I'll be right back
Egan, Harvey F.
whose refusal to be taught in the Afrikaans language unleashed the final phase of the black revolution. That day's Natal Witness (June 15) turned its attention to the report that philanthropists...
...It's all at least as good as Homer, but it is complicated...
...A catechist said that she had not been so inspired since her pilgrimage to Medjugorje...
...After a plate of sauerbraten and a slice of strudel, the local historian opened a few eyes...
...Yet a message from the East is being whispered in the West...
...Several surveys report that nearly 22 percent of U.S...
...their question implied a belief in reincarnation...
...The main concern of educators should not be to make African-American or IrishAmerican or Italian-American children proud of their culture...
...Another monk, the author of several unpublished novels, came to the podium and gave us the heartening news...
...The way things are going, they won't have far to look...
...A professor of Scripture, short of stature and breath, made only a brief stop at our meeting and a brief comment on the theme...
...March 31, 1915...
...That's their parents' job...
...Through fourteen centuries the subject has not been seriously considered by any mainline Christian church, though it is widely accepted by most religions in the East...
...Another committee member recalled one of Saul Bellow's characters who said: "A single span of life can only make virtue desperate...
...It i s n ' t easy to teach, but teaching isn't--shouldn't be----easy...
...This keeps Serbs and Croats hating each other, and that fact ought to be apparent even to our most brain-damaged educators, but no one seems to notice that the problem stems from a primordial need to have good guys (and therefore bad guys...
...Thomas has staked 9 August 1991:457...
...Without a hell or a purgatory, where does the defiled person go...
...All those present seemed to agree that since the material of the human anatomy constantly comes and goes yet an individual remains the same person, every adult person on earth has inhabited several different bodies...
...Each incarnation provides an occasion for a person to grow in love...
...But that cultural failure should not lead schools to try to fill in the blank, as if a school room could do what home, church, and neighborhood cannot...
...Joan of Arc Church in Minneapolis, is the author of Leaven: Canticle for a Changing Parish (North Star Press...
...This may in part be due to something that happens with the press, especially during the summer--the need to grab at something hanging dimly in the air and make a trend of it...
...The flurry over what is and is not politically correct occurs at the same time as a raw and ugly fact: race relations are once again openly nasty, after years of a kind of forced politeness, punctuated by confrontations in which nobody listened to anybody else...
...Better none than only one...
...Jesus also said a person must be "born again" before entering into heaven...
...Therefore, another chapter of a person's life in another human body on earth will not be a totally new experience...
...456: Commonweal Most of us, slightly bewildered, staggered back to our parishes, wondering how to put together the scattered theological pieces...
...HARVEY F. EGAN Harvey F. Egan, pastor emeritus of St...
...And at the same time, we produced geniuses like Madison, whose approach to writing the Constitution that became the foundation of our government is probably the most enduring and fascinating product of the Enlightenment, one with effects that continue to inspire people in every comer of the world...
...Nor is there any proof that it is false...
...At the first pause in the program, members of our group stampeded to recharge their psyches with caffeine...
...In midafternoon, the theme was opened for questions and comments by participants in the symposium...
...After we trudged through four verses of "Amazing Grace," the keynote speaker, an underemployed master of novices, intoned the mandated clichr: pleased and privileged to be with us...
...I had arrived early for a "Whither Christianity...
...He reminded us that many persons thought Jesus was a 9 August 1991:455 reincarnation of Elias or Jeremiah...
...Then the resident theologian, Vaticanized a generation ago, reflected on eternal verities and alluded to an evolving problem...
...Child prodigies were mentioned...
...Our monk replied: "I remember Jean Harlow but who is Madonna...
...The apostles wondered if a man born blind was afflicted because of his sins in a former life...
...our revolution was perhaps the least defensible use of violence in world history, in that we weren't really oppressed~we were overtaxed by a tooremote government, and were finally willing to kill for it...
...553, a splinter group of Eastern bishops without a pope was maneuvered by the Emperor Justinian, a frustrated theologian, to reject reincarnation as an authentic Christian belief...
...Maybe, just maybe, that person, after death, will get another opportunity, another chapter of life on earth, to be converted from sin and selfishness to a love that grants admittance into heaven...
...Our speaker suggested that resistance could be interpreted as an ardent desire for heaven or an intense dislike for this world...
...it is not mentioned by contemporary theologians...
...A dreamy parish council member assured us that, on several turns of a merry-go-round, he has had several lives and, when he achieves his unique kind of love, he will grab the brass ring and receive his prize...
...Hans Kiing recently noted: "The question of reincarnation is open to discussion...
...If there is a hell, it is empty...
...Saint Gregory of Nyssa was one of its eloquent advocates: "It is absolutely necessary that a person's soul must be purified and, if this does not take place during this life, it must be accomplished in future lives...
