I should wait and see what happens.
I could have ignored the palatial setting if only someone had addressed the
issue. As far as I know, no one did. If at least we could have admitted that we
were living a counter-sign every moment of our presence there! Same for the
food—it should have been addressed. Should we have had cheese sandwiches
as I suggested at one point? Or an alternative menu? But that would have been
divisive.
I talked to other Jesuits about my reservations. One was very responsive; he
saw Jesuit institutions as being stuck in the Two Standards meditation: By
embracing high-cost institutions, the Province becomes sensitive to (if not
enslaved by) money sources and beholden to the Murdochs and Disneys, as the
Cardinal is in his LA Cathedral. I suspect that Bellarmine survived the test of
that “Enemies” Playing Cards incident recently, but the outrage and
uproar of the alums certainly points to those alums not reflecting the justice
(and allied peace) element in their education.
And that’s still the question, isn’t it? How do Jesuits and
Jesuit institutions impact on the culture? Do they in any essential way stand
for “A Faith That Does Justice?” Is Faith with Justice the first
thing that comes to mind when the Society is mentioned? Is that on the way to
happening? As a follow-up, I recently brought the subject up to one of the
outstanding teachers I had met from St. Ignatius High School. I did a quick
overview for him of the SI Alumni Directory’s appendix of “career
listings.” Alums, it seems, have been overwhelmingly into banking, law
& medicine, accounting, advertising, agribusiness, brokerage &
investments, business administration, business entrepreneurism, engineering,
information systems, construction, consulting, non-elective government,
finance/venture capital, insurance, hotel-restaurant management, manufacturing,
merchandising/sales/marketing, real estate, military, transportation, and
utilities. The listing of these goes on column after column, page after page. It
overwhelms alums who work in other fields, such as education, energy resources,
foundations, counseling, judiciary, nursing, clergy, etc. Of course, one can
seek justfaith in any way of life. But why am I suspicious that financial
success far far far far far outdistances justice issues in graduates’
minds? How much emphasis does SI put on justice? How much does it question
structures of oppression and discrimination? Has there been a shift lately?
Someone should do the research.
Excuse me for my wide-ranging ignorance in many things here. You asked for my
reflections.
No one talked about the ROTC on our campuses. Air Force ROTC has a spacious
office at the very entrance to the “University Center” building. The
brochures on its racks were slick, filled with success rhetoric, and beautifully
designed. We should remind ourselves that this is the same Air Force that serves
as the “Shock and Awe” first strike arm of our president, the glory
of wars won without casualties (on our side), the nuclear delivery system, death
by remote, using the smart and stealth technology that allows the US to bully
and prevail.
The Jesuits I queried found the Air Force presence only a slight
embarrassment. Evidently the university profits from its presence; dropping ROTC
would no doubt offend many alumni and supporters and research grants would dry
up. The University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University host the Army
ROTC, which does aggressive recruiting on those campuses. When my daughter
Rachel went to SCU she received regular letters promising practically a free
ride if she joined, a suggestion that I labeled "solicitation to
prostitution". I still think that. Kids recruited out of black ghettos or
the barrio probably see joining the armed forces the only way to get an
education.
Don Cordero
I remember when Bill Masterson first asked the Companions if any of us wanted
to attend the convocation, and I remember being surprised to find my hand go up.
I recall feeling some contradictory thoughts and looking at my hand and
wondering why it was up.
We were supposed to do a mini-retreat, to prepare for the convocation, and I
had mixed feelings about that. However, I felt that I owed a large debt to the
Jesuits for being where I am in my life today, and the retreat turned out well
for me. Among other things, I reconnected with Steve Olivo, SJ. He had been in
the back of my mind for a number of years. If this were all that came out of the
retreat that alone would have been worth the effort. But there was more to come.
Those of us there developed a good connection. We became a mini-community. After
the retreat, Steve even joined us and our spouses for a lively dinner at our
house. It was a warm experience.
I drove down to Los Angeles on August 1st In spite of the
congestion on the 405 freeway, I arrived about 4:00 PM with feelings of
apprehension. I checked in and got my room. I felt “outside-inside”
and really unsure as we walked down to the social hour and dinner. However, from
the moment I got in close proximity to the large group, I was greeted warmly.
