The Difficulty of Making Fire

...P6guy was brought in to emphasize the objective nature of belonging to the Church: "The bad citizen is of the city...

...The prophets called attention to the injustice to which such witlessness leads, whereas for Socrates the capital crime lay in mindlessness parading as wisdom, and for Jesus the thing was its heartlessness...

...Could we look at that oppression squarely, I think, we would prove a national force less tolerant of "benign neglect" at home and of alliance with dictatorial oppression abroad...

...If Vietnam and Watergate have not led us to reappraise where we stand, what we actually create (besides monsters) at home, in school, parish, business and civic arena, perhaps economic disaster will do the trick...

...Pluralism is our daily bread...

...If we can find our way past the fear of being ourselves, we may discover the fairy, tales are true...

...The brink of despair may shake us out of our torpor, provided, that is, the shaking induces what the mystics referred to as the "purgative way," the first step in an opening to experiential reserves that ordinarily in prosperity we do not tap...

...Of course, the church will itself be changed in form by the process, perhaps more radically than we now imagine...

...But the collapse of preconciliar ecclesiology did not mean simply its one-to-one replacement by another ecclesiology...

...Only note that if our legends are reliable, the God who is and acts in our life-stories is not a Promethean Zeus who hoards his fire and resents sharing it with earthlings, but one who recognizes no "mine" or "thine...

...As a descriptive statement, it may be all too true that our religion in this sense has nothing to do with politics, but this admission simply exposes bankruptcy of spirit, not its riches...

...In this respect, all Americans are somewhat in the position of our fable's priests who grow fat while the people freeze, the irony here being that it is our souls which are really "on ice...

...It invites head-tripping, killing moralism, and all the abuses of rigid authoritarianism--aberrations familiar to most Catholics...

...He decided to journey from one tribe to another, sharing the art of his discovery with different peoples...

...The Nicene creed was not meant to become the relic of a forgotten age, but a hymn to an archetypal story that each of us might sing about our own drama of virgin birth, creative suffering and continual resurrection...

...At issue here, then, are all those inward resources we draw or refuse to draw from the energy sources of the universe--a question of deep and lasting reserves without which the Gospel is a dead letter in a museum of antiquities...

...They banished a whole library full of once'cherished apologetic arguments...

...The point is to make fire yourself...

...In assimilating them, as the early Christian community did with Greek wisdom and Roman law, we may realize some of that catholicity we lay claim to...

...In this approach, we are directed to trust on faith (and at second-hand) that the road map is reliable, and behave as i] such and such an idea, feeling or action (exemplified, for instance, by Jesus) were our own until, by projecting ourselves into the model, we assimilate ourselves to it and find ourselves through it---our deepest reality confirmed by experience first-hand...

...The problem is one of keeping faith--with ourselves, others and God--a problem not unlike the difficulty of making fire in our simple tale...

...Instead of the quasi-identification of the realized Kingdom with the Church--which led straight down the path of triumphalism--we were to stress its pilgrim and unfinished nature, always on the move...

...In some such terms one could roughly summarize the Council's achievement in ecclesiology...

...And of course, if we ever thought in the days of pre-Vatican II uniformity that there was one general answer to this question applicable to all, no such answer is possible today...

...And if we mistakenly look to the churches as still possessing a monopoly on the arts of inward transformation, our state seems even more bleak...

...In other words, conciliar ecclesiology relativ~zed the Church in a healthy manner...

...End of part one of our tale...

...Before Civil Rights battles, Vietnam and Watergate, this question was unthinkable-and habituated to the evasion of responsibility for our society's evils by our onetime minority status, it still is for many...

...When socialization in America does not mean conformity to the Vince Lombardi cult of winning ("the only thing"), we still find ourselves ruled by Commonweal: 127 the clock, by production schedules, quantitative growth and individualistic success...

...As Catholics who have succeeded in the long haul from immigrant ghetto to Babbitt's Main Street and beyond, it may not be far fetched to take the barren urban core of so many of our cities as an apt symbol of the steep human cost of our "success...

...Our society is so structured that few find the time for enlightened self-interest, and if the time is there, the art of using it often is not...

...If that means more fire-makers, it will be a good thing...

...Mother's nerves, say, belie the faith she professes and Dad may be a commuter, absent even when present...

