A BRITISH EYE'S VIEW

...are all about...

...And there was the group of young married couples, buoyantly dismissing the entire Catholic past in favor of a free, informal community style...

...So what's wrong...

...This was not because anyone was insincere or shallow, but rather, I think, because the response of that group was a good, simple, loving response to the charm of a very attractive lifestyle---that of the Gospel...

...But this kind of thing should be the place where people can begin to discover God and live, by personal repentance and humility...

...Only there was not much suffering going on, everyone being comfortably incomed, with good quality carpets and well-fed children...

...This is not to say that such groups as the one I described before are not good...

...I was moved and grateful, yet uneasy...

...He was living with a group of young people who were trying to start a farming commune...

...But it was apparently necessary for her self-respect that her talents should find a cash value in competition with other women, and that she should prove this by the quality of her clothes and possessions...

...It doesn't have to pretend, it really can be open and simple and uninhibited, not because these things make up a good lifestyle, but because they happen when people follow Christ...

...It still isn't, and paradoxically the giving up of personal wealth and comfort, and the abandonment of the prestige of the old-style Church, even the public admission of past corporate sin, can actually make it harder to 'leave all things.' I met, once, a youngish priest in a wealthy parish in California...

...He felt out of place, restless, he couldn't explain exactly why...

...Is it too much to ask...

...They met to discuss and to worship, with the help of any swinging cleric who would come along, and they talked a lot about sensitivity, consciousness-raising, and the moribund condition of the Church and how great they had felt last week when someone read a passage from Isaiah, about the suffering of God's servant...

...He was rather shy, but warm and intelligent and humble...

...Perhaps the best way to make my point clear is to sketch a few actual examples from my own experience of both the real and the phony...

...As there were men and women in the group, and they had to sleep wherever they could find a barn or a floor, they had taken temporary vows of celibacy, in a perfectly unpretentious and matter-of-fact way...

...The hampering, unreal thing is the unintended by-product of a very necessary communal heart-searching...

...He roared with indignation, and poured out wrath on the callous, the indifferent, the peddlers of false psychology and of selfishness disguised as public spirit...

...She had all the right phrases but what they amounted to was a rehash of the values of commercial society, with a frosting of radical theological-cure-psychological jargon...

...He didn't denounce anyone, he just knew he had to leave it all and look for a way of life closer to the Gospel one...

...All these things I have kept from my youth"-- and Jesus loved him, he was good and generous and lovable...

...He was in a state of agony, torn between loyalty to real people who valued and needed him, and loyalty to the Gospel which, at times, seemed to present merely abstract demands, unrelated to what actually went on around him...

...These people, and there are many of aU kinds, ate the renewal...

...Not all of them were very interesting or impressive people, and clearly a lot of self-restraint was required to put up with the garrulous, the self-pitying, the crotchety, the naively enthusiastic, the over-emotional...

...It is there that regeneration begins...

...He was good looking and sexy...

...But then that is what brotherhood, and reconciliation, and freedom, and witness, and community (etc., etc...

...In both these cases, and so many others, people are suffering in reality, in their own lives, the results of those corporate sins which are so constantly bewailed...

...They had not known the annihilation of the natural self as it perceives its own total inadequacy for the joy offered...

...Commonweal: 43...

...But it's where the real growing starts...

...He was doing a lot of good work with children and in the poorer areas, but he was deeply distressed by his identification with a way of life whose values he felt to be anti-human...

...There was the nice little Sister with spectacles who talked for half an hour about her need for fulfillment, and how the new freedom from hypocritical submission to superiors meant that she could now find self-respect and use her God-given talents as a witness to the Word...

...bers, in age, race, calling and income, but who shared a cheerful seriousness that was never pretentious, and seemed able to do what so many religious groups apparently feel is not even necessary--respect divergences and live with them, rather than trying to find the ideally 'like-minded' community...

...We need to analyze, and experiment, and find new ways to understand and express (in words and lifestyles) what God is telling us in changing times...

...They are very good, full of hope for the future, places where people can realize how futile and wasteful are most of the aims that our society sets itself...

...To give an example, I have had the experience of being welcomed, befriended, surrounded with gestures of brotherly love and intimate sharing among peoples whose lives were simple, open and joyfully dedicated to the service of others...

...Those who have thus done public penance (in acres and acres of newsprint) are thereby discouraged from any really searching self-examlnation at the level of immediate experience...

...The difference, here, is not that between communal and individual conscience, but between the analysis of guilt and the personal repentance...