“Warmth” is one of the words that characterized the whole
convocation experience for me. Rich Robin, SJ was the first who came up to me
and threatened to kick me if I didn’t recognize him. Well, he was a bit
more graphic, but that served to melt any residual apprehension. For the whole
time, Jesuits came up to me and greeted me warmly. In fact, this was my
experience throughout the convocation. I sensed a feeling of graciousness on the
Jesuits’ part. Most of them expressed appreciation that we came.
After an excellent dinner we convened at the large chapel on campus. The
level of positive energy in the church was incredible. The place was packed. I
can still hear the mighty buzz of conversation and expectation. I knew at that
moment that there would be more for me to receive than I would be able to give.
The warmth and openness of the presentation by the Provincial, Tom Smolich, SJ
set a tone for me that never left me the whole time. (Tom had also come to the
Companions retreat in Santa Cruz, a mark of openness that impressed both my wife
and me.) The service ended with a special movie made for the occasion. It was a
thought-provoking yet subtle challenge for the rest of the week.
Rather than go through a listing of the events in the days that followed, I
wish to share selected feelings and experiences. There is no doubt in my
doubting mind that the whole event was a moment of grace for me. Frankly, I have
great reservations about Roman Catholic belief structures and content but I
could not deny that something of a profound spiritual and joyful nature was in
the air. More than anything else I experienced graciousness. In fact
“graciousness” was the other word that pervaded my experience. I had
almost a continuous conversation with someone except for the times that I chose
to be alone and reflect. I attempted in my own halting way to be continuously
present to my experience and feelings and try to stay away from analyzing what
was happening. It is funny, now that I reflect back, that I spoke to none of the
women in any depth.
But my sense of the women in attendance was that they were a presence that
was deep and one that subtly made the convocation move in a direction that will
be very important for the Jesuits and much, much more for the larger church. I
was impressed by the way the explicit presence of the women in the prayer
services set a tone of inclusiveness. One of the opening presentations about
Mary was very powerful and deeply moving for me. My immediate reaction was that
only a mother, of four boys no less, could only have given her words the depth,
subtlety, humor and meaning they had. (Well, it also helped that she was a
little feisty and Midwestern!) Believe me; however, I have no illusions about
the huge gender disparity in the Church.
Overall, I think it was a watershed event for the Society and for the Church.
For myself, I am very rusty in the Spiritual Exercises and have determined to
refresh some lost knowledge. While I still do not know how I can participate
with the Society in this huge collaborative challenge facing them, I know that I
have something of importance to give. It was also clear to me that I am
challenged to follow up on my personal insights, no matter what the Jesuits do.
But, honestly, I hope that I will be invited to more “nitty-gritty”
interactions if that is the way they go.
Whatever happens I am personally grateful. I was glad to return to my wife. I
came back a little better husband and father. It was an honor for me to be
there. While I am still skeptical about the Church at large, I am joyful in my
skepticism. I am also glad to have chosen to be in the Jesuits and in spite of
the pain of leaving, to be where I am now in my life. God-speed to them.
Doug McFerran was a Jesuit from 1952-62. He taught philosophy in
the Los Angeles Community College District until his retirement in 2003. He is
the author of IRA Man: Talking with the Rebels and is currently the
editor of ARCCLIGHT, the newsletter published by the Association for the
Rights of Catholics in the Church.
Throughout the convocation, there was an explicit emphasis on just listening,
whether to each other or to the Spirit within each of us. This was probably the
best way to go. It didn't keep us from asking hard questions of each other, but
it reduced the likelihood of acrimonious debate.
At the opening session Tom Smolich cited three reasons for coming together.
First was the importance of this particular moment in the Church, highlighted by
the sex scandals. It has been forty years since Vatican II, but we are still
working to implement its changes. Next was the reality of the Jesuit situation
with declining vocations. Finally there was the Ignatian vision of education,
too important for us to be limited to the status quo.
Among the points striking me the most in the presentations in the next few
days was the repeated theme of a third or "transformative" stage in
religious life replacing the first (the one those of us from way back know so
well) that called for relative isolation from contemporary culture and the
second that called for more complete immersion in this culture. The point now
was to rediscover what it meant to have a religious identity that to some extent
would set individuals against their world but allow them to work to change that
world. This was echoed repeatedly in the call to pursue "a faith that does
justice" (especially in a presentation by Greg Chisholm that I think will
be on the province's convocation website). Since one of the themes of the
convocation was that of lay-Jesuit partnership, a number of folks felt called
upon to parse what this means. I particularly liked the points made by Loyola's
own Sister Mary Beth Inghram, who demanded that religious groups (her own as
well as the Society) not see themselves as "victims" of declining
vocations. The emphasis, she said, had to be on "empowering co-
ministers" as much as on training new members. "The torch is not being
passed; we're all holding it up together."
