by Father Robert Lauder

11th in a series

In re-reading Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011, pp. 362), I found some of the statements that the Holy Father makes about the Risen Christ especially interesting. Reflecting on my own experience of receiving religious instruction from grammar school right through college, I think that the mystery of the Resurrection was greatly neglected.

An historian of theology, I suspect, could explain in detail how this happened, but whatever the reason, this central mystery of Christianity should never be neglected in any presentation of the Christian faith.

In discussing the appearances of Christ after the Resurrection, Pope Benedict points out that the apostles don’t seem to recognize the Lord immediately. When they do recognize Him, the Holy Father suggests that they recognize Him from within rather than recognizing Him from His physical appearance. The pope suggests that there is a kind of dialectic of recognition and non-recognition.

He writes the following:

“This dialectic of recognition and non-recognition corresponds to the manner of the apparitions. Jesus comes through closed doors; he suddenly stands in their midst. And in the same way he suddenly withdraws again, as at the end of the Emmaus encounter. His presence is entirely physical, yet he is not bound by physical laws, by the laws of space and time. In this remarkable dialectic of identity and otherness, of real physicality and freedom from the constraints of the body, we see the special mysterious nature of the risen Lord’s new existence. Both elements apply here: he is the same embodied man, and he is the new man, having entered upon a different manner of existence.” (p. 266)

The type of existence that the Risen Lord has passed into is very mysterious to us. I suggest that the dialectic of recognition and non-recognition can be a help to us as we allow our relationship with Christ to develop. We have the Scriptures to guide us and the sacraments to aid us so that there may be times when we are very aware of the presence of Christ in our lives.

In my own life, I find that during some moments when I am praying, the Risen Lord is very real to me. At some other times, I am not aware of His presence. That does not mean He is not present but that I may not be focusing on His presence. That Christ is not bound by physical laws means that He can be present everywhere, that there is not a moment when He forgets us or neglects us. Christ’s conquest of death is a victory for Love.

Commenting on the way that God enters into the lives of people, the Holy Father writes the following:

“It is part of the mystery of God that he acts so gently, that he only gradually builds up his history within the great history of mankind; that he becomes man and so can be overlooked by his contemporaries and by the decisive forces within history; that he suffers and dies and that, having risen again, he chooses to come to mankind only through the faith of the disciples to whom he reveals himself; that he continues to knock gently at the doors of our hearts and slowly opens our eyes if we open our doors to him.

“And yet – is not this the truly divine way? Not to overwhelm with external power, but to give freedom, to offer and elicit love.” (p. 276)

I believe deeply that giving freedom is the divine way.

Reflecting on the mystery of the Risen Christ in our lives and reading some contemporary Catholic theology, I have come to believe when people die in union with the Risen Christ they enter a new way of existence. They are wherever the Risen Christ is.

For example, I believe that when I celebrate the Eucharist tomorrow morning, my deceased father, mother and sister will be present. I don’t mean that they will be present only in my memory. I mean that they will really be present as will the Blessed Mother and all the saints. Of course it is impossible to imagine this – billions of people standing around the altar!

But I no longer think, as I once did, of the death of our loved ones as a separation from us. I believe that when our loved ones die in union with the Risen Christ they are closer to us than ever. Obviously, we cannot see them or touch them or hear them speak. Still, I believe that they are present. This is part of what the Risen Christ’s victory over death means. This is part of what Love’s victory over death means.

by Father Robert Lauder

First in a series
AS PART OF the adult education course on the Catholic novel that I moderate every semester at The Immaculate Conception Center, Douglaston, I had to give a lecture on Joseph F. Girzone’s novel “The Homeless Bishop” (Maryknoll). Readers of this column may be familiar with Girzone’s very popular novel “Joshua.” Because the plot of “The Homeless Bishop” centers around the value of identifying with the poor, I knew that my lecture somehow had to deal with poverty.

The name of theologian Johannes Metz came to mind and, though I had never read any book by him, I suspected that his writing might give me some insights that I could use in my lecture.