...Our speaker suggested that our more enlightened attitudes in these areas have recently helped to reduce the incidence of at least three ugly experiences in our society: abortions, the casual use of drugs, and street crimes in several large cities...
...It is a hopeful hypothesis, believed by millions of religious persons in the past and today...
...were their extraordinary skills, talents, and insights carried over from a former life...
...I wondered if Father Peregrine had indeed come back for another trip or two...
...adults believe in some form of reincarnation...
...Few had ever composed a sonnet, voted for a socialist, bet a Daily Double, or winked at a stranger...
...Most had looked at too many screens--computer, television, confessional---m search of Godot...
...A belief in reincarnation, he explained, was widely debated in the early centuries of the Christian era...
...A concerned questioner noted that some persons probably would not want another life on earth...
...An awkward question has surfaced and our speaker took it on with aplomb...
...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., journalism professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, is author, with Jeff Theilman, of Volunteer: With the Poor in Peru (Paulist...
...He gave no statistics on these developments...
...There is a new degree of nastiness in race relations, a new separatism, but it isn't all that different from the old kind...
...Every good person will be rewarded, every wrongdoer punished...
...In the church of our childhood, he said, we believed that every person is created to praise God eternally and that, when the body dies, the soul of that person goes promptly to be judged by a God both merciful and just...
...To this historical overview was appended the names of heroines and heroes of the human family who have believed in reincarnation William Blake, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, "It's me, Helen, your husband Steve, I've been born again!'" Johann Goethe, Feodor Dostoevski, Robert Browning, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Darwin, Henry Thoreau, Conan Doyle, William James, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Pearl Buck, Thomas Wolfe, Jack London, Herman Hesse, Robert Frost, John Masefield, Elizabeth Kiibler-Ross, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Ernesto Cardenal...
...He further commented on a few traditional Catholic beliefs and practices that are, he hinted, now in the process of fading: three persons in one God, Original Sin, chastity, hell, confessions, the priesthood, and the permanence of marriage...
...Our guru's response was brief: "Maybe...
...Selfesteem ought to be at the bottom of any educational curriculum, and literacy (narrowly defined) at the top...
...The question: If only purified lovers can enter into eternal union with a God of love in heaven, where goes the person who has not yet achieved his or her designated degree of love...
...American expansion happened for reasons that involved a mushrooming greed...
...I think it can be argued that the sort of heat generated by the nomination of Clarence Thomas is in its oddly skewed way a sign of health: here a black conservative is being called "treasonous" by black liberals with a stake in one comer of the current system...
...Lunch break: not many participants knew the words for the praying of the noon Angelus or had ready responses to the morning's dilemmas...
...Most cautious Christians consider reincarnation the bizarre belief of religious weirdoes...
...Heaven is a glorious reward for saints, the blessed, the pure of heart, people who sought and followed an enlightened conscience--for all authentic lovers...
...Our conference master suggested another pilgrimage on earth could be a blessing for many of us...
...Then, at the Second Council of Constantinople in A.D...
...We want to replace a vision of America as a nation of heroic white Protestants fleeing persecution in Europe, who "discovered" an inhabited continent, helped to civilize its inhabitants--making some mistakes along the way--and struggled through a problem with slavery which was finally solved by white people, after some more mistakes...
...That is the fact that we are wrong-headed enough to want a version of history in which whole groups were good, and whole other groups were bad...
...This is not, as some have suggested, simply a matter of the Japanese wanting to keep their own cultural values isolate and intact, though those values are definitely part of this movement...
...He sniffed and shuddered...
...There was the first spark--a hint of reincamation?--in a day that would singe the catechism...
...The church vs...
...We produced complicated heroes like Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth (who forced some slave women into freedom at gunpoint rather than allow them to make the choice of slavery for their own children), and the revolutionary-era Quaker saint John Woolman who opposed both the violence of slavery and the violence of the revolution...
...He described the kind of Catholicism that prevailed in the years before Vatican II...
...We were reminded that Dante's pilgrim went to the Gate of Paradise and then, not totally purified, hesitated...
...I think we will have a healthier society when we can show our children both heroes and complications, and tell them that the heroes themselves were complicated...
...symposium, a provocative theme to be presented by a languishing religious community of priests and brothers belatedly making gestures toward survival...
...Some Christians are pausing to reflect...
...Purgatory has been a Catholic fantasy without a biblical foundation, now forgotten...
...The main point is that they want their kids literate when they go back home, and they are right to doubt that American schools are capable of doing the job...
...That day's Natal Witness (June 15) turned its attention to the report that philanthropists had rescued from oblivion the manuscripts of Pietermaritzburg-bom novelist Alan Paton, whose Cry the Beloved Country was "the opening salvo in the literary attack on apartheid," and were returning them to South Africa...