Santa Clara's Paul Soukup
reminded folks that ours is not the first generation to experience this business
of a shared ministry. He also insisted that what this means will look different
in different situations. We are wrong, he said, to fear for our institutions;
there is no need to protect them. (Paul, by the way, agreed to my request to
probe his thoughts further, maybe for JGC.)
In many ways the convocation
illustrates the 60's cliché that the medium is the message. The way we
did come together, sharing living quarters and meals, meant more than anything
else for both Jesuits and non-Jesuits, including the group of us with a foot in
each world. There were quite possibly a number of Jesuits who were not present
because they could not handle what Smolich has been demanding of the province. I
was personally reassured by the men I met up with, so many of those from around
my own generation as well as a few far older than me (I'm still blown away by
the priests who now were seven decades in the Society) and the new kids, the
novices and the scholastics who brought their own sense of excitement to the
group.
Obviously, there are a lot of memories stirred by the time we spent together
at the convocation. I was reminding Bernie Bush how, as a regent up at
Applegate, he had been instrumental in my corruption when on a trip to Tahoe,
which was supposed to be on the California side only, we somehow managed to find
a casino. I had one quarter (SI guys, remember how we used to squirrel away
quarters for the laundry machines?) which I played, then I borrowed a second
from Lou Bishop and hit a jackpot with five silver dollars and shared the
wealth. Lou completely blew my away when I was retelling the story by saying
that he still had his silver dollar from that day. I keep thinking how much I
would have wanted those days and that camaraderie to go on forever.
I've already said that at a personal level the convocation marked a deeper
reconciliation with the Church itself. Even though I find that as we recite the
Nicene Creed in the liturgy I keep wanting to say "not really" to
about every point, I want the Church, mythology and all (using that term in the
more cognitively neutral sense of all the stories and images of a tradition), to
remain a positive influence on the world. I am again angered by those who have
compromised the Church, whether by failing to keep their zippers in place or by
protecting the sinning cleric from the consequences of his actions. I am
saddened by the revelations of how priests and religious, instead of rescuing
the victims of oppression, actively contributed to some of the real horror
stories of oppression (as in Ireland with the Magdalene laundries). But I take
the consecrated bread and wine because I want so much for this communion of the
faithful to be a reality, and so I must put my intellectual rebellion on hold
and do my best to deal with my own "cloud of unknowing."
Robert R. Rahl was a California Jesuit from 1963 to 1973. He was on the
faculty of New College of California for fifteen years and twice served as Dean
of the School of Humanities. He was later Director of Information Technology for
the California Medical Assciation from which he retired in 1999. Married to
Laurel Lane for 25 years, he has three sons and one grandson. Robert volunteers
as a technical advisor to the West Coast Compañeros, Inc. and its online
journal Just Good Company. He grows miniature roses and preternaturally
hot peppers.
One of my most vivid memories connected with the California Jesuit Province
Convocation of August 2003 comes from about four months before the actual
event. In prayerful preparation for the Convocation, about ten of us
"Compañeros" former members of the Society of Jesus met on
the weekend of April 25-27 in the offices of the California Provincial at Sacred
Heart Center, the former site of the Novitiate where we had all begun our Jesuit
training at various times many decades ago. We were joined for the Saturday
afternoon session by Fr. Steve Olivo who lives in the grand old building which
now has been transformed into an infirmary and assisted-living center for the
aging population of the Province. For many of us who left the Society in the
tumultuous 'sixties and 'seventies there still persists a residual pain of loss,
accented by a smoldering sense of rejection by our former comrades. In those
days, when someone left it was silently and secretly, under cover of darkness,
and the departer was not to be mentioned again. Some of these feelings were
being aired that Saturday afternoon when Steve shared his own deep feelings in
his usual slow-spoken, gentle, soft words. "You felt that we had rejected
you, but we felt that you had abandoned us." So used to looking only at my
own side of that terminal event, I was stunned to realize that there was plenty
of pain on the other side of the closing door, too. A few minutes later the
group was fishing for a single word to describe both those who had remained in
the Society and those of us who had taken other roads. Steve spoke up again and
offered, "We will always be brothers." A simple and obvious
word but it moved the group strongly and deeply because we felt the reality of
it then and there.
