The lessons of complexity
Garvey, John
SIPNEY CALLAHAN f 111 CALL ¥® H0LiiiES$ Planned & unplanned In his apostolic letter Novo millennio ineunte, initiating the new millennium, Pope John Paul II asks: "Can holiness ever be...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...And those parishes which are true to Catholic social teaching will serve the needy (with or without President George W. Bush's imprimatur), while they work for structural reforms...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...God offers the gift of holiness to all, but "the gift in turn becomes a task which must shape the whole of Christian life...
...The chemist who is directing the cloning project for the Raelians says that a number of young women are willing to serve as surrogate mothers...
...Today, the pastoral priority of every Catholic parish should be to prepare its members to respond to the Second Vatican Council's "universal call to holiness...
...True, some churches in Russia are still being used as restaurants, garages, or gyms, but when visiting there for several weeks last August, I saw that many had been restored to liturgical use...
...In such a dialogue I think the pope makes the better case...
...The great hero of ancient Russia is Saint Prince Alexander Nevsky (1220-63), the man who saved Russia from the invading Teutonic Knights who promised to make it Roman Catholic...
...worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...It is Wendell Berry's long essay, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (Counterpoint...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...He offers Job's "I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though...
...By a wonderful coincidence, a fine book came my way at the same time this article did...
...D 10 Willard Francis Jabusch A PAPAL VISIT TO RUSSIA Where is Alexei II's invite...
...They are being assisted by a UFO cult, one led by a former racecar driver named Rael, who claims to have learned much from space aliens...
...how, then, could you explain it to Mr...
...John Paul II, however, rarely asks questions without his reply at the ready...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...It seems to me that you would have to concede—and here empirical evidence is available—that it could not be done...
...The primary function of religion is not to generate happiness but to construct meaning" (see, Tyron Inbody, The Transforming God [Westminster John Knox...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...The inner spiritual dimension of the faith was not apparent to them, only the judgments and guilt that produced the fear that cast out love...
...Since "paths to holiness are personal," as the pope writes, holiness comes in many forms...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...He has already been invited by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and only awaits word from the patriarch before flying to Moscow...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...Most registered Catholics aren't even coming to Mass every Sunday...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...As a wife, mother, grandmother, writer, and lecturer, my days consist of many activities that require my full focused attention...
...Pastors in Western Europe and North America can only envy such numbers and devotion...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...Maybe I will...
...His point is that growth in holiness and prayer will energize love of neighbor and enkindle the commitment to social justice...
...SIPNEY CALLAHAN f 111 CALL ¥® H0LiiiES$ Planned & unplanned In his apostolic letter Novo millennio ineunte, initiating the new millennium, Pope John Paul II asks: "Can holiness ever be planned...
...Is Alexei willing to pay a similar price for this freedom in Russia...
...For that matter, holiness always attracts crowds...
...But it is hyperbole to speak of "persecution...
...The holiness quest of a person in the world has to be grounded in the realization that working well and loving well require engrossed states of emotional and mental concentration...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...Berry spends a good deal of the book arguing with Edward O. Wilson's proposed reconciliation of science, religion, and the arts, which Wilson put forward in Consilience (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...The property of Ukrainian Greek Catholics was confiscated and given to the Orthodox...
...Wilson...
...As the book of Nehemiah (8:10) says: "rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength...
...I tentatively conclude that prayer can be offered before and after intense, engaged activities, but not during...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...I agree...
...Yet, it is to the Orthodox church that many Russians return...
...Churches do build community bonds that strengthen civil society...
...Berry is not at all against science...
...Quite apart from the fact that there are about five hundred thousand Roman Catholics in Russia, the pope knows that his visit would have enormous symbolic importance for the whole Christian world...
...To know that I am 'a white male American human,' that a red bird with black wings is 'a scarlet tanager,' that this is 'a riparian plant community'— all that is helpful to a necessary kind of thought...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...People follow religion, he says, because it is 'easier' than empiricism, the lab evidently being harder to bear than the cross...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...In ten short years, several historic monasteries and convents have been restored to the Orthodox church and have welcomed hundreds of young novices...
...Arguing that there is such a thing, Berry provides examples from King Lear, a biography of Robert E. Lee, and the Old Testament...
...In Latin America, Roman Catholics are not very happy about the growth of Evangelical sects, but it is the price to be paid for religious freedom...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...How many times have I heard cradle Catholics say that they left the church because they never understood that their religion was more than a formal ritual, or dutiful conformity to rules...
...And then is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving...