Another reason that I knew that I had to deal with poverty was that in every discussion group with which I have been involved in the last 50, and there have been many, people at some point express their feelings of guilt at being part of the First World while people in the Third World are starving.  It is not that I think that I have some solution to world poverty, but I knew that somehow in the lecture I had to at least bring up the problem. I also had to at least comment on why Jesus speaks so often about the poor in the gospels and what the Church in her teaching means by “the preferential option for the poor.”

Metz was a disciple of the great German theologian Karl Rahner, but he eventually moved away from Rahner’s theology and constructed his own theological vision.  I suspect that he thought Rahner’s theology dealt too much with the individual and did not focus sufficiently on community and social problems. How accurate that depiction of Rahner’s theology is I am not qualified to say.

In preparing to give my lecture, I found a small book by Metz entitled “Poverty of  Spirit” (Translated by John Drury, Newman Press). The book is a gem.  Within its pages are wonderful philosophical and theological insights into the mystery of the human person and the mystery of God.  My guess is that one reason that I enjoyed reading Metz’s book so much is that the philosophy that the German thinker uses is very similar to the philosophy I teach students at St. John’s University, Jamaica.

At the beginning of his foreword, Metz writes:
“Becoming a human being involves more than conception and birth. It is a mandate and a mission, a command and a decision.  A human being has an open-ended relationship to himself.  He does not possess his being unchallenged; he cannot take his being for granted as God does his…. Other animals, for example, survive in mute innocence and cramped necessity. With no future horizons, they are what they are from the start; the law of their life and being is spelled out for them, and they resign themselves to these limits without question.

“Man, however, is challenged and questioned from the depths of his boundless spirit. Being is entrusted to him as a summons, which he is to accept and consciously acknowledge… To become man through the exercise of his freedom – that is the law of his Being.”

After I read the first two pages of the foreword, I was hooked. Anyone who reads this column with some regularity probably knows why. Metz expresses succinctly, yet powerfully, what I consider some of the most important truths about the human person, truths I teach, write about, discuss and try to live.

That being  human is both a mandate and a mission, a command and a decision, I find provocative, exciting, challenging and even inspiring.  By creating us as conscious free persons, God has built into our nature a call. We are not finished.  Our lives are adventures in grace, adventures in trying to be less self-centered and selfish and more unselfish and loving.  We are creatures summoned by God, called by God to live our lives as gifts: gifts to God and to others. This is the ultimate meaning of being human.  There is a purpose and a goal and a direction built into our nature as persons.

We are magnetized by God, but we are free.  We can turn away from the mandate and the mission. We are the only creatures in our experience who are free. This is a tremendous blessing, but it also involves risk. How we direct our freedom will decide the type of persons we become.

God is creating us from nothing but because of our freedom we can influence our destiny.  Recognition of our dependence on God can help us cultivate poverty of spirit and also make us more aware of our freedom.