Against this backdrop of old wounds, the invitation California Provincial Fr.
Tom Smolich extended to us Compañeros to attend the province
Convocation as official delegates was a very pleasant surprise and an
occasion of healing. The event itself proved to be, for me, an experience of
both healing and revitalization. For the first time in the history of the
Province Convocation a periodic all-member meeting non-Jesuit
colleagues in the province's ministries were represented in large numbers. With
falling numbers and rising median ages, the Jesuits of the United States in
general and California in particular face either extinction or rebirth in a new
form. Many of the Society's more enlightened members and leaders realize that
the brightest hope for rebirth is in connection with their non-Jesuit
compatriots in Ignatian ministries, women and men who are inspired by the same
Ignatian spirituality and dedicated to the same apostolic work without
necessarily being tied to either religious vows or a calling to the clerical
priesthood. Convocation 2003 was an opportunity to give this hope a
concrete expression in real life.
We met from the first to the fifth of August on the campus of
Loyola-Marymount University which overlooks the southwestern expanse of the city
of Los Angeles. The Jesuit participants stayed on for an additional three days
to fulfill the requirements of their annual eight-day retreat. These were very
bright, warm, sunny days in the coastal desert of southern California but the
meeting planners had foreseen the weather and provided us at registration with
T-shirts, caps and sun-block. Of all the meetings I've ever attended this was by
far the best planned. A superabundance of LMU student-workers watched out for us
and took good care of us, pointing us in the right direction for meals and
meetings and liturgical celebrations and sometimes providing us with
transportation in the form of king-size golf carts and trams.
During the afternoon "Happy Hour" which kicked off the meeting I
ran into dozens of Jesuits with whom I had lived and worked and most of whom I
hadn’t seen for decades. They included former classmates who were celebrating
forty years as Jesuits. Forty-three of us entered the Society of Jesus at Los
Gatos in the autumn of 1963 and nine are currently members. All but one was in
attendance at the Convocation which made this a real reunion for me.
Mutual affection and good will for each other was alive and well after all these
years and a lot of my trepidation melted right away. In the following days the
keynote in my encounters with other participants was this sense of active
acceptance and good will coming from young and old, male and female, vowed
"religious" and just plain folks alike.
The "agenda" for the five days was quite unusual since
agenda typically means "things to be done" and there was
nothing for us to do, at least nothing that we had to do. Of course there
were lots of activities scheduled, meals and meetings of all sizes small,
medium and large groups as well as liturgies and other prayerful and
reflective gatherings, in addition to plenty of informal get-togethers. Nothing,
however, was mandatory or "musting" to be done. More importantly, the
point of all these events was, in Zen fashion, that there is no point. The
Convocation was planned intentionally and explicitly to have no
measurable outcome, no "practical" point. Its raison
d'être was, instead, the creation of an environment of discernment,
based on Ignatius of Loyola's notion of "discernment of spirits" in
his Spiritual Exercises which lays the foundation for all forms of Jesuit and
Ignatian spirituality. All the Convocation activities were designed to
foster and nourish this atmosphere of openness and discernment, to allow us and
encourage us to listen to each other, to ourselves and to the Spirit speaking
and working in us and through us and through all the events of our lives.
What I heard and saw and felt during that time was a common bond of love in
the Lord, in the all-too-human visible Church, and in the Ignatian spirit of
generosity in the service of God and the people of God. The best bet for the
Jesuits not only to survive but even to thrive in these changing times is to
continue and build on the commitment to its Ignatian partners which showed such
a promising beginning in Convocation 2003.
Dave Van Etten and his wife, Mary Ann, operate a Family Day Care for
children from their San Jose, California, home. Dave entered the Society in '58,
an engineering grad from Santa Clara University, spent three years as a
missionary in Taiwan and the Philippines, and left in 1969 from Alma College in
Los Gatos. He currently serves as a WCCI Director and Chief Financial Officer,
coordinator of the Companions' annual reunion and co-moderator of their online
communication activities.
We were housed 2 by 2 in beautiful and modern two-bedroom apartments in new
and/or near-new dorms located close to the main entrance of the University just
off of Lincoln Ave. As you enter the campus you are startled by the size of the
first building on your right, University Hall. Perhaps a bit more than two
football fields long, this mall-like building with a huge interior atrium was
built in the 1980s to house the main headquarters of GM-Hughes Electronics. The
building lay empty for some time until it was sold to LMU by Raytheon Corp. in
January, 2000 for $75.5 million dollars, about a third of its fair market value.
