Transfigured

It was not any cleverly invented myths that we were repeating when we brought you the knowledge of the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; we had seen his majesty for ourselves. He was honoured and glorified by God the Father, when the Sublime Glory itself spoke to him and said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour.’ We heard this ourselves, spoken from heaven, when we were with him on the holy mountain.

2 Peter 1:16 - 8

One of the ‘Luminous Mysteries’ appended to the Rosary of our parents and grandparents by the late Pope John Paul II was the Transfiguration of the Lord. The disciples Peter, James and John are witness to the appearance of Elijah and Moses together with a transfigured Jesus. The image that often attends this experience is that painted by Raphael between 1516 and 1520. This high altar piece now hangs in Pinacoteca Vaticana of the Vatican Museum. I was privileged to view it and meditate on its beauty and composition on our first visit to Rome.

As rich as Raphael’s expression is, it cannot contain the depth and breadth of what the disciples saw and felt, of the early Church and of our experience of the divine in our own lives, although his attempt is nothing short of majestic.

The Transfiguration, then, is not just a retelling of an event, it is the event. It incorporates the story of Israel’s salvation, the messiahship and mission of Jesus, and reveals the transformation that awaits us within the kingdom (the here and now) but which also anticipates our own exaltation at the end of time.

The Transfiguration reveals a part of the inner mystery of Jesus and part of our potential as human beings seeking divinity. Here is Jesus, alongside Moses, the redeemer of the Hebrews from their slavery in Egypt, with Elijah, the great prophet who worked miracles, who ascended into heaven in a whirlwind and who would return to announce the coming of the Messiah.

The early Church was in need of this affirmation and doubtlessly co-constructed this pericope to advance their understanding of their place in this extraordinary story.

As such the Transfiguration is my story too. It is about my journey. It is about raising my consciousness and awareness of the presence of Jesus in my life and his capacity to transform me into a vehicle for his Good News. It is also your story should you choose to engage in and invest yourself in it. It needs to be retold in your own life, as a story of hope, as fulfilment of a promise.

By all means  gaze upon Raphael’s Transfiguration. Meditate upon it, pray it as part of your Rosary devotion, but most of all – live it out in hope.

Peter Douglas

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How Augustine's Confessions and left politics inspired my conversion to Catholicism

by Elizabeth Bruenig

Shortly before Easter 2014, my family visited me in the United Kingdom, where I was studying Christian theology. I rode the train to meet them in London, where I planned to deliver the news to dad myself. Mom already knew. Months earlier, I had requested from her a copy of my Presbyterian baptism certificate, which she located and provided without judgment, reasoning that there were worse things a young person could get up to in a foreign country than converting to Catholicism.

It was late when I made it to their hotel, where I met them in an upstairs lounge. We caught up for a little while before I mustered my courage and came out with it.

“I’m converting to Catholicism next week,” I said. “That’s when we do it: Easter.”

At first my dad did not believe me. After all, why? To them, converting to Catholicism did not seem like something I would do. Up until that point my parents had thought of me as most parents of that era likely thought of their adventurous, college-aged children: leftish, radicalized by the 2008 financial crisis, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, no ally of anything establishment or retrograde. They knew I was very religious, but conversion likely made even less sense to them given my strong faith: Why mess with a good thing?

In the Beginning

I was baptized as a child in a Presbyterian church my family attended for a time, but was raised Methodist. I liked my Methodist church, though I was not ever sensitive to its doctrinal uniqueness. I knew we believed in a kind of free will before I knew what sort of theological conviction that belief ran up against. I knew we relied heavily on the Bible, though we were not as thoroughly literal as others. I knew we believed in being kind and orderly and that our pastors were learned and gentle and trusted to guide and illuminate, though each of us went alone before God.

When I left home for college many states away, I intended to keep up with my Methodist churchgoing but didn’t. Our Protestant chaplain was a profoundly humane Quaker with whom I spent a great deal of time, and in the light of our friendship I periodically attended meetings of the Society of Friends. I appreciated the authenticity and earnestness with which the Quakers pursued God and thought it appropriately humble to sit silently under the white beams of a New England meeting house and await Him.