...It makes sense, therefore, that some Russians find themselves drawn to other religions...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...Berry's point is that religion and the arts are, in Wilson's scheme, subsumed under a scientistic, reductionist point of view, one which is finally as much a matter of faith and a priori thinking as any religion ever was...
...Wilson would consider this "a 'beneficent' falsehood, supported by no 'objective evidence' or 'statistical proofs...
...Wilson wishes you to take empiricism...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...And there is yet more that is seldom mentioned in Western history books...
...He demonstrates his points well, sometimes devastatingly...
...Gospel joy leads to sacrificial love in action, but social action and meaningful constructs, sans prayer, don't lead to the abundant life...
...As they listen to such horror stories, it is hardly a wonder that many Russians take "Roman Catholic" to mean "alien" or indeed "enemy...
...This struck me as both sad—in the unlikely chance of a successful cloning, they will not get "him" back—and profoundly superstitious...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...As one good pastor puts it, his parish has to make an effort just "to reach out, to invite, to encourage people to the active practice of their faith at the most elementary level...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...As in Ireland or Bosnia, a dash of historical amnesia might be helpful in tempering ancient hostilities...
...Here I wish John Paul II had probed more deeply into the meaning of holiness for lay persons engaged in the world...
...Overburdened pastors coping with the multiple activities of a busy parish may quail before this papal insistence that they reclaim the church's holy mystery and offer a training in holiness...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...The pope is far truer to the gospel when he says that prayer and worship lead to "ineffable joy...
...Every Russian child learns the story...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...Toward the beginning of the book, after making a wonderful use of the dialogue between Gloucester and Edgar in King Lear, Berry writes something that shines through on every page: "To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it...
...REV...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...Can, for instance, holiness also be unplanned...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...Pope John Paul II would like to add Russia to the long list of countries he has visited...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...Suppose, granting the hopelessness of empirical proof, that you took Job's statement of faith as seriously as Mr...
...The arts—and the Incarnation itself— are incapable of the generalization and reductionism that a merely scientific point of view imposes...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...During Soviet days, it was renamed Zagorsk, after a Communist hero...
...Nevsky is a sort of George Washington for the Russians, made a saint because he saved the country for the Orthodox religion...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...Holiness is also wholeness, or an integration of all that I am—and I am many things...
...9 JOHN GARVEY THE LESSONS OF COMPLEXITY On reading E. O. Wilson & Wendell Berry Arecent New York Times Magazine article (February 4) told the chilling tale of a couple who are trying to clone their dead child...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...Perhaps we should wish that after the processes of reduction, scientists would return, not to the processes of synthesis and integration, but to the world of our creatureliness and affection, our joy and grief, that precedes and (so far) survives all of our processes...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...Heart speaks to heart...
...Would a visit from the pope in any way add to Alexei's prestige, or would it rather only confuse and influence his people in undesirable ways...
...Many twentysomethings I observed in the congregations seemed extraordinarily devout...
...But when I try to make my language more particular, I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...In Communist times, Catholic clergy and laity who did not convert to Orthodoxy were imprisoned in labor camps and often murdered...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...The pope accepts all this and says that working for social justice embodies the church's "commitment to history," and demonstrates our "love for our brothers and sisters...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...No, dear friend, it is a far greater misunderstanding to think that a coherent belief system is enough...
...it is a necessary but limited and limiting way to examine aspects of the world...
...REV...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...He already has a church that is growing with the devotion of many young people, one that represents a highly visible part of every city and village...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...But they are still working to get him back...
...Science is necessarily about generalization and exhaustive explanation...
...See this, and more strange stuff, in Margaret Talbot's article, "A Desire to Duplicate...
...Familial and intellectual activities conflict (the working grandmother problem), and both require a loss of self-consciousness in service of the other...
...When Catholics return to the faith, they do so because they discover the power of the Holy Spirit to heal and help them live good and happy lives...
...The title might lead people to dismiss Life Is a Miracle as one of those dreadful inspirational books...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...But there is another reason, even less evident to Westerners: the heavy hand of history...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...Berry argues that a real dialogue among science, art, and religion would exhibit "a just complexity," which rules out the narrowness of Wilson's reductionism...
...Marvin, S.D...
...In the seventeenth century, Polish and Lithuanian armies invaded Russia...
...11 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...They know the baby will not be exactly the same as the first one...
...They think this baby should be alive...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...Well might he ask—given the complexity of the idea of holiness...
...It is inspirational, like Lear, like Job...
...At the famous monastery of Optina Pustin, several hours from Moscow in the Russian countryside, I winced when a young Russian guide described how the Polish troops massacred the monks and then immolated the women and children who had taken refuge in the village church...
