Religion & reflex
Garvey, John
forgotten is that this is a consequence of the fact that it is the believer who can 'see,' who has an intuitive understanding of the religious phenomenon he is studying. The blind do not have to...
...But more than the body's place in prayer is involved in this difference between traditional forms of religion and a self-consciousness which marks more recent forms of devotion...
...What is being sought in the sort of assignment my son was given is, of course, not a bad thing: it is good for children to know that their parents love them...
...Therefore, she dedicated her life intensively to prayer, and insisted that we pray also...
...In the same issue," in "New World Order I I " , by Fred Siegel, Mary Kaldor's name wa.s misspelled...
...You may have had a different experience of this than I have, but I don't know many children who are really enthusiastic about any of these exercises (I don't know any, in fact...
...A number of parents sat down and dutifully wrote letters, and I have no doubt that sincere things were said and that some children and parents were moved...
...We live in the Lord...
...Edelman came to know many refugees during two years in Costa Rica doing dissertation research, he was not, in fact, involved with refugee work...
...But what was also being sought was a moving experience...
...Another article in the same issue tells of the Yugoslav government's irritation with an alleged Marian apparition in that country...
...I have seen that self-consciousness at liturgical conferences where people learn to bow from the waist rather than genuflect when they enter a church, and so they do so as they approach the altar, very carefully and properly, having learned just that aftern o o n . There is, however, a lack of precisely this self-consciousness which is the mark of moving more deeply into religious observances...
...She was deeply aware of the difficulties of faith in our modem world, aware of the corrosive effect of modem science and technology on the sense of the sacred, and the difficulty all of us have to keep our faith in this kind of environment...
...But deep problems in this area require individual pastoral attention, not wholesale attempts to evoke feeling...
...and although we were bored by such things as the Stations of the Cross during Lent, we didn't think they were corny...
...Many of them were fishermen, and gave space on their boats for fellow pilgrims to sleep while they prayed...
...Her gesture had the swift and easy quality I have seen in Catholic churches when people enter, touch the water in the font and cross themselves as they move to their pews...
...The woman in the Orthodox church made me wonder about religions in the industrialized West these days (as a columnist it is my job to soar in this way from the particular to the grand) and about what we may be losing...
...My children have relatively little connection with the church of my~childhood...
...He did not resolve these dilemmas...
...to that extent the body's place in the relationship which is implied by prayer -- one which has to do with everything about us -- is discounted...
...What we need, the embarrassed objectors seem to say, is a little self-consciousness...
...If I have to be told to love my child, or my wife, something is wrong...
...Yet they had no faith...
...and we dii~ in the Lord...
...The Lord said to me: you shall see yourself that all manner of things shall be well...
...blessed be the name of the Lord...
...They have, after all, lived through a lot of Bell Telephone and Coke commercials...
...Will our children...
...I don't know the solution to this problem -- can those older forms be restored at this point...
...THE EDITORS children to be confirmed were expected to send a letter to the school telling our children how much we loved them, and how proud of them we were...
...The blind do not have to suffer garish sights, but their relief is the result of a handicap...
...Dorothy knew that the important aspects of her life -- her vocation to love, to the lay apostolate, to virginity, her positive acceptance of death as an integral part of the Christian mystery -- all this made no sense at all except through faith...
...She repeated the prayer of Jesus for Saint Peter: "Simon, I pray for thee that thy faith fail thee not...
...But unbelief remained a problem.She knew persons who were extraordinary human beings, sometimes with cultivated natural virtues beyond that of many of her Catholic acquaintances...
...it was forcibly reopened by the pilgrims, who prayed there for hours...
...It was a life completely of faith, but also a hidden darkness in which she faced alone the terrible mystery of unbelief...
...But they served to bringthe church into the modem world and created the envirohment in which Gaudium et Spes of Vatican II was possible and even anticipated...
...She devoted herself rather to a life of teaching and counseling students at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University where she found her great satisfaction among the students and colleagues whom she loved and who came to love her...
...many still heroically active in the service of God and neighbor...
...They know when someone is trying to move them...
...But, as for me, I seem to know what the atheist knows, and feel what the most arid secularist feels, what troubles me is the terrible plausibility of unbelief in our modem world...
...WAS IN AN Orthodox church in a small southern Illinois coal town when a middle-aged woman came in, crossed herself, kissed the icon at the end of the aisle, and walked back to a pew...
...but it is a problem indeed, and a couple of things I have read during the past year make me wonder about it...
...If parents and children do have a problem communicating their love for one another (or worse, if they don't have any love to communicate), the problem is not remedied by self-consciousness about it during the preparations Which surround a sacramental occasion...
...The many who were part of it are scattered today: m~nY like herself, called to the Lord...
...these things aren't there to be evoked on cue...
...When I entered college the Mass was in Latin...
...I think it's a good thing that we are able to do this, and it is precisely because it is good that I would hate to see it made into a form of homework...
...The point of such gestures as the sign of the cross is, among other things, the participation of the body as well as the mind in prayer...