...If I am not mistaken, all our psyches have been shaped by this momentous switch in cultural styles, but its revolutionary implications for church order and educatien in the art of faith-keeping have hardly been clearly recognized...

...Having thus abandoned the polls to ITT and Chase Manhattan (or the Butcher of Attica), we then wonder why we are lonely and powerless--never recognizing that in an era of corporate socialism, the Lone Ranger is a jerk...

...Thus the remarkable fact that many individuals can hear "good news" provided it is distinctly non-verbal (a sound sacramental instinct for what counts), or if words still count, hear it through psychological jargon, through Zen or perhaps the instructions of an Indian sorcerer--but to resort to the canonical language of the Gospel, much less official churchese, simply put them to sleep...

...This way is perfectly valid, even though subject to well-known risks...

...To say, or to imply, that the Church itself was the object of faith was blasphemy: it was the milieu of faith, its mediating community...

...The point deserves elaboration...

...and instead of contrasting Church and world, we were exhorted to share the hopes and joys of humanity...

...The remembering we require does not consist of cataloguing memorable archaic sagas, nor does it consist in following authorities like a dutiful robot...

...The first tribe which had learned about fire reserved the secret for their priests, who enjoyed affluence and power while the people froze...

...You were marked, sealed, branded--all images legitimately derived from the sphragis or seal of the Spirit...

...Roman Catholics were urged to pride themselves on being different...

...Without such arts, we lose the sense of what our moral strenuosity, our work, is for...

...Paul's, "not me, but Christ living in me...

...The conciliar ecclesiology put an end to these comfortable views, and it set up a movement which carried individuals and groups into novel and unforeseen areas...

...It is what has been called the Way of Forms, the approach to perfection through the medium of crystallized wisdom~whose operational axiom is "Here is the truth: assimilate it...

...The fifth tribe, on the other hand, actually did use fire, and this enabled them to be warmed in an otherwise cold climate, to cook their food and manufacture all kinds of useful articles...

...Once again, revival comes from unexpected quarters, and it should be no embarrassment to the church that her role as parenting agent here is now broadly distributed--for in consequence the scene of human possibility is not nearly so bleak as it otherwise would be...

...And that faithlessness, fundamentally a lack of faith in the power that is freely given us, naturally shows up in all we do, or omit...

...And here, on the issue of spiritual economies, we Americans are less skilled than in dealing with the oil shortage...

...In this sense, it is not difficult to grasp that the problem is not that God may be dead, but we are---in failing to sense who we are...

...The repentant future was to be different...

...If I am not mistaken, that recentering was what our "founders" were about...

...The disciplines of remembering and rebirth have indeed taken on "secular" form--and with the right attitude nearly anything will serve, from pottery and motorcycle maintenance to psychotherapy and Alinsky organizing...

...The power of the map or symbol lies in its being a medium of integration rooted in our own deepest reality, and to appropriate the form or symbol is to remember ourselves and so be able to utter that paradox of St...

...The poet in us dies a little daily...

...Properly understood, the Augustinian way of faith still holds up, and yet it must be said that its style runs counter to another maieutic that increasingly seems to stamp our whole era...

...Intent ol the Sabbath It was the intent, of course, of the Sabbath Rest-indeed of all religious ritual--to inspirit the dispirited and awaken sleepwalkers from their anesthesia...

...The Spirit blows where She wills...

...When the language and forms lose their awakening power, become mere clich6 or threat, they simply freeze gears, and instead of leading people to recall the authority latent in their lives, they have the inverse effect of invoking a rich association of entrapping traumas--and hanging them up there like the petrified possum playing dead...

...It used to be claimed that Roman Catholics were more fortunate than others, not of course because of their merits, but because a complete system of grace-bearing sacraments accompanied them from the cradle to the grave as a kind of celestial social security...

...The next decade was filled with the shock waves from these simple, fundamental and necessary options...

...To the extent it remains his and not ours, we make the mistake of our Nour-worshipers...

...And at this point in the Catholic story in America, the broadside of the Hebrew prophets against the injustice of an affluent Israel will make healthier reading for us than the solace Paul and the New Testament writers were concerned to offer a harassed minority population in the Roman Empire...

...Finally, one tribe before which he demonstrated his art panicked and killed him, being certain he was a demon...

...Where is your baptismal certificate...