Classroom and administrative office space across the campus immediately doubled
in size. If you have not visited the campus in a long time, do so at your
earliest convenience. Wow! Has it changed in the thirty-nine years since I spent
the summer of 1964 before departing for Taiwan!
There were five plenary sessions (i.e. main speakers) spaced through the five
day period we were there. These prepared presentations were designed to set the
tone for the gathering, to prepare us to be open, to listen and to be responsive
to the movement of the Spirit during the Convocation. I think many of us found
the first session to be a big surprise: “Mary – Partnership with
God”. The centerpiece of the program was a talk by Rita
Dollard-O’Malley, Director of Adult Spirituality at St. Ignatius College
Preparatory in San Francisco, on Mary’s Annunciation and her radical
openness to God’s Presence and plan, and also an understanding of Ignatian
indifference. Look up “Annunciation” by Denise
Levertov……..really powerful stuff. One takes a big chance these days
keeping the interest of a group of this size zeroed in on a Marian theme. Rita
not only did it, but she did it masterfully. Wow!
There were other highlights….and a couple of
disappointments…..but I’d like to focus my reflections on what
happened to me as we worked our way through these days of dwelling in the Spirit
with old Jesuit companions and new lay friends.
The first thing I was moved to do was force myself to spend time with Jesuits
I had not seen for a long time and seek out common ground in our relationships
that had not previously been explored. I asked whoever was sitting next to me at
lunch a little bit about their high school and college days (if any) and then
set about attempting to discover common acquaintances from those periods. Time
and time again common friends and connections were unearthed which led to
conversations I never dreamed possible. It is indeed a small
world……..
The larger question mark as to what this Convocation was about was gradually
resolved for me to some extent through the development and exploration of
relationships, expressions of friendship, the revelation of unknown and
unexplored connections, and the sharing of these discoveries.
It seems that the key to “greater partnership and collaboration”
in our ministries is to discover the power of fostering and growing personal
relationships and friendships within our ministries. We need to set about daily
to break down the obstacles that prevent us from interacting more freely with
our fellow ministers in the priesthood shared through baptism, both Jesuit and
otherwise.
Our personal encounters with each other – especially with those we do
not know very well and with those to whom we are not naturally attracted –
need focused attention in order to build bridges of cooperation.
Jesuit-lay collaboration will come about with the dissolution of the
hyphenated division. As emphasis increases on the “priesthood of the
people” in carrying out “ministry” there should be less
emphasis… and less need, I might add…for the imposition of
“rules and regulations” from the “Capital Gang” at the
Vatican.
The major challenge for the Society of Jesus is the unknown that lies ahead
for each of its members. Will the Society last? If not, what will it morph into?
The biggest obstacle for many of the older Jesuits is the holding on to the
Jesuit culture that provides a life to which each Jesuit has become
accustomed.
One thing I would do in each local apostolate, in each particular sector or
at the local Jesuit community is to establish and promote the discovery of
relationships among/between the members of each grouping to provide a basis of
connected action, i.e. a built-in periodic sharing one on one by members of each
ministry to deepen understanding, friendship, etc. There may be some way to
establish a means for the Jesuits to share with each other in more formal ways
the benefits of their “Journeys” without reverting to feelings
generated by the “exercitium caritatis”.
A contradiction: The vow of poverty vis-à-vis the opulence of the
campus living quarters, the elegance of the meals and the continuing
availability of every kind of alcoholic beverage at happy hour,
er...Pre-prandials. An AA meeting was held every evening in the Jesuit Residence
at which there were a dozen or so folks. Unfortunately the problems with alcohol
and drugs are much greater than that.
Jim Torrens, SJ, entered the Jesuits out of St. Ignatius High School in
San Francisco in 1948 and went the normal Jesuit course, including theology
studies and ordination in Belgium. He did his graduate studies in English
literature at the University of Michigan and then, in the turbulence of 1968,
went to teach at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He then had two long stints in
the classroom at Santa Clara University, plus a few years as community superior
at the University of San Francisco. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was an editor of
AMERICA in New York City. He then spent three years teaching with Mexican
Jesuits in Tijuana and is currently director of the House of Prayer for Priests,
a retreat house in the archdiocese of Los Angeles. His late-life publications:
Presenting Paradise (a translation and commentary of Dante's
"Paradiso," Scranton University Press), Reaching toward God
(essays and poems, Sheed and Ward), and Uphill Running, a Jesuit Life
(poems, self-published).