by Father Robert Lauder

Third and Last in Series
There are several reasons why, even though it was published more than 25 years ago, Richard Gilman’s “Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir” still seems very relevant to me.
One reason is that in his memoir Gilman describes his outlook before he converted to Catholicism as that of a secular humanist.  My opinion is that secular humanism is the predominant philosophy among American intellectuals, at least the intellectuals who put out the newspapers and magazines, who create the films and plays, who write the bestsellers and who teach at many of our universities and colleges.
Some of the basic tenets of secular humanism are that there is no God or supernatural and no life beyond the grave, that we are the chance products of evolution and that we can construct an ethics without any reference to God.  I think that most secular humanists are either atheists or agnostics.
Another reason, which I have mentioned in an earlier column in this series, is that Gilman’s life reveals the power that literature can have in a person’s life. Gilman identifies Catholic novels as being very influential in moving him toward his eventual conversion to Catholicism. When I read about his interest and even excitement in reading some Catholic novels, I can relate very much to that experience though Gilman was reading them as someone wondering about Catholicism and I was reading them as a Catholic. I observed the same interest and excitement when I persuaded other Catholics to read some Catholic novels. Gilman writes:
“Of all the novels I read during those weeks the most affecting and important to me were Bernanos’s ‘Diary of a Country Priest,’ Mauriac’s ‘The Desert of Love,’ and Greene’s ‘The Heart of the Matter’ and ‘The End of the Affair.’ I’ve read them all again recently. The Bernanos, that grave, lovely tale of  the dying young curate, afflicted with a ‘deep, inexplicable incompetence, a supernatural clumsiness,’ who is devoted to God yet anguished by his impending loss of the world’s beauty, is the only one of them that isn’t concerned in some way with sexual desire and, though I don’t think it’s for that reason, the one that holds up most firmly as literary art… The first time I read these novels what took hold of me was the theme of human love, caught in the trap of religious belief, the idea of sexual hunger in fierce relation to the transcendent, the struggle between erotic desire and the imperious purity of the supernatural. Whereas now, in my nearly total state of unbelief, the religious elements strike me as somewhat forced, in a peculiar way almost irrelevant.”
I can understand Gilman’s initial enthusiastic response to the novels. I can even understand and sympathize with his experience of reading them after he had lost his Catholic faith. However, I cannot agree that the religious elements seem almost irrelevant.  If we take God and the supernatural out of the novels that Gilman mentions there is no story left. I think that the main character in Greene’s “The End of the Affair” and also in “The Power and the Glory” is God. Remove God and the entire meaning of the novel would change.
When “Faith, Sex, Mystery” was published it received a long review in the Sunday New York Times (Jan. 1, 1987).  A large excerpt from the book had appeared in The Times about a year before the book’s publication and in the excerpt Gilman made some of the main points that he would elaborate on in the book. I think the word “nearly” is important in Gilman’s description of his unbelief. I suggest that he was still some kind of believer or he could not have written so intelligently and insightfully about fiction that deals with the Transcendent.
In an interview that appeared around the time that the book was published, Gilman spoke with Ari Goldman of The Times, who points out that near the end of his book Gilman describes himself as “a lapsed Jewish-atheist-Catholic. Fallen from all three, a triple deserter!” Goldman writes the following: “Yet, when pressed about where he stands religiously, he falls back on his adopted faith. ‘I think if I were dying, I would want a priest.’”

by Father Robert Lauder

First in a Series
I THINK IT was Elie Wiesel who said that God created human beings because He loves stories. Wiesel’s insight, I think, is profound. There are as many stories as there are human persons and none of the stories are unimportant or insignificant. There are no unimportant people.
I am not certain why particular books impress me more than others. An obvious reason might be the simple fact that some books are just better than others.  I suspect that the time in my life when I read a particular book can greatly influence my reaction to the book. What my interests and preoccupations are at the time that I am reading a book also plays a role in my experience of reading.
Wiesel’s comment has been on my mind because I recently pulled from my bookshelf a memoir that I read more than 25 years ago. When I first read it, I thought it a very interesting book. Looking through it now, I have not changed my opinion. If anything I am more convinced of its importance. The book is Richard Gilman’s “Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir” (Simon & Schuster). Exceptionally well written, Gilman’s book interested me back then and still does now because it deals with several topics that I think are perhaps perennially relevant to anyone interested in literature and faith.
Brought up in a secular Jewish household, Richard Gilman in 1952 was a bored, depressed, 27-year-old atheistic Jew. One day something strange happened to him while he was visiting a library. He had gathered together some books that he wanted to take out when he felt strangely attracted to a book on the shelf. The book was Etienne’s Gilson’s “The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy.”
Gilson, a neo-scholastic philosopher, was well known in Catholic academic circles. I recall that when I was studying undergraduate philosophy in the seminary “The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy” was strongly recommended reading. Taking Gilson’s book down from the shelf, Gilman began to leaf through it and read some passages. He had been actually struggling to leave the room but felt he was in the grip of some unknown pressure. Gilman writes the following:
“The book was a big one, a real tome, and as I reluctantly leafed through it, turning the pages with an effort and forcing myself to read a few lines here and there, it struck me as dry, technical, full of alien language and ideas…as much as I could make out of those. In any case it was nothing in which I could conceivably have any interest, I told myself.
“So I put it back on the shelf, picked up the books I’d chosen before, turned around, found myself without any power to move, turned back again, took the Gilson book from the shelf once more, put it back, repeated the whole mad cycle three or four more times and then, besieged, light-headed as though I had a fever, nearly sick to my stomach, put the book with my others…”
This fascinating incident was the first step toward Gilman’s conversion to Catholicism. When he arrived home, Gilman reluctantly began to read Gilson’s book. He would put it down and pick it up again several times. Getting through the book was almost a physical struggle. Finally when he finished it, Gilman, alone in his room, said out loud to himself and to the air something like, “It’s true, all of it, it’s all true.”
Looking back on his experience of arriving at belief in Catholicism, he describes his experience as completely intellectual. The elements that won him over were entirely philosophical and intellectual. The experience that happened through reading Gilson was not accompanied by any moral conversion. Gilman was not especially preoccupied with any sins from his past life but only with the truth of Catholicism.
Judging from my experience as a priest with people who have converted to Catholicism, an intellectual conversion such as Gilman describes is relatively rare. Something like that may have happened to Jacques and Raissa Maritain or to Thomas Merton but it seems far from typical.
The fact that Gilman’s conversion began through reading philosophy probably is one of the reasons why his book appealed to me as a professor of philosophy. Also it probably appealed to me because as an academic I believe in the importance of books and reading. Books can be a strong force in someone’s life. I can think of several books that I have read which I can honestly say changed my life. Even as I write these words, titles of books that greatly influenced me are coming to mind. Certainly Gilson’s book changed Gilman’s life.

