In Good Company
Ruddy, Christopher & Martin, James
FROM G.E. TO S.J. In Good company The fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience James Martin sheed & word ,$15,95,216pp Christopher Ruddy when my wife and I...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...D 35 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...He may have been trying to provoke us by denouncing the most revered of all motorcycle brands in a sort of biker's version of epater le bourgeois, but what31...
...It was easy to accede...
...Among Catholics it raises issues of equality, authority, crisis, patriarchy...
...In Good Company is, in outline, a straightforward vocation story: an ordinary, occasionally indifferent Catholic becomes dissatisfied with worldly success and seeks something more meaningful...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...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...
...Why," as Wills asks, "would anyone want to adopt such an uncomfortable post if he could avoid it...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...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...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...He was built like a defensive end, shirtless except for a sweatstained leather vest, intricately tattooed, and evidently hallucinating under the influence of the nearly empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Tequila which an unprincipled bartender had surrendered to him much earlier...
...Noble and highminded, it sounds much better than "job" or "career...
...Written while in the first fervor of religious life, Martin's book does not directly take up Wills's dilemma...
...At other times, he tries too hard to show that he's just a regular guy, who enjoys the occasional pitcher of beer or toke of a joint...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Martin's energetic style sometimes saps emotional depth, and so he remains content with somewhat cursory accounts of his spiritual and physical trials...
...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...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...Harleys...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...These virtues are also the book's vices...
...God will hear you...
...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...
...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...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...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...
...he bellowed, and, to our considerable relief, passed out on the laminated tabletop...
...another executive, attempting to fire an older, accomplished worker, says, "F— compassion...
...REV...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...Such humor and directness serve well his intended audience: younger adults searching for faith, and prospective priests and religious...
...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...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...There is no pious airiness whatsoever in the book...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...WE BRAKE FOR GOD Riders for Cod The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang Rich Remsberg Afterword by Colleen McDannett University of Illinois Press, $34,95, 263 pp...
...Upon visiting Philadelphia's stoneand-marble seminary, he writes, "The Church Triumphant...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...The great irony is that while Wills realizes that the church is, in the words of his hero, Saint Augustine, a corpus permixtum—a body shot through with sinners and saints— he nonetheless fails to see that vocations occur within that messiness as well...
...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...
...Attending a benefit for a Jesuit middle school, he declines the advances of a drunk woman, and tells a student, "If you ever want to attract women, just buy a black shirt like this one...
...Married only a short while, I already see how frightening and joyful our vocation to each other can be...
...Michael O. Garvey tie summer night a few years ago, as my brother and I were having a couple of beers in a local biker bar, I became uncomfortably aware that a conspicuously enraged patron at a nearby table was demanding our attention...
...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...
...headquarters will not: Jack Welch, "America's bestever chief executive," as Newsweek recently declared, will not be happy with its portrayal of his plutocratic ways...
...He seems unsure at times that his account is inherently attractive...
...Might not part of the present vocational crisis be that some of our contemporary understandings of Christian vocation—be they of religious life, priesthood, marriage, or single life—far from being too demanding, do not demand enough, do not appeal strongly enough to our longing for generosity and selflessness...
...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 soon answered, "Yes," but the question has continued to challenge me...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...Martin's conversion story calls to mind Garry Wills's assertion, in Papal Sin, that the vocation crisis exists, in part, because the church's intellectual dishonesty— concerning, inter alia, the Holocaust, birth control, clerical celibacy, the role of women—deters many idealistic young men and women from considering priesthood or religious life...
...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...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...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...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...However, Martin points to the at-once compelling and liberating nature of Christian vocation: How can one resist such desire and joy...
...Maybe I will...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...James Martin, S.J., associate editor of America and the author of several books, has written an engaging account of his journey from successful corporate businessman to vowed Jesuit...
...Tomorrow," Bob Dylan sang, "is a long time...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...I bet they didn't hold hands during the Our Father here...
...he roared at us several times, as the other customers continued nonchalantly to converse...
...How can one not sell all that one has for the "pearl of great price," even if it involves much suffering...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...Standard, canonical stuff, but the gravity of the question caught me unawares: Did I really understand what I was getting myself into...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...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...
...In Good company The fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience James Martin sheed & word ,$15,95,216pp Christopher Ruddy when my wife and I went in for the requisite premarital investigation, the pastor asked each of us if we realized that our impending marriage was dissoluble only upon death...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...Lacking neither intellect nor integrity, Martin offers an answer: God...
...Martin confesses that he cried from anxiety his first night in the novitiate and that, as part of his formation, cutting smelly, overgrown toenails in Jamaica sickened him...
...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...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...There is no such thing as a vocation that does not involve human and institutional frailty...
...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...
...his 34 humorous asides, while invariably funny, occasionally seem designed more to keep the reader's interest than to advance the story...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...any healthy marria...
...Martin's passage from Wharton graduate and General Electric whiz to Jesuit novice is striking, and he writes with honesty and wit...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...No zealot or sap, Martin shows how surprisingly joyous and alluring commitment to God can be...
...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...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...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...
...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...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...Part of any responsible, intelligent, mature commitment is acceptance of, not acquiescence to, the flaws of the obiect of commitment...
...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...
...REV...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...God is literally in the details, however...
...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...
...bears witness to that fact...
...The demands made upon Martin in the novitiate in his ARMY CHAPLAIN CORPS...
...doesn't owe you a damn thing...
...Martin is especially good at explaining unfamiliar terms and practices without being patronizing...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...Although ecclesial "structures of deceit" can and do hinder the hearing of God's call, In Good Company reminds us that every Christian vocation has its origin and sustenance in God, not humanity: "You did not choose me but I chose you...
...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...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...Vocation is a trendy, sometimes contentious word today...
...Or divine grace...
...Ultimately, we see Martin in the novitiate chapel on the night of his vows, filled with gratitude toward God and amazed that the formerly "rich, young (and depressed) man" is now inconceivably, unexpectedly happy...
...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...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...thus one sees such book titles as "Ornamental Horticulture as a Vocation...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...Hearing a call from God to religious life, Martin initially resists it, but eventually enters the Jesuit novitiate which transforms his life...
...At a time when much is being written and spoken about the future of religious life and the priesthood, In Good Company serves as a welcome witness—at once inviting, sane, grateful, and gracious—that every Christian vocation "costs not less than everything," but can give in return all to those who accept the call...
...My brother and I had begun to agree upon a discreet, or even panicked exit when the drunken biker disgorged, among other things, the rest of his thought: "Harleys suck...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...He is scathing in his critique of corporate life: Speaking to trainees, one executive tells them, "G.E...
...Every Jesuit vocation director in America will buy this book by the gross {G.E...
...Trapped between their "high calling" and the church's "low standards" of truthfulness, such persons refuse to compromise their intellectual and moral integrity and so decline their possible vocations...
...difficult work with the dying—and the hard-won joy it brings—lead to a further thought...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...What's often left unasked and untold is what Christian vocation is...
...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...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...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...
...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...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...Marvin, S.D...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