...Should she leave what had become a mockery of the foundress' ideals...

...Why me?' his expression seemed to say...

...It took me a long time to admit to myself that the whole thing felt a little phony...

...He was quite right-- but it was a playing on feelings, a using of personal charm and a calculated dosage of blue jokes (we're not prudes nowadays, are we...

...And there was another who talked about the goodness of ordinary people, the sense of God to be found in a holiday crowd, the Spirit at work in every place--and the effect was not to waken people to that vibrant and~shattering presence, but to lull them with the feeling that they've got it all already, no change of heart is necessary...

...Was it just British reserve...

...Yet these demands were real, because they were the demands of Christ...

...When the struggle for holiness became a worried scrabbling around in one's own motives, and humility was 'an unreal self-depreciation, then it was right and necessary to assert the goodness of the human nature God made, and the need for proper self-respect and fulfillment of personality and talents...

...I have met others in the same agony, like a Sister in the Midwest, acutely aware of the too-comfortable conformity of her community to the ideals of the American Dream, yet bound both by fidelity to her vows and real love for other individuals, both students and Sisters, who needed her where she was...

...And the real thing can be allied to depth of thought and analysis, without running the risk of merely mouthing the phrases of moral agony and concern, while continuing to be just as self-satisfied and conformist as the kids in the Coke ads...

...Where they are is where it's at...

...There was, finally, a charismatic group whose leading characteristic was the extraordinary variety of its mere...

...They had seen something good and happy and embraced it...

...And there was another group of young people, whose idea was to travel around the country with their guitars, preaching Chrht with Gospel songs, and talking about him in a quiet, gentle and slightly humorous style...

...This man was being brought down to the depths of real, not token, humiliation...

...The Gospel demand is always for personal and communal repentance and conversion, and this is fully realized, but because the real sins of the Catholic body have been analyzed and acknowledged, and renewal undertaken, it is common for this process to be regarded as equivalent to the personal metanoia from which alone 'other Christs' can be born...

...I have seen enough of the genius of American Christianity to realize what it can do when it is set free...

...It isn't possible to be sure, and I hesitate even to suggest this kind of judgment, but it seems to me, looking back with real gratitude and affection, that the people in that group (with maybe one exception) had not realized the Gospel demand as one for fundamental and painful personal transformation...

...And whichever choice is finally made, in these and similar cases, to 'stay' or to 'go,' the person who has been baptized with this baptism wil be a point of regeneration for the Christian body...

...But it has to be real and personal, therefore--in practice--it hurts...

...Only the same old thing--the sad notion that having the right ideas is a substitute for radical personal repentance...

...There is a bravura, a virtuosity, in the style of American spirituality, which is unique and splendid...

...He lived in considerable comfort, and worked hard in a traditional type of middle-class parish...

...Or stay to help those who needed her so much...

...It isn't enough to remove oneself from outworn, destructive institutions, if this is done merely because they are distasteful and boring...

...There was the family in a battered frame house with worn linoleum in the bedrooms, who seemed to provide a place for every sort of local activity and need, from meditation sessions to playgrounds and marriage-counseling, with usually a few youngsters staying in the house because of trouble at home, or an illegitimate baby on the way, or just loneliness...

...It would certainly be ridiculous to expect that all those who want, now, to make Christianity real and free from its finks with destructive systems and ideas should suddenly be capable of conversion...

...But saxifrage is wise And to its time precise, And waits beneath the rock The second age of ice...

...There are people all over the United States who are discovering the happiness of this stripping away of unessentials, this return to simplicity of life and sincerity of speech and feeling, whether in new communities, or just in families or groups of neighbors...

...It is also due to the abuse, in the past, of the ideal and practice of humility, and of personal self-examination...

...That is good, but it is not enough...

...There was the young man who said, looking still a little bewildered, that he had suddenly found he couldn't go on in the University, though he enjoyed it a lot...

...to rouse the reaction he wanted...

...It wasn't enough...

...There was the young 11 April 1975:42 priest who talked about abortion to a large audience...

...OOO0 O OO0 OO0000 ERNEST KKOLL MIDWINTER SPRING How saxifrage can tell This mildness out of season Is but a winter spell To bait a winter treason Makes matter far too nice For science to surmise Beyond an inner clock...

...He got it--the audience was fawning on him, but I doubt if much real repentance was going on...

...That's how it is when it's Christian...

...What is wrong with the Christian scene can be righted only by those who are hurt by what is wrong, who mind the harm that is being done, and seek new ways with humility and compassion and a longing for truth...