by Father Robert Lauder,

Lately, the expression “the earthly virtue” seems to me to fit the virtue of hope. This is probably due to the way that I think about the virtue as having one foot in the next world and one foot in this. Hope is focused on the next life with the risen Lord but it is also crucially important for us as we try to direct our lives in this world.

St. Paul was of course completely correct in claiming that love is the greatest virtue and as I have grown older that has become more and more obvious to me. But I think that hope must be right below it in terms of importance in our efforts at living as followers of Christ. I agree with the statement of St. John of the Cross that in the evening of our lives we will be judged by how we have loved but I also think that how we love is related to how deeply we hope.

Embracing the Virtue of Hope
In reflecting on the role that hope should play in our lives, I became aware that I have been trying to be more hopeful, more trusting in God’s love, for more than 60 years. When I was studying in the seminary to become a priest, for one entire year, at the advice of a spiritual director, I read everything that I could get my hands on about the virtue of hope. I read books, pamphlets and essays. The plan was to fill my consciousness with the importance of trusting in God.

After I finish writing this column I am going to look through my bookcases to see how many books on hope I still have. It might be interesting to read the remarks that I probably wrote in the margins as I was reading. I was so concerned about the virtue that I eventually wrote a small book about it.

A few years ago I came upon a quote from the theologian Gordon Kaufman. It is about the mystery of God’s Providence. The quote spoke to me and still does.
When I have shared it with others it seems to have helped them as well. It presents a beautiful view of reality and of the decisions and choices that people make. What is most important about Kaufman’s statement is that it is true. He wrote the following:

“If man could believe that the historical context into which he has been thrown were meaningful, if he could believe it to be the loving personal decision and purpose of a compassionate Father Who is moving all history toward a significant goal, then anxiety would be dissolved. If he could believe his existence and decisions and actions had an indispensable place within larger purposes shaping the overall movement of history, and that even his stupid blunders and willful perversities could be rectified and redeemed, his anxiousness and guilt could give place to confidence, creativeness and hope.”

Imagining God
I suspect that there are times when I think of God as a bystander in my life, picturing God as observing me but not actively involved in my choices. This is not the God whom Jesus revealed. God is constantly active in our lives, loving us, inviting us, inspiring us. If God is pure self-gift, and I believe that this is probably the least inaccurate image we can have of God, then God is in a dynamic relation with us at every moment of our lives.

Reflecting upon the virtue of hope, I am reminded that we are called to surrender to God. Of course if we are conscious at the moment of our death, the most important act that we can perform is to surrender to God Who loves us more than we can imagine. But it is not just at the moment of death that we are called to surrender. We do not redeem or save ourselves. God offers us salvation and redemption but we must choose to accept God’s gift. St. Augustine said that though God created us without our consent, God will not save us without our consent.