...If the Way of Forms is ApolIonian, this other approach is Dionysian, what we might call the Way of Expression...

...The point is that though the two approaches begin from opposite poles, they may converge in the finale...

...For one thing, it means that much of our traditionalistic approach must continually battle against the expressive tidal wave--and with little understanding of disciplines that might ride the wave and use its power to good effect...

...No, we need a somatic process whereby we give flesh to good news--such as others can touch, as they did in a Pope John or a Gandhi...

...But what are the consequences of this assertion for passing on a living tradition of promise (rather than formalism, moralism and empty ritual...

...Learning to accept and use the Way of Expression would seem, then, to make sense...

...As anyone familiar with our nearly forgotten mystical tradition is aware, many of these Eastern ways are not indeed at all foreign to what was once a living force among us...

...Has our climb to the top of the melting pot benumbed us, stifled our moral imagination, made us "good Germans" who hate breaches of etiquette more than injustice, who follow orders and swallow whole the mythology of the American Dream...

...Having food few of us know of, the authentic faith-keeper earns steadfastness only by passing through the heart of darkness, descending to meet the demons of fear and self-loathing within--whereas the magic optimist, lacking faith in his own depth-reserves, turns to lateral corroboration, to substitute parents, a police force armed to the teeth, or the security of mass-mindedness...

...The fact is that we need not look exclusively in that direction for assistance, for it is one of the distinctive marks of the mo~lern age that the arts of tapping into deep spiritual reserves are no longer confined to church or its custodians, but widely distributed throughout our society and its institutions...

...The second tribe forgot the art and instead worshiped the instruments of making fire (perhaps ex opere operato...

...The self-reliant ego, schooled not to depend on others, seals its own death-warrant...

...we are all princes in beggar's clothing, sleeping beauties--waiting to be awakened to our identity...

...The former has found another center of gravity than these--and what he or she may remind us of is that the prime sacrament of God's presence is, potentially, none other than you and me--us...

...For it were substituted several more or less Commonweal: 131...

...The advantages and dangers of the latter are of course more familiar to most of us, and so we cling to what we know, but the former approach is de rigueur in many Eastern anti-traditional traditions ("if you meet the Buddha, kill him...

...bleared, smeared with toil...

...We may, if we like, see the first part of this fable as telling the story of our founders, the Hebrew prophets, Socrates, and Jesus, and the second part telling the sequel, the somber history of fo~'getfulness and reminding in and out of synagogue, temple, civic forum and church...

...we worship a plaster god, forgetting the secret of our humanity, mistrusting the Spirit in the actual present--and so our inward emptiness and powerlessness, our frustration and our violence...

...The fifth tribe, as we pointed out, prefers anonymity, so it is necessary to play the detective in this matter...

...There is no reason such disciplines cannot be adapted to fire-making in the Christian sense...

...Worse, the Jesussymbol often becomes a substitute rather than a vehicle for attuning us to the unfathomable mystery of our being-that we are each summoned to plumb the mystery and responsibility of being "of one substance with the Father...

...Instead, it is often exclusively his story, and that is the price of the church's amnesia on the point that the object was to make fire as he did...

...Evil takes its toll...

...But given the degeneration of formal religious rite in our culture and the lack of social consciousness in so much of revived spiritual exercise (privatized, as is the custom in Protestant America), our ritual and prayer often amounts to another narcotic which insulates us from the horror show of a consumer economy stimulating and feeding our insatiable needs even as it sucks blood from the world body politic...

...instead of the notion that the Church was a "perfect society," we admitted that it was sinful and perpetually in need of reform...

...Being cognizant of Nour's fate, moreover, they were inclined to reticence...

...For our purposes, we may end the fable here, though the original text goes on to unsettle the complacency of members of the fifth tribe with missionary aspirations, those who know the art of making fire but fail to master the additional art of teaching the method to those with different tongues and customs in a way that will not be triumphalistic...

...Their subculture flowered, with many national nuances, as a means of expressing, adorning and making bearable the norms and values which made this group so special, privileged and different...

...More apposite for the moralistic Catholic conscience, the real God with whom we deal in all our dealings in the world is no coven of Furies, but the bearer of grace...

...Some took his instruction and learned how to make fire themselves...

...The third worshiped a likeness of Nour himself, but were no better off than the second tribe, having forgotten how to do what their teacher went about doing...