“NOW IS THE ACCEPTABLE TIME”
James Torrens, SJ
Zaccheus, besides being a classic name in California province
history—and a big name, not a little one--is a very winning figure in the
gospel, one of that handful of needy and feisty people who manage to catch the
attention of Jesus. He’s up there in the sycamore tree just watching and
Jesus calls up to him, “Zaccheus, come down quickly, for today I must stay
at your house.” Saint Luke adds, “And he came down quickly and
received him with joy.” “Quickly” is the key word, excitedly.
That’s how happiness makes you act.
I always see this scene through the lens of an article by Paul Bernadicou who
did his dissertation on this chapter in Luke, if I’m remembering
correctly. What Paul found in this chapter and in this episode was an emphasis
on joy in salvation. Here is a shady character, a man of dubious ethics, working
with the Romans to squeeze his own people. And here is the reformer, the man of
God, Jesus, who comes to this sinner’s house to make it his. How
terrific!
“I must stay at your house.” This may sound like Jesuits we can
remember who invited themselves to people’s houses, always for the good of
these people, of course! Well, we’re in the position of Zaccheus today.
Each of us is called to make our lives, our apostolic team, our community, our
Order, into the Lord’s house. Our vocation is not to a given place but to
a continual placement in the divine presence, which gives us our identity,
companions of Jesus.
In my novitiate days, the scholastics who had taught us in high school were
in Alma College, and they put out a book through the Bruce Publishing Company
called Better A Day. The allusion is to Psalm 84, “Better one day
in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. Better the threshold of the house of
my God than a home in the tents of the wicked.” It’s that beautiful
psalm that starts, “How lovely is your dwelling place.” Each chapter
in the book was about an outstanding Jesuit brother. I especially remember the
story of Nicholas Owen, the constructor of priest holes, and Wilfred
Schoenberg’s essay on the brother who traveled the Silk Route through
Asia. Schoenberg, whose death we heard of yesterday, was an eager and feisty
character, a moving force behind the Native American museum in Spokane. The book
could be written today, and needs to be written, about the Brothers who by their
companionship and service and palpable faith and apostolic concern guarantee
that we are indeed the house of the Lord, that we indeed exude joy in
salvation.
“Salvation” is a tricky term. It’s much more relative than
we may realize to our particular day and age, to what Mexicans call la
coyuntura, the present conditions. Years ago in graduate school, I remember
a fellow graduate student in English who had looked at a number of
dissertations, many of them by Jesuits, and he claimed that the Jesuit theses
all had a tricky approach which made it easier for us. Half of the thesis was on
the state of the current scholarship; the rest was the original work, the
solution or resolution. I’m sure he was right. It’s the Scholastic
Method, the procedure of Saint Thomas, beginning with the state of the question
(status questionis).
But really that’s what we have to do, be aware of just where we live.
John Martin, in his homily, talked about Ignatius responding to “the
calamity of the culture” in his times. A frequent name for our culture,
our intellectual milieu, with its infectious proneness to doubt, its suspicion
of everything, is Post-Modernism. I thought that once I got away from Santa
Clara University and all the faculty discussion groups about Post-Modernism that
Ted Rynes so faithfully attended, I would be free of that tar pit. But
that’s where we live.
Susan Sontag just had a page in the L. A. Times Book Review about her
favorite topic, photography, and this is what she claims: “The modern way
of seeing is to see in fragments. To see reality in the light of certain
unifying ideas has the undeniable advantage of giving shape and form to our
experience, but they are misleading, demagogic, always in the long run untrue.
They deny the infinite variety and complexity of the real.” In other
words, reality is much too complicated for us to figure out. You can love, as
she does, “the savage autonomy of the detail,” but you have to throw
up your hands like Pontius Pilate and exclaim, “What is truth?” So
Pontius Pilate is a figure of Post-Modernism.
Bishop Ed Clark of Los Angeles, former rector of the college seminary at
Camarillo, just gave a fine lecture recently on “Characteristics of
Post-Modernism,” the philosophy or outlook that’s so much in the
air—in the relativism of our students as much as in the ironic mode of
columnists. Bishop Clark asked, How can we speak to people thinking this way?
