Among the Sufis perplexity is a very important notion and a critical stage in spiritual growth. My perplexities are not that kind of thing….a bit more mundane but still quite significant. Here’s a few of them:
A. Recently there was a story on CNN about the Holy Grail! And relics in general.
It appears that there are something like 200 churches in Europe that claim they have the Holy Grail (and how many heads of John the Baptist are there?)! And somebody said that if you added up all the wood that is claimed to be from the Holy Cross, you would be able to build a house. It seems that in Late Antiquity and in the medieval world there was quite a “relic industry.” People wanted relics and mementos; people got what they wanted. (Today the tourist business thrives in places with this kind of stuff.) There is a very popular kind of religiosity that seems to be almost centered on relics, “holy sites,” miraculous saints, etc. I don’t understand this; it is, at least to me, a big puzzle.
When I was a little boy, I collected baseball cards. It gave me a feeling of “connectedness” with those guys whom I idolized. So I kind of get that. Then, when I was a novice monk, my novice master gave me a relic of St. Sharbel, the Lebanese hermit whom I admired. And a friend gave me a small rock which he had brought back from Mt. Athos. These also gave me a sort of reassuring “connectedness,” but they were not even a small theme in my spirituality. But it appears that these kind of things seem to be so central to many people. This feels like a crypto superstition. So, instead of focusing mind and heart and one’s whole being and life on that one reality which we call God, folks obsess about miracles, “incorrupt bodies,” speaking in tongues, possessing or seeing relics of “holy people,” “holy sites,” paranormal phenomena, etc. I am totally bewildered what that spirituality is all about.
B. The election uncovers another bunch of awful puzzles. Consider this: a remarkable number of Christians, mostly Protestant Evangelicals, support Trump. And not just support but believe that he is somehow “God’s chosen one” to protect us from “satanic forces.” Here is an NBC News story about this:
I am totally dumbfounded! One wonders what is going on!? Makes one sympathetic to atheists!
C. I identify with the Catholic community, so you might think that I feel smug and congratulating myself that I am “not like them,” the folks above. Nope. Can’t do. There was a poll taken at Notre Dame University among the students, and it turned out that the majority of students preferred Trump. Catholic voters in Pennsylvania are polling in favor of Trump, etc. Here’s another recent story:
Also, so many figures in the Trump camp, like Vance, claim to be committed Catholics. At the very least don’t these people know something of Catholic social thought? Odd. General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the Trump years, recently said that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous man” to the welfare of this country. Things like this do not seem to bother these Catholics. I really wonder what constitutes the religiosity of these people, what is their spirituality all about?
One could say that the issue of abortion holds sway here, and I think that may be partially true. But one issue does not explain this phenomenon. And I am afraid there is a darker truth here. Again, not the whole story but definitely it is there as a factor. Over the years you will find a strain of Catholicism that is inclined toward authoritarianism, both in Church and State. There is this need to impose, even by force, one’s notion of Christianity, indeed, even of Catholicism itself, one’s notion of social order, one’s notion of patriotism, etc. These folks have never been comfortable with how messy democracy can get. Like the monarchist Catholics in France who yearn for some kind of “restoration” of the “old order,” these people look at the pope as s kind of king, and the bishop in his diocese as a kind of king within that realm; and the Church is a Kingdom. The celebration of the Feast of Christ the King is no longer a redefinition and transformation of power into servanthood, but a theologically warped celebration of religious power. It’s not hard to see how that kind of Catholic would be attracted to someone oozing with aspirations to be a “strong man,” a dictator in effect if not in name. Given all this, I am still puzzled by how warped the Catholicism of some Americans is. If only they could recognize the distortions within their religiosity……
D. American history. I love reading that stuff and pondering what I learn there. Inevitably one runs up against a “brick wall” of understanding….it’s impossible to figure out the rationale for some things….because there isn’t any. Among the most prominent of these, I think, is slavery.