...Properly, worship should offer radical recreation for our arrested selves, "God's glory" being, as Irenaeus put it, "a man fully alive...

...No Gallup poll reports it, but people do come alive, repossess themselves, by a host of "unorthodox" means, and so assume the responsibility of caring for the earth and building a counterculture that nurtures the growth of men and women who also may come into their own and keep faith with each other and a faithless world...

...If its claims were being scaled down, it was because they had been exaggerated...

...Part two takes up the drama many centuries later...

...Children see through these charades--with their guts, which is where real reliables are always tested...

...No, it is no season for Cardinal Spellman's jingoism, but time to ask ourselves, as managers of the system now, how our individual and collective input contributes to the liberation of all peoples, a task that requires all our genius for technical invention and know-how surely, but equally demands we keep faith with the promise that is constantly being subverted in the global village...

...The reserves are there, we must learn to trust, as are the arts of breaking through our incredulity on the point, but neither is well advertised...

...We require different maieutics for different people...

...The latter may be what our "easy conscience" wants to hear, but it is not necessarily what our souls need to hear in order to choose life rather than death...

...Lacking an interior life, at the extreme we settle for those compensations of an empty heart--the insulated suburban pleasure dome and purchasing power for all the distractions needed to kill time before an antiseptic death...

...Except that faith in the sense of profound self-remembering is no technological skill, at which we Americans excel, but concerns ourselves, the operators--and our interior economy...

...As Roman Catholics we profess loyalty to tradition, which is not to be confused with fixation on the past...

...A twitch on the thread of the Divine Angler could bring you back...

...Our inner world, or lack thereof, goes public...

...It's a question of giving birth to oneself--a second birth...

...Fire-making, we might say, is the art of remembering ourselves when we have forgotten who the prophets, Socrates and Jesus told us we might become, when clouded by the cataract and callus of our individual and collective armaments races, we have lost our wits and our way...

...At a stroke identity was tested and affirmed...

...This tribe, however, was widely scattered among the nations, and its members were difficult to detect...

...The family and city we build and manage expresses ffho we think we are, and consequently our lived religion (the metaphysic we feel in our gut) lies at the root of our politics...

...As always, it is by their fruits, not their rhetoric or denomination, that we recognize them--these breathers of fresh promise into our stagnant world...

...God does not become flesh in our time...

...The expressive way exhibits an iconoclasm toward all established forms and trusts that descent to those inner voices beneath all our egoistic posturing will dismantle the demons and liberate us for authentic responsibility...

...Even when we are genuinely welcomed into the world and assured by that primordial sacrament of our mother's milk and touch that the cosmos willingly gave us birth and holds promise for us, that sacrament does not hold...

...The fact is that both ways have their pitfalls, the expressive way in that it may only release deeply buried fixations which never wear themselves out, and the formal way in that the map may usurp the place of genuine experience and understanding--never encourag15 November 1974:130 ing us to wrestle with our own angel for our own distinctive blessing...

...Depending on where we are, we need to hear one of these messages or the other, but as psychologists remind us today in chorus, listening is often difficult for adults...

...Forgetting that, the church becomes a refuge for well-intentioned neurotics on permanent hold--and not a healing place for witless sinners...

...the good stranger is not...

...They were also alleged to be more fortunate because they "knew what they stood for," unlike (it must be assumed) other Christians who were still arguing about what to stand for...

...That America is going Hindu or Buddhist (with the usual complement of frauds and romantic sentimentality) may just be one of the best things that ever happened to the Christian churches here...

...It need not be viewed as opposed to the objective to which our traditional Way of Forms aspired, as anyone can see who recalls that our prime teacher asserted "the truth lies within you," and our Apostle insisted that we are "Temples of the Spirit...

...Without what William James called "moral holiday," morality becomes self-righteous tyranny, charity merely officious meddling...

...Their disaffection for "the world" serves as an indictment of that adjustment process which compels a progressive shrinkage of head and heart, of condemning to death the greater part of our consciousness in the interests of succeeding at the competitive game and becoming in the event a soulless machine...

...How, then, do we unlearn this grim "realism," and learn again to embrace the earth--and in the process release the stops on our own stymied imagination and creativity...

...And today it sweeps through our culture like an invisible tidal wave--and seems to those raised in the traditionalist mode of the Way of Forms as a menacing invitation to anarchy...