...In the new Russia, with its relative freedom of religion, many, especially the young, have questions about their own Orthodox roots...
...Just as sex does, I might add for the benefit of celibates and the cloistered...
...Holiness will always consist of intense love of God and neighbor, but the specifics can present problems...
...What he opposes is the claim that science can satisfactorily explain everything that matters most to us...
...Most important, today the churches are crowded...
...Yes, parishes do well to act as "mediating institutions" (the buzz word in political analysis used to praise voluntary associations that stand between the individual and the state...
...In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Alexei II has spoken of the "persecution of Orthodox Christians by Greek Catholics in western Ukraine, and the work of proselytism carried out by Catholic church structures among the traditionally Orthodox population of the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox church...
...Overzealous proselytizing is a real concern, but after seventy-four years of atheism, it is not surprising that many have no religious allegiance...
...The patriarch is said to be ailing...
...Some believe that the biography of Alexei himself—his rapid rise from a simple Estonian monk to official representative of the USSR at foreign conferences, to metropolitan of Leningrad, and finally to patriarch—suggests his collaboration with the former Soviet state...
...I disagree with those theological authorities (often Protestant) who proclaim that it is a deep-seated misunderstanding of religion "to presume that the purpose of religion is to produce happiness...
...Berry speaks of the Kentucky farm he has worked for thirty-seven years, and shows that its mystery cannot be exhausted by reductive language...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...Most Catholics, I suspect, are annoyed if not dismayed at the unwelcoming and unecumenical attitude of Alexei II, Patriarch of All Russia...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...one is the woman's own daughter...
...The dead child's parents know, says the chemist, that "this baby will have no memory of the ten months they had been living together...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...I'm obviously seeking a spirituality that covers the out-ofcontrol, unexamined passionate part of life...
...Valaam, on a beautiful island in Lake Ladoga near the Finnish border, is once again home to both monks and hermits...
...Today, pilgrims travel to Sergiyev Posad to venerate the saint's relics, and 300 seminarians study theology there...
...The parish is "a diverse complex 8 reality" forced to provide "something for everybody...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...Berry has wise and powerfully moving things to say about ethics, morality, religion, and the arts...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...The implicit message here is that mysticism for the masses is hopeless...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...As a convert, I resist these stories, but over the years I've had to admit that abuses do happen...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...With this religious revival, the astonishing number of priestly and monastic vocations, and the restored magnificence of the Russian churches, Patriarch Alexei II may think he has no need of a visit from the bishop of Rome...
...Now the Catholics would like to have their churches and other property in the western Ukraine returned...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...These sad testimonies always begin with the words, "I had twelve years of Catholic education, but...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...But this book is finally much more than an argument with Wilson...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...Berry asks, "Is knowledge by definition explainable, or is there such a thing as unexplainable knowledge...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...They brought with them Jesuit missionaries to convert the people to Catholicism...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...Yes, he answers, there exists a "genuine 'training in holiness' adapted to people's needs...
...I would love to hear a sermon helping me become whole and holy at every level of personal consciousness, with or without self-awareness...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...They stood—for there are no pews or kneelers—and made the deep bows and innumerable signs of the cross as they followed the lengthy liturgies with a quiet intensity...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...Why...
...Hence, his evident coolness...
...I cannot be concentrating on reciting lauds and compline at church, or on private prayers at home, and at the same time fully attend to my granddaughter's emotional needs—or talk over some thorny bioethical question with my husband...
...Regrettably, there has been some anger and recrimination on the part of some Catholics...
...Now it is once again named after Saint Sergius, the most revered of Russian mystics...
...Currently, new icons are being installed, frescos are being painted, domes have been regilded in magnificent gold leaf, and choirs have relearned the wonderful Slavonic church music—necessary because every liturgy is sung and there are no organs, pianos, or guitars...
...Furthering the transcendent spiritual life of a parish is, as Mary rather than Martha would understand, to choose the better part...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...The "Orthodox Vatican" and holiest of all monasteries is Sergiyev Posad, about forty miles outside Moscow...
...They would have been about ten years old when the Soviet state collapsed...
...God will hear you...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...But Alexei II shows little interest in a papal visit to "Holy Russia...
...Superstition, after all, is more about control and the illusion of control than it is about magic...
...Such misunderstandings fuel the "I am a recovering Catholic" movement...
...A universal education in the art of prayer must be initiated, centered on all the different forms of public and private prayer such as eucharistic prayer, liturgical prayer of the hours, contemplative prayer, and personal conversational communion with Jesus as friend...
...But in the meantime, it is unlikely that a Polish pope will be a welcome guest in Moscow...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