The fact is that most Southerners in the pre-Civil War era did not own slaves. I have seen various estimations that range from 10% to something like 30%. But the other fact is that the “Southern cause” enthralled the overwhelming majority of Southerners. Most of those men walking into the fierce Union firepower at Gettysburg…Pickett’s Charge…did not own slaves. What were they willing to die for? For a small minority to be able to own slaves? Probably not. Some Southern historians put it this way: for loyalty….to their land…they were mostly farmers…most of the Southern economy was agrarian…the land which was invaded by the “industrial” North. Also, loyalty then to their way of life, loyalty to their State, loyalty even to Robert E. Lee. Insane and delusional. Thus the myth of the “Lost Cause” rose up, the myth that the South was engaged in a “noble cause.” It was a lie and a delusion then, and so it is today, no matter what some historians are saying. It didn’t matter that so few actually owned slaves….the fact is they all tolerated slavery. After their defeat in the war, the South worked as a whole to structure their society in a segregationist way….not to mention the Klan, vigilante groups, and brutal police forces that terrorized Black people. Today the South and the border states are peppered with various mementos that valorize this delusion and maintain a remnant of a deeply enigmatic attitude of the heart, and there is a strong resistance to taking down the statues or renaming some institutions, etc.
But lest the North get sanctimonious about it, we need to remember that the phenomenon of segregation was prevalent also in the North even if it was not totally institutionalized. How white people considered black people was a national tragedy that to this day affects us all. In the Old South this enigma that I am pointing to is the desire not just to see certain people as inferior but even more so to turn another human being into a commodity, a property that I can own. This goes beyond “not liking” someone, hating them, even seeing them as an “enemy.” Where does that come from? Incidentally, slavery in the ancient world was not racially based….usually it meant that you were on the losing side of a war or some conflict. In the U.S. it was deemed that a whole class of people by nature were somehow less than human or that a whole class of people can be turned into a commodity because of their very nature.
A religious angle to all this: where were all the Christian churches in all this? Apparently all over the place…..from the few that supported the Abolitionist Movement and the Underground Railroad to the many in the Deep South who exemplified a deafening silence about how all this should look to a follower of Christ. One should also add that a number of religiously grounded colleges, even in the North, benefited from trafficking in slaves. But what really gets me is that the Jesuits in Maryland owned slaves. How these ecclesial elites, well-trained in religion and secular studies, endorsed such a practice totally bewilders me.
E. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Love the Latin…so succinct! Usually translated as: Outside the Church there is no salvation. First enunciated in this form by St. Cyprian of Carthage in the 3rd Century, early patristic period. I forget when but at some point it was declared as an infallible doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. I suppose by now one can see a “little” problem in all this!
For centuries, until the Vatican II Council in the early ‘60s, this statement was taken literally. In part this explains the strong missionary push by the Church, and you can also kind of see how the European colonists looked at the people of the New World…..a part of the “massa damnata” that was doomed to hell. So even coerced conversions were for their own good! There were some remarkable exceptions like the few Jesuits who made it to China and India in the 17th Century. They were overwhelmed by the beauty, the power, the depth of the religious consciousness they found there. They tried to adjust their Christianity to fit in but the Vatican put a stop to all that.
With Vatican II the Church softened its view of the other great world religions, but the theologians could not do away with an infallibly declared position. So there was a problem! They came up with various solutions, like looking at all these other religions as a good preparation for Christianity and therefore as somewhat “salvific” in a sense; or looking at other religionists as “anonymous Christians,” and so on. Catholics who had real and deep contact with authentic religious practitioners from the other world religions found these solutions inadequate at best or even totally wrong. Merton simply ignored this dilemma in the last years of his life and continued exploring the depths of Buddhism and Islam. The actual lives of these people spoke to him more than the limitations of some doctrinal conundrum. Abhishiktananda is even more interesting because more radical. In the last years of his life he simply rejected all this. For him Christianity, the Church, was “incomplete” without the presence and insights of the other great world religions. Our understanding of Christ and who we are is deficient in a serious way without the vision of the other great religions. Needless to say doctrinally this does not fly! At least in any official sense. And to me it seems that it presents an even deeper enigma…..but one in which I feel much more at home.