...My son was recently confirmed...
...As part of the preparation for confirmation the parents of the Corrections: In the May 4 issue, Marc Edelman was erroneously identiffed in the book review section as having spent a year in Costa Rica working among Salvadoran refugees...
...As long as the mind insists on being the most important part of all this (as it does when we assume that an automatic gesture is worthless because we haven't thought about what we were doing -- would this be true if I waved a fly away from my eyes thoughtlessly, or closed them reflexively against lye...
...But what bothered me about the whole attempt was this: what does this do to spontaneous expressions of feeling...
...Toddlers think about walking much more than we do...
...A lot of Catholic liberals and fundamentalist Protestants are embarrassed by the old lady who moves her lips when she says her prayers, or by signs of the cross which are done rapidly and which seem to the non-participant's eye 1 June 1984:327 to be simply careless...
...This sort of thing -- an organized, self-conscious experience -- increasingly takes the place of forms of devotion which have fallen out of our lives...
...they pay lots of attention to it...
...Do they think these repeated actions will save them...
...She represents an era that may someday be seen as a golden age...
...Although Mr...
...In the important Journal of Religion in Communist Lands published by Keston College (Heathfield Road, Keston, Kent BR2 6BA, England) there was an account of a mass pilgrimage to a Catholic shrine near Shanghai...
...I come from a family where people kiss a lot and where, especially late at night after family gatherings have settled out a bit, brothers and sisters can talk for hours about what's right and wrong with all of us...
...She lived and died in the deep peace of the presence of the Lord, repeating near the end the line from Julian of Norwich: "Don't worry...
...These incidents made me think of the important place the Black Madonna occup!es in Poland, and the hope which Guadalupe has brought to millions of poor Mexicans...
...Her private life with the Lord was a life of profound spiritual experience, a life kept hidden from even her closest friends...
...Maybe this is apparent only to someone whose liturgical experience is as varied as that of my generation (which is to say, those of us who are in our late thirties or early forties...
...At any rate, there is a self-consciousness which comes of this experience which makes us self-conscious even about self-consciousness...
...JOHN OARVEY Commonweal: 328...
...Not that the sacraments have nothing to do'with love -of course they do, with human as well as divine love...
...I have seen the same thing gone after in other liturgies...
...Don't these people pay any attention to what they are doing...
...and, being strengthened yourself, strengthen the brethren...
...In some people these gestures, done as a repeated part of ritual observance, smooth out over the years until they become stylized, one flow like the line at the edge of a piece of driftwood...
...She used to remark: "Saint Theresa (of Lisieux) referred to unbelievers as sinners...
...consciousness...
...There is in this sort of assigned emotion an equation of religion and therapy...
...Gradually Dorothy Dohen ceased to write serious sociological material...
...Of several minds: John Garvey I RELIGION & REFLEX CAN FAITH SURVIVE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS...
...JOSEPH P. FITZPATRICK, S.J...
...Thomas O'Dea personally experienced the religious dilemmas he wrote about with such great analytic power: especially the dilemma of the church confronting secular culture, and the dilemma of the Christian attuned to the demands of the absolute trying to live out his commitment to the here and now...
...Her death, as was her life, was a hymn to Christian hope and joy and love...
...Holy objects -- pictures, rosaries -- and common recited prayers were a central part of this...
...The church which was the goal of the pilgrims had been shut during the Cultural Revolution...
...Father Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, S.J., is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Fordham University...
...It may be that there are children whose parents do not tell them what they feel for them, parents who are reluctant to show any overt affection at all, and that is sad...
...The equation of religion with good feelings and the attempt to evoke those feelings doesn't go as deeply as some old and now ignored devotions did...
...There is something now which makes us uncomfortable around such traditional practices, with their ancient and familiar mix of prayer, attention, devotion, habit, inattentiveness, and lack of self...
...some have been lost...
...My children, without any coaching from me, have expressed that feeling about much of what they are exposed to in the name of religion...
...Although I have attended only a few synagogue services, I have noticed the same combination of inattention and ritual taken seriously...
...It is significant that this sort of devotion and such things as common recited prayers and litanies play such an important part in the survival of faith during hard times...
...That includes automatic reflexes, habits, all of the non-rational things which remind us that we are not in control...
...He lived with the tension between faith and scientific knowledge until death came to him, as it will'to us all, as the final tension resolver...
...Do we have any equivalents...
...She was at ease with believers of other faiths, an active member of the Ecumenical Commission of the New York archdiocese...
...This has as little to do with Christianity as the deep swoons of Victorian teenagers reading romantic novels...
...That sort of complaint isn't uncommon...
...It is when you don't have to think of something, that you have learned it...
...What we are losing is the lack of selfconsciousness, a lack which drives some people crazy whenever they encounter traditional religion or popular religious devotion...
...It is not a sign of love or of natural feeling when these things are assigned, but of the death of real feeling...
...The assignment is the symptom of a problem and is not even close to being a cure...
...many seeking to live the vocation to love in the hidden world of family and friends...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 11