How can we present Jesus Christ to them in a way that clicks? He gave some
hints. The people who are skeptical about foundations, norms, authority are very
pragmatic. They ask, Is it practical? Does it make a difference that you
believe? The terrible effect of our scandals on the church as they are served up
in gory detail by the media is to seem to say, It’s not making a
difference.
We need to show by our lives, by our way of living “The Principle and
Foundation,” that it does make a difference for us to believe in
God’s plan for the world, centering in Jesus Christ. At school
commencements or mission statements or wherever, that needs somehow to enter
in—the big plan of salvation, as in those opening chapters of Ephesians
and Colossians, and in the prologue of John, and in the Spiritual
Exercises when we contemplate the Incarnation.
Certain agenda and emphases get a lot of attention today—tolerance,
diversity, multiculturalism. They are crucial to the good health of our society
and to living out the gospel, and they are honored in the Second Vatican
Council. But they do go with the flow of Post-Modernism. They respond to the
good points, the strong features, of our culture.
What is still countercultural is the emphasis on our Catholic Christian
treasures of belief and our values of conduct and, in fact, the sacrificial
spirit, the generous response of the Kingdom meditation. Last summer, speaking
to Black Catholics convening in Chicago, Bishop Gordon Bennett encouraged their
readiness to “show up” on Calvary, for the sake of the church, the
Body of Christ
I had a talk with one of you a few days ago about that thorn in the heart of
so many devout Catholic parents of a certain age in our country. Their
children—three, four, five, six of them—so often seem to have
wandered off from the faith of their fathers, that is, from religious practice
and allegiance. It was very encouraging to hear Dean Brewster tell of his own
way back, the hard and costly way of “invisible discernment,” where
the Holy Spirit has the lead. Anyone in R.C.I.A. can match Brewster’s
story many times over. They are all part of the hope we have to keep up.
What cannot be quenched in people, however skeptical they are, is their
desire for God. That is put very well by Mike J. Buckley in his contribution to
a book of essays that Tom Lucas just edited in honor of John Padberg (Style,
Spirit, Story). There is no scarcity today of “religious
hunger,” Mike writes, an “emptiness that constitutes a longing for
union with God.” “Unless it is suppressed or overwhelmed with
distractions or lost in unacknowledged despair, there is within the human being
that sense of privation and an aspiration for coherence in which things make
final sense and human longing is affirmed in the experience of love.”
Buckley concludes his essay by reminding us how much God desires to unite
human beings with himself. The longing, he says, is nowhere better expressed
than in chapter 15 of Saint Luke, the shepherd searching the lost sheep, the
woman searching for her lost coin, and the Father on the lookout day after day
for the return of the lost son.
Whether or not the pundits and the intellectuals concur, we’re here to
say things do make sense. The National Geographic photographer whose
video we saw has a sense of his art that is completely opposite to Susan Sontag.
The difference has to do with vision, vision of the possibilities, eyes for the
light that shines out from inside. “Vision controls our perception,”
he says. “When vision is clear, passion and creativity flourish.”
Mike Buckley said something in an issue of Studies long ago that has
stuck with me. He said it’s a prime Jesuit characteristic to do everything
yntensamente, intensely. Wilfred Schoenberg, Jim Gill (also just
deceased) are outstanding examples. You can’t do that without a
transforming vision.
Today, August 6, in world history is post-modern in the most awful and
awesome sense, a look into the chasm that was opened by the explosion of the
bomb in Hiroshima. That was a black hole of the human spirit. The run-up to this
calamity was code-named Trinity. What a negative image of the bountiful Creator!
But an equal and opposite force is celebrated today—transfiguration, our
change of face into that of Jesus.
This day has always been special for me. It was my father’s birthday;
he served my first Mass on this day. And in my last year of theology I did a
licentiate thesis on the passages in Second Corinthians that talk about the
reality of an apostle as reflecting—in action, attitude and word—the
glory of Christ. You know, “All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the
glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to
glory, as from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”
This is the real joy that we’re called to, like Zaccheus divesting
himself of whatever he needed to and could, in gratitude. Only in his conversion
did Zaccheus achieve importance. John Steinbeck wrote, in East of Eden,
“I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the
quality and number of his glories. . . If the glory can be killed, we are
lost.”
It’s a daily thing, our call to glory. We live, you know, by days, not
by years. I am not age 72 but 26,000. That’s pretty daunting! Fortunately
they go one at a time. “If today you hear his voice, harden not your
hearts.” Zaccheus, get down out of that observation post of yours. Today I
must stay at your house.