Theology on the knees
Garvey, John
THEOLOGY ON THE KNEES A FAITH FOR FAT TIMES IS FALSE , CATHOLICS who are in their mid-thirties or older have gone through more changes than any generation of Christians since Constantine, maybe...
...In another place she wrote, "Love is not consolation...
...The shallowness of happy, passionless Christianity is, in our time (or in any time), a betrayal...
...it is another to embrace the shallowest notions in modern culture...
...It is light...
...If we listen only to our own age we may end up sounding contemporary, but we will not have been much help to anyone...
...He was a prisoner there, and he tells them about what he went through, and what other prisoners suffered...
...The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster...
...We fasted from midnight before taking communion, ate no meat on Friday, and knew our superiority to all other religions...
...The Council presented us with a new vision: the church was a sacrament to the world, a pilgrim body whose vocation included solidarity with the whole of humanity...
...The work which Vatican II has given us is not the abandonment of our tradition, but a deepening of it, a willingness to see in previous Catholic changes some clues to what we may bring to our own age...
...But in passing from one to the other we have been exposed to some genuinely silly stuff...
...During the last weeks of his life he could not talk to anyone very coherently about things that mattered to him...
...In order to compete with, say, sociology, psychology, or linguistic analysis, theology must come up with its own jargon, its own version of academic objectivity...
...But in trying to ape the ways of other disciplines theology runs the risk of becoming the Drag Queen of Sciences...
...He died in a nursing home which smells like urine, and he couldn't stand the smell...
...What he meant became clear to me recently, when I read in a British theological journal a brilliant demonstration of the reasonableness of believing that God is real...
...the rape and murder of missionary women...
...There is something simply untrue in a theology so devoid of passion...
...An Orthodox priest told a friend of mine that the problem with Western theology was that it was not done on the knees...
...He tells us that we should learn to love ourselves, and it seems like remarkably thin advice, given what so many people have to face...
...At the other end of the universe a young priest says sincerely that you can't love anyone else until you love yourself...
...Relatively few people miss the older vision...
...then figure out what is needed to make that thing of your own creation happy...
...At the same time, Catholics were willing to put forth the "he married a nun'' approach to Martin Luther and his theology, and our history of the Middle Ages was certainly a selective, romantic one...
...JOHN GARVEY...
...When someone tells me that I ought to learn how to love myself, get in touch with my feelings, and so forth, I imagine that line being preached to the people who stumbled through Nagasaki with their skin hanging in shreds, or people being shot at in El Salvador, or people on their way to be gassed...
...The vital question is: how to be and how not to be...
...He was angry about it, and he was sometimes hard on the people who tried to take care of him...
...The Second Vatican Council changed all that...
...In any case, it can be argued that theology which does not lead to prayer is a waste of time...
...Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "To be or not to be is not the question...
...Norman Vincent Peale, Billy Graham, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and other Protestant luminaries: said things which no one outside of the fundamentalist fringe would be willing to say today...
...A religion so designed for fat and comfortable times is false...
...He spent the last few months of his life dying of lung cancer...
...Nevertheless, he talks to children in the parish school as often as he can...
...Our brand of Catholic exclusiveness was considered amusing by people who knew that their own Protestantism was superior to Romanism...
...If only they had learned to love themselves first, before their children were torn from them . . . then what...
...It is one thing to leave behind the old Catholic defensiveness...
...The spot we are all in is too serious for detached talk about God, as if God were an interesting subject, or happy words about learning to love yourself or getting in touch with your feelings...
...he finds it difficult to make himself understood...
...A man I met recently spent almost half of his life in an institution, confined to a body cast because of a crippling bone disease...
...What is certain is that the Catholic church my children know is radically different from the one I grew up in...
...No one had given us a clue that the aspects of Catholicism which we thought of as unchanging were, many of them, only about four hundred years old, and that a less defensive and more diverse Catholicism was our longer heritage...
...In a society which is oriented towards selling people things, the first job is to sell people themselves, and then you concentrate on all the things needed to keep the self happy...
...There is a Polish priest who is helping out at our parish - "supplying," in the practical language of the trade...
...His English is halting...
...This seems to reverse certain biblical priorities, like "He who seeks his life will lose it," but it is one popular current line of thought...
...The merchandizing technique is familiar to parents: first you sell the set of dolls, then the clothes that go with it, then the condo, then the car...
...This was the final helplessness...
...Make an object of yourself, we are asked, one which you learn how to love...
...Part of the problem could be that theology is, among other things, an academic pursuit, and the academy itself is not in very healthy shape...
...THEOLOGY ON THE KNEES A FAITH FOR FAT TIMES IS FALSE , CATHOLICS who are in their mid-thirties or older have gone through more changes than any generation of Christians since Constantine, maybe even since Paul...
...During one "dialogue homily" a priest interrupted someone who was speaking and asked, "Are you categorizing Harry...
...There: a bold statement if ever there was one, and I'll let people who are willing to dig up contrary evidence go to it...
...Simone Weil wrote, "In a time such as ours, when affliction is hanging over us all, help given to souls is effective only if it goes far enough really to prepare them for affliction...
...That line has haunted me, like a tag from Woody Allen...
...He had enjoyed books, music, and chess, all pleasures which were cut away from him as the cancer spread to his brain...
...When he was at last able to work and live away from institutions he prized his-independ-ence...
...It was lucid, convincing up to a point, and it was as cold as ice - nothing of Job's agony, nothing of Pascal's fire...
...Until the late 1950s such liberal Christian magazines as Christian Century were sometimes explicitly anti-Catholic...
...In every class he tells them about Dachau...
...When I served Mass it was usually said in rushed, often sloppy Latin...
...JOHN GARVEYl...
...Before the Council we saw the church as a thick-walled citadel from which Catholics looked out with suspicion - not entirely unfounded - at a world going mad with self-induced poisons...
...A reporter just back from El Salvador talks about the atrocities there: a man's severed head sewn into the murdered body of a young woman...
...To pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question...
Vol. 108 • April 1981 • No. 8