There are many realities in our experience that can frighten us, even frighten us so much that we are afraid to act. That is where hope comes into play. Hope reminds us to trust in God’s love for us and that the victory has been won for us by Jesus’ death and resurrection. Hope does not mean that everything will turn out the way that we want. It does mean that at the end even our best wishes and dreams will be exceeded by what God has planned for us.

Everyone’s life is a great drama, an adventure in grace, a journey toward the goal that Jesus has won for us. On that journey we are never alone. Hope reminds us of this profound truth and encourages us to live in the light of that truth.

Next week, a closer look at two different Christian spiritualities — eschatological and incarnational.

by Father Robert Lauder

READING Father Michael Paul Gallagher’s Faith Maps: Ten Religious Explorers from Newman to Joseph Ratzinger (New York: Paulist Press, 2010, 158 pages, $16.95) has been an enjoyable experience in more ways than one. First it has been enjoyable to become reacquainted with thinkers I have studied previously and to see how Father Gallagher summarizes their thought and which of their insights he chooses to emphasize. It has been even more enjoyable to become better acquainted with thinkers I have heard of but have never had the opportunity to study. Finally it has been enjoyable to discover which thinkers are the original sources of some interesting and challenging ideas that I have previously embraced without knowing their origin.

More than anything, like Father Gallagher, I want to make the insights of some great thinkers accessible to more people. That’s why I am writing this series of columns. Theology is an exciting discipline and in the Church at this moment we need more not less theological knowledge. Reflection on the mysteries of the faith should not be left to only the professional theologian.

Accessible Insights

Each of us to some extent should try to see the implications of our religious faith in our life. Many of us might not have the time, the energy or the educational background to read the scholarly works of some theologians. That is one reason why a book like Faith Maps is so valuable: Father Gallagher makes wonderful insights accessible for us.

One of the insights of John Henry Cardinal Newman that Father Gallagher makes clear is Newman’s insight into imagination. He writes the following about Newman’s notion of imagination:

“The focus is not on pure thinking or some separated version of rationality, but on the process of discovering truth and acting on it. This is what is implied by Newman’s favorite term ‘real.’ The opposite of the real is the notional, indicating an intellectualism remote from the drama of decision and commitment. Here Newman was being courageously counter-cultural. He wanted to unmask the illusion of neutrality that has come to captivate his contemporaries (and ours) as the only credible way to truth. In its place, and somewhat in the spirit of St. Augustine, he explored the more personal drama of our seeking and finding…

“If Newman had lived a century later, he might well have used he term ‘existential’ in place of ‘real’….For him the function of imagination was literally to ‘realise’  faith, in the sense of making God real in a person’s life.” (pp. 14-15)

The key to Newman’s notion of imagination and the importance he gives to it is, I think, that it enables faith to flourish and to deepen. How do I imagine myself as a priest? How does a Catholic imagine himself or herself as a believer? Of course by imagination Newman does not mean the imaginary in the sense of fantasy or wishful thinking. In fact he means almost the opposite. I think for Newman imagination enables faith to become incarnate in a person’s everyday life.

Examples help me to understand the importance that Newman gives to imagination. Suppose I think of being a priest as being someone who was ordained to administer sacraments but whose ministry or apostolate has little if anything to do with his living in this world. This would be a situation in which my imagination should broaden to understand more deeply what it means to be a Christian believer and more deeply what the meaning of priesthood is. If my imagination does that, I may come to see that however I imagine the priesthood, the meaning of being a priest will always be more than and better than anything I can imagine.

Another example would be a member of the Catholic laity whose understanding of the sacrament of baptism focuses completely on entrance into heaven, almost thinking of the sacrament only as a ticket to heaven. That person’s imagination should broaden so that the person can see that the meaning of the sacrament should transform our lives in this world.

Inspired in Different Ways

The broadening and deepening of our faith is a lifelong task for most of us. Each of us may find that the Holy Spirit inspires us in different ways

For example, I have found reading Faith Maps not only intellectually stimulating but inspiring. Whenever I am with my friends I want to talk about the book, about the insights that Father Gallagher offers, about how some of the ideas may be useful to us in trying to spread of the Good News. Someone else reading the book might have a very different reaction. Even if a person liked the book, even thought the book to be theologically and philosophically profound, he or she might not find the book inspiring. The Spirit blows where it will.