...Its characteristic motto might be: "The truth lies within you, and you can find it by forgetting all packaged answers and established forms...

...which have evolved disciplines for making it a path to the highest spiritual transformation...

...And at jeopardy if our Nour-precedent serves as example...

...Further, as our fable suggests, neither legend-keeping nor Nour-worship by themselves are any guarantee of finding our way, though surely each contains clues to pursue...

...The fourth tribe, being people of the Book, retained the story of fire-making in their legends, but again, though the story was reiterated, it rarely expressed the actual life-story of the fourth tribe's members...

...That liturgy does little to change us or alter our style of life may in part stem from a Catholic education that for so long made a sacred cow of verbal orthodoxy, and equally one-sidedly insisted on ritual observance (worshiping instruments) --while forgetting that both dogma and liturgy are roadmap and vehicle for a journey into experience which simplifies the self...

...A sound pastoral instinct would dictate that we cease beating our heads against the wall here, and seek other ways to move...

...Changing concepts CHURCH MEMBERSHIP AND MODELS PETER HEBBLETHWAITE A T FIRST it looked as though the Church was merely being put in its place, in its proper place...

...but then this spiritual idea was juridicized to an extraordinary degree...

...This man was called Nour...

...Of course these faith-keepers must be distinguished from compulsive optimists who sustain their euphoria by evading tragedy and evil...

...Blasphemous as it may sound, God is a Commie, not a boring old emperor...

...Had we other securities than our credit-rating and a longer memory, we might be able to face the question, and indeed identify with the desperate in our own land and the sea of human despair in the rest of the world--all of which denies that the Kingdom will come...

...The child in us, at first eager to drink in and absorb all the energy in the universe, gradually learns to seal up the avenues of access, fortify itself against loss and injury...

...You might stray far off or become a terrible sinner, but you remained a citizen and were still firmly held...

...Add to this the traumatizing abuses by which the Way of Forms has been subverted, and one obtains an explanation of why "tradition" induces in so many the possum effect...

...And wherever they appear and by whatever mode or strange transport, their arrival is cause for eucharist--even at this 25th hour of terror...

...The Roman way to ultimate self-transformation--which the stepchild American church has respectfully followed --we might simplify, is the way of faith classically articulated by Augustine, credo ut intelligam...

...Once upon a time, - " there was a man who meditated on the ways in which nature operates, and he discovered, due to his concentration and application, how fire could be made...

...Involving both physical and mental exercise (that it be neither head-trip nor superstition), and indeed the employment of all the recreative arts, ritual and meditation disciplines were made for man, for people "all seared with trade...

...A truly catholic sensibility ought to be able to discern inspiriting action 15 November 1975:128 wherever it occurs--and rejoice...

...Our destination is set forth in advance of taking the trip, hopefully as a map to guide our steps...

...But there remains a serious problem if we are to put flesh on our legends and do what our teacher did, a conflict of detective methods that arises from a conflict in the largely hidden assumptions of divergent cultural styles...

...No less than the formal way, it can be a way to that "death to self" of which the Gospel speaks...

...if it now seemed more modest, that was because it had been arrogant...

...We have time to master the world, little time to master the tumult of aborted selves that rage within for breathing space--and thus marginal time to expend on the evils of racism, violence, urban decay and world starvation...

...This miracle was worked, antecedent to choice, thanks to something called ex opere operato...

...The fact is that traditional maps and symbols represent for many a debased coinage whose currency provides little defense against the erosion of genuine community that constitutes the generative economy of real religious faith...

...Others, however, drove him away, thinking him a menace, before they had time to understand the value of his discovery...

...As Americans, we speak of ours as an experimental, non-traditional society, and though there is much exaggeration in that (being more regimented in fact than our Commonweal: 129 mythology would indicate), there is also plenty of truth in the description...

...The delicate ecology of our elemental trust that the universe stands as God found it on the seventh day, "very good," is disturbed, and so the anatomy of reactive neurosis begins early, and the urban rat-race does the restmunless as adults we find another center of gravity which holds up in the bedlam we call our "world...

...The church is no longer sole repository...

...The "Do this in memory of me" refers not to a rubric, the proprietary fight of a clerical caste, but to a way of life that in our own situation and without slavish imitation we are all to embody...