Clarity, not consolation

...CLARITY, NOT CONSOLATION RELIGION ISN'T THERAPY recently read an article-it appeared in the September 24 issue of the New Republic and is worth looking up-which offered a brilliant reading of the state of contemporary American Catholicism, along with a reasoned and careful defense of many aspects of the new universal catechism, suggesting that it offers more of an occasion for dialogue between liberals and conservatives than initial critical reactions may have indicated...

...psychology seeks healing, even the healing of conditions that are not illnesses but necessary parts of growth in understanding, like confusion, self-doubt, and dread...

...Where religion joins the co-dependency movement as another form of therapy there is a danger that its essence will be seriously misunderstood, and its most basic set of questions ignored or misconstrued...

...So much for the secular criticism of religion as a way of avoiding life's harsh realities...

...If God is real, is God one who cares about us, or is capable of responding to my agony or my joy...

...The distance between the questions and the people asking them, and the sickeningly glib responses religious people too often offer, is a horror...

...In any case, to speak of such issues as sexual morality or the ordination of women as seri-ous theological questions seems to me to miss the much more important ones, questions that have faced the church since the death of Jesus and continue to face it...

...The ordination of women is an important issue only if ordination means something in the first place...

...Knowing yourself to be empty is essential...

...Ours is a society that tends to look for therapeutic answers: will the answer to my question provide me consolation, make me feel better...

...They will not have to do with the most basic questions people need to ask...

...but you can't respond to them honestly without seeing them as in some profound way good and instructive...

...Are these really the most difficult theological questions...

...Sensibility, Sullivan writes, "is a paltry substitute for divine truth...

...Within the context of his article, the sentence makes good sense...

...How does God respond to our need for meaning, a need that comes from our being made in God's image, a need that a universe that seems (rightly, if you are a believer, and wrongly, if you are not) to be scattered with clues that imply a meaning out there, a meaning that is not a human symptom but is itself innate, and finally answers our deepest desire...

...But to many people in the contemporary world it is a little like a debate among adherents of Aztec religion over whether surgical steel could appropriately replace obsidian as the material of choice in the manufacture of sacrificial knives...

...In any case, I wouldn't put any venture capital behind a magazine called Philosophy Today...

...The suffering the young woman Was going through made my daughter question whether God was real and, if God was, made her wonder why God shouldn't be hated...

...There is a form of monastic Buddhist meditation that involves sitting next to a decaying corpse for days, watching the process...

...In a world starved for meaning, where children from any number of traditions are themselves unconvinced by what has been handed on, and still find themselves in need of meaning, these really are not the questions...

...Asking the right questions, as every teacher at some point tells every pupil, is the only way to find the right answers...

...Can we accept the kind of God revealed in Christ...

...Philosophy, like religion, has for most of its history sought clarity about our condition...

...You can heal these nonillnesses falsely and make yourself feel better, at least for a while, in the process...

...The limits to sex I won't even count as a contender...

...It is axiomatic that you are supposed to "feel good about yourself...

...If you're not an Aztec, you aren't likely to find the debate interesting (though you may find it amusing...

...Feeling bad is, at some points, the beginning of the only kind of healing that counts...

...The author, Andrew Sullivan, does a good job of pointing out what is obvious to people who know contemporary Catholicism well: "The most striking fact about today's Catholics is the enormous difficulty in saying anything general about them...

...Are these even really theological questions at all...

...The meaning of priesthood...

...One reason the questions raised by our popular culture seem to lead people in directions that religion does not address well is that religion, where it wasn't whoring after acceptance by the culture to which it should stand in some contrast, has been, at its best moments, more about clarity than consolation...

...As Newman wrote, we cannot be 'amused into immortality.'" But here Sullivan wrote a sentence that took my thought in another direction: sensibility, he wrote, "begs almost all the difficult theological questions: the role of women, the meaning of the priesthood, the limits to sex...

...That might be why one friend of mine, before he turned to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, spent most of a year at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery...

...If sides on such an issue are taken by non-believers they will be taken on grounds that have nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politics...

...What if there is a lot in yourself that you honestly ought to feel bad about...

...I remember how upset my daughter, in her early teens then, was about a young woman we knew who was dying of a brain tumor...

...The role of women makes sense as an issue if churches in which women are to have a place make sense, and for a lot of people that is far from established...

...Disillusionment is the first step on the way to joy...

...As a discipline, psychology is more popular than philosophy-and it's easy to see why, bad as pop psychology can be, when you think of what academic philosophy has become...

...But what if you really shouldn't...

...This is not intended as a criticism of Sullivan...

...He credits Andrew Greeley and Eugene Kennedy with offering real insights into the nature of contemporary American Catholicism, but is sharply critical of their over-reliance on the notion of a "Catholic sensibility...

...We get back to the basics: why am I here...

...For Catholics (or for Eastern Orthodox Christians or for Orthodox Jews) questions such as the ordination of women are important, even have an importance that is theological-but their importance is apparent only after the really important theological questions have been faced up to, and answered...

...Being perplexed is the beginning of wisdom...

...My answer was a kind of stammer, but it was that if God isn't real, and if the Incarnation does not mean that in some way God suffers with us, that woman's suffering has no meaning, and meaningless suffering is even worse than meaningful suffering...

...Maybe, if this is a challenge to clericalism, but even then it hardly seems as difficult a question as the question of prayer, or why one should care to try to pray, or if there is anything or anyone out there to pray to...

...If when someone asking that kind of question comes into a church that does not respond beautifully (I use the word advisedly), can we expect them to turn to the church when looking for meaning...

...I would have thought the Incarnation itself, or the goodness of God, pretty high candidates...

...Most contemporary forms of religion in the West don't seem to be addressed to serious seekers...