RIDING THE WHIRLWIND
McCarthy, Abigail
RIDING THE WHIRLWIND Abigail McCarthy A priest friend has written to me, "Some of us think you go too far one way, and some of us think you go too far to the other, but I think you are just about...
...It is clear that the best of us can be brutalized and treacherous...
...If growing up in a family has been a nightmare, do away with families...
...In another context Dr...
...In recent years I have been shaken to the very core of my being as successive revelations as to the historical plight of women have correlated with memories from my own life history and that of women I have known...
...RIDING THE WHIRLWIND Abigail McCarthy A priest friend has written to me, "Some of us think you go too far one way, and some of us think you go too far to the other, but I think you are just about right...
...when almost every institution of the happiest political experiment in history is riddled with decay and perversion of purpose...
...Anguish becomes converted into a series of rallying cries...
...I am hanging on -to faith and to trust...
...when technological man is seeking the way to desert this planet -what am I doing...
...I see the world now as they see it...
...This is a society that is increasingly denying its impotence by calling it tolerance, preaching resignation and naming all this progress...
...to all that...
...What I would like to bring with me is a sense of the past, its continuity in the present, and a sense of identity stemming from the past which enables each one of us to withstand the assault of change...
...I have sympathized with those, especially my friends in religion, who have had blinding insights into the way that the very institutions which gave them security and purpose have been instruments of injustice...
...I hang on to the belief that for those of us in the Christian tradition the central experience and the central answer is an encounter with a Person...
...Through it I crossed the barrier into the world of my children and of all the young people to whom this world really belongs...
...The allegiance to what is the lack of reverence of man for men...
...Finally, I still affirm the "bright things: love and abiding friendship, the mystery of children growing and changing, the joy of intense thought, the gift of books and teachers of many kinds, the human capacity for simple fun . . . the simple wonder of the colors, and the sounds of the parade of life...
...New York Times, 8/22/75...
...I hang on to all that...
...I hold that at the very heart of this encounter with Person is the mystery of freedom and personal responsibility, and that, although I am a pacifist and can foresee no justifiable war, freedom and life for others may be worth laying down your life for...
...It is even harder to free ourselves from the tentacles of impersonal evil, the emptiness at the heart of social evil depicted so graphically in C.S...
...than institutionalized military conflict or terrorism in the name of liberation...
...If intimacy is frightening, let us have open marriage...
...But I do not wish to have crossed this barrier having brought nothing from the other side, as have so many older people in a headlong rush to join the young...
...Hendin has put into words my own imprecisely conceptualized apprehension about other areas of our life -that, to be prosy, we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath...
...Like many others in this period of the most rapid change in recorded history, while the material and philosophical world is tilting from West to East, when every value we have held is being called into question...
...There seems to be only the choice: to deny what one sees, or to cut all ties and jettison all previous values...
...Herbert Hen-din, director of psychosocial studies at the Center for Policy Research, has said that there is a cultural trend to-word dealing with painful emotional problems by politicizing them...
...But the unquestioning acceptance of change can lead us as easily into a twilight as into a bright new dawn...
...when, in a shorter period than my own lifetime, it has come about that food grows out of contaminated earth, the oceans are poisoned with oil and waste, and the air above our cities is potentially death-dealing...
...If children seem like a curse, let everyone stop having them...
...The tendency is for people to find others with similar problems and to declare the beliefs of everyone else as the cause of their despair...
...Dr...
...It still does...
...Lewis' This Hideous Strength -evil bred of inertia, fear, the worship of abstraction...
...The truth is that I don't think I am going one way or the other...
...The good news we once cherished was, and still is, the possibility of redemption, of triumphing over evil and finitude...
...It had one of those glassed-in sign cases outside holding lettered announcements and this text or that...
...There are other modes of sacrifice (Continued on page 415) Abigail McCarthy (Cont...
...Zhivago, like the young people of the Symbionese Liberation Front (who, however, in some sense had no pasts), like the people in some of the more extreme Jesus movements...
...The question is, of course, what can we hang on to...
...When I was a college teacher I used to drive past a Protestant church every day...
...The perception of injustice can assault one's very concept of self, and can undermine personality...
...I feel a sense of surprise that it is so easy to lay aside what once were rocklike basic assumptions, as I look at injustice in the fierce light of their outrage...
...It is hard to rise above our personal capacities for evil...
...After the tumultuous political year of 1968 I wrote the following: "I cannot wish that the campaign did not happen...
...I maintain an affection for that institution which, rocking along through the centuries, divided often, absorbing more change and adapting more variously than we know, outliving almost every other institution in modern history, has brought us that Person...
...The most frightening people of our time, and in history, are those who make abrupt breaks with their pasts, denying what they once held dear, denying the past itself, like Strelnikov in Dr...
...Most often it blazoned this message: "We preach Christ, and Him crucified and risen again...
...That sign and its succinctness used to make me happy...
...I would not change that much now...
Vol. 102 • September 1975 • No. 13