But I was restless. In the quiet of the meeting house I would let my mind circle around threads of Scripture, moving like a spiral, inward toward meaning. But as the spiral tightened toward a kernel of truth, difficulties began to snare the lines. Already I was reading rapaciously about the histories of the biblical texts: their journeys through translation and interpretation; their auditions for the canon and those that did not make the cut; the late additions and redactions. I had not been raised to think the Bible totally bereft of metaphor or allegory, but these were problems of authority, not interpretation. Who could say what was symbolic or literal, what was historical artifact and what was currently applicable instruction?

Protestantism charges the individual conscience with many, if not all, of these interpretive duties. The trouble, as I came to see it, is that while Scripture must contain at least some meaning that is stable over time, consciences are not. Not only do individuals change over the course of a lifetime, inclining them to different (though entirely honest) interpretations; people change as cultures change. And some of those shifts in society and culture have major ramifications for how (or whether) we understand the things we read.

Truth in Charity

Take, for example, the winding historical journey of charity. The word caritas appears multiple times in the Latin text of the Bible and is usually translated into English as either “love” or “charity”; different translations of the same passages can feature either, as an attempted correction to the problem that follows.

The King James Bible renders 1 Corinthians 13:3 as “And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.” To contemporary readers, especially those outside the Catholic tradition, that verse may seem a little odd: How is it possible to give all of your possessions to the poor without doing charity? Doing so would appear to be the very definition of charity.

But the word has changed over time. As the scholar Eliza Buhrer points out, the original term Paul used was the Greek word agape; but, inspired by Cicero, Jerome, in the fourth century, translated it into Latin as caritas. That choice, Buhrer writes, “cemented the idea that caritas would forever be associated in some way with poverty,” though it certainly bore no such inherent association in its original Latin usage.

Thanks to Paul’s use of the term agape, early Christian writers (including Augustine, who never used caritas to mean almsgiving) were very cognizant of the difference between caritas and what we would now identify as charity. But throughout the middle ages, Buhrer observes, sermons and homilies on poverty began to conflate caritas with giving itself, and though the church would always distinguish between the two uses, they blurred in the popular religious imagination.

These days, charity in popular usage refers almost exclusively to almsgiving or other activities that support people in need; the less-apt reading of caritas won out. Thus, one often hears the popular talking point among politically conservative Christians that assistance as administered by the state is not charity, because it is compulsory—an argument meant to refute Christian arguments for state-funded welfare programs. This idea draws from both senses of charity, the antique and the medieval. On the one hand it suggests there is no moral imperative for Christians to pursue a robust welfare state because the Bible actually counsels love, something that cannot be coerced; on the other, it seems to accept that the term charity itself denotes the giving of goods.

It is possible to resolve the confusion: True, love cannot be coerced, and that which is given without love is not given in the spirit of caritas; still, it is entirely possible to build political institutions that ensure humane conditions for the least of these out of caritas. In that case, the charity is not in the transmission of goods to the poor, but in the initiative to create a world where those transmissions reliably take place.

And yet, so much depends on one word and its tangled history. It seems unlikely that the average reader of the King James Bible can be expected to have researched and understood the different uses of caritas—I did not do so until graduate school—yet one would be ill-suited to grasp the full meaning of 1 Corinthians 13, not to mention the political discourse that rests on it, without having done so. We read words as we understand them, but words change over time, and so do we.

As a student, I became increasingly aware of the problems these textual knots posed for the way I had been taught to relate to God: How could I read my way to God by the light of my own conscience if I was not even entirely sure of the meaning of what I was reading, much less my ability to read it reliably? And in the course of all that confusion, as if by divine providence, a professor assigned St. Augustine’s Confessions in one of my classes.

Honest Confessions

I began to read Augustine compulsively. I devoured the Confessions and City of God, then moved on to his letters, his sermons, the Soliloquies and the Enchiridion and on and on. Some five million words of Augustine’s writings survive, and I wanted to read them all.

I loved his clarity of mind, his incredible intellect, his dazzling charisma. I loved, as a young adult, all that intensity—the strength of his feelings for God and the world, his passion. But I also appreciated the service his writings provided in terms of navigating difficult texts: Without quite knowing it, I had begun to rely on the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church.

Tradition provides a chain of provenance beginning with the original biblical texts and extending down into our present year, with scholars and clerics reading their predecessors and puzzling out how to apply their thinking about God and his people to new questions that arise with time. Instead of leaving a single conscience to the knotty business of making sense of ancient texts, the tradition offers Christians a chorus of helpