by Father Robert Lauder

Sixteenth and Last in a Series

AS I RE-READ Father Michael Paul Gallagher’s  Faith Maps: Ten Religious Explorers from Newman to Joseph Ratzinger (New York: Paulist Press, 2010, 158 pages, $16.95), I am stunned by the originality of each thinker. I have the feeling that I am learning something new both from those with whose thought I was familiar and from those with whose thought I was unfamiliar. This has been my reaction to just about every religious explorer whom Father Gallagher discusses but I admit that I do find the thought of Charles Taylor especially interesting and challenging.

In the last decade or so this brilliant philosopher’s Catholicism has become more and more evident. I knew that I would be attracted to his thought when I read in Father Gallagher’s book that Taylor is bothered by the fact that sociologists, historians and philosophers find it perfectly all right to neglect the spiritual dimension of life. Taylor claims that they have not only forgotten the answers to life’s great questions but they also have forgotten the questions.

Empowered By Love
Though Taylor is primarily a moral or political philosopher, Father Gallagher claims that the philosopher from Canada offers a perspective that is not found in some more theological writers. Disagreeing with agnostic and merely psychological viewpoints, Taylor insists that Christian Revelation empowers people because it enables them to share in God’s own love. I confess that this statement, which I agree with completely, surprises me in that it comes from a philosopher. Father Gallagher points out that at the beginning of Taylor’s enormous book, A Secular Age, Taylor asks why, though it was almost impossible not to believe in God in 1500 in Western society, today many find it not only possible but almost inescapable. What has happened?

Commenting on Taylor’s response to the question Father Gallagher writes the following:
“His answer involves the birth of a ‘modern’ sense of the self, as less embedded in traditions of belonging, more insistent on individual rights, and assuming that this ‘disengaged’ version of self is simply common sense. But ‘human nature is something that… cannot be conceived as existing in a single individual’…In this spirit Taylor defends the importance of community roots and ‘mutual’ enrichment’ as opposed to ‘solitary self-sufficiency’…He is sympathetic to the ‘modern’ ideal of personal authenticity and yet suspicious of its more dehumanizing embodiments, in particular of its tendency to get out of touch with sources of meaning larger than the individual self. Among these larger horizons is the possibility of religious faith.” (p.107)

The more I read about Taylor’s ideas, the more interesting I find them. Taylor points out that ordinary people do not get their notion of self identity so much from explicit ideas the way a professional philosopher might but through narratives and images. This makes sense to me but I am wondering how we discover or produce narratives and images that give people a sense of transcendence, a sense that their lives take place in relation to a Divine Transcendent.

For years I have been trying to help people, seminarians and university students as well as those in adult education programs, to broaden their sense of their own dignity and the value of their lives by inviting them into programs dealing with classic films and Catholic novels. While some have told me that they have profited from these programs, I have to admit that those who seem interested are a relatively small number.

I believe that my own self-understanding has grown through viewing great films and reading great literature but I wonder if this is a good way for most people. I don’t know anyone who has taken part in the film or literature programs who is disappointed but how to interest a larger group is what has me stymied.

It is clear that Taylor’s view of the self goes way beyond secularism. He wants us to abandon a narrow view of human existence that leaves no room for the presence of God in our lives and instead welcome the surprise of the Gospel which has the power to transform us, not only in the hereafter but here in this world. This, I think, is what the new evangelization is trying to accomplish. We should be able to live with a profound joy because of God’s involvement in our lives. Anything that helps us to become more aware of God’s loving presence in our lives is good.

Taylor has an expression that I very much like. He writes that when the horizon of religious faith becomes real then life becomes an adventure of “choosing ourselves in the light of the infinite.” Isn’t “choosing ourselves in the light of the infinite” what all spiritual practices from prayer to reading scripture, from receiving sacraments to ascetical practices, are supposed to help us accomplish with the help of God?

Preview: In the Jan. 7 iusse of The tablet, Father Lauder will reflect on the meaning and mystery of Christmas.[hr] Father Robert Lauder, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn and philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, writes a weekly column for the Catholic Press.