...Or at my next call...
...A few persons mentioned messages found in their tea leaves, and several others added significant observations...
...I live in a part of New York where Japanese who have moved to America for several years, for business reasons, send their children to Japanese schools...
...THEOLOGICAL TRENDS "I'lL BE BIGHT BACK" REINCARNATION REVIVED he cemetery at the monastery needs a major manicure...
...Brother Dolce, all effervescence, gave me a booming greeting: "Hello, Comrade...
...Saint Augustine, hardly a theological rebel, asked God: "Was I in another body...
...These treasures, he mourned, are disappearing, not by direct resistance, but by the quiet inattention of faithful Catholics...
...The epitaph on one marker caught my eye: "I'11 be right back...
...the Alan Patons of the future "will have to find new causes and controversies...
...A secretary indicated her hope to become acquainted with Matthew Fox and his creation-centered friends...
...The Bhagavad-Gita was quoted: "As a person casts off worn-out clothes and takes on new ones, so do the souls of persons cast off worn-out bodies and enter new ones...
...And the Book of Revelation (21:27) gives the clear message: "Nothing defiled shall enter heaven...
...Father PeregrineS...
...The eyes of participants were popping, but no objections were raised...
...Of course, there is no scientific evidence that the reincarnation theory is true...
...We should be able to tell the truth: white Christians, for reasons of greed, bought black animists as slaves from black Muslims who bought and sold people with as little remorse as their white customers...
...He brought to our attention and lamented the fading of several ancient Catholic beliefs and practices: indulgences, purgatory, the devil, holy days of obligation, tithing, the sinfulness of birth control, papal infallibility, fasting and abstinence...
...This has been our understanding of eventual religious experiences, our guru at the podium explained, until recent developments in religious doctrine have brought a more enlightened understanding of the Christian message...
...At the community happy hour which has replaced vespers, members of our group, now breathing easier, lifted a few goblets and visited informally...
...I let it pass...
...Pilgrims on earth, it was suggested, are a bit like players in a drama...
...Several tombstones are tilting...
...Today, some contemporary Christians are looking to non-Christian religions to consider their teachings, believing the human family will eventually embrace a single worldwide religion...
...This is called reincarnation, the reentrance of a person's tarnished soul into another human body for another opportunity or several opportunities to become prepared for God's blessed reward...
...state tug-of-war brought down the curtain on this theological discussion...
...This is, once more, a case of public schools being asked to do what a larger culture, or network of subcultures, has failed to do...
...We seem to want to trade one stupid myth for another...
...One thing concerns me here...
...Some religious visions may be enlarged...
...There are attempts at curriculum reform which indeed look foolish, and while they aim at instilling pride in children from minority ethnic backgrounds, they will instill, instead, bad history...
...There is no need any more for protest literature," the Witness editorialized...
...The plan of God for all persons to gain salvation will be fulfilled...
...His epitaph encouraged me to concentrate more earnestly on current opportunities to grow in love so that I will be fully prepared for entrance into glory at the first call...
...A new-age member of our group wondered if a person might be reincarnated on another planet...
...At the orientation meeting in the Great Hall, dozens of veteran symposia attenders, members of church staffs and parish committees, gathered, each equipped with the necessities of pastoral life--notebook, name tag, coffee cup, and furrowed brow...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey POLITICS & CULTURE TO EACH ITS OWN e seem deluged, lately, with stories about "PC," about being "politically correct," and the ways this concern has taken over campuses, grade school curricula, and even Supreme Court appointments...
...These victims were brought against their will to a land already populated by tribes, some of whom were peaceful, others vicious, few at all decent to the women among them...
...The theme is currently prominent in several novels and movies...
...Our group's response was briefer: "Wow...
...We want to put in place of this a picture of noble "people of color" (don't call them colored, or examine the fact that this makes white people transparent) whose high culture was tom from them by evil white slavers, and who were rescued solely through their own determined struggle toward freedom...
...He hummed "All My Life's a Circle...
...The need is important to demagogues, but should be anathema to educators...
...At this judgment, a person will be directed to heavenly glory or a place of temporary purification or hellish torture...
...Several refreshing religious beliefs, he declared, are coming on strong: the infinite power of love, the nobility of every human person, universal salvation, the glorious goodness of all creation, the supremacy of conscience, reincarnation, and respect for the rightful roles of women in our society and church...
...A specific question arose: "Do you think Jean Harlow has been reincarnated and is now Madonna...
...A parish administrator who was inclined to call 911 at noon calmed down enough to reveal his hope to become a deacon if he can get his wife's permission...
...Many rehearsals are necessary before a theatrical role can be perfectly mastered...
Vol. 118 • August 1991 • No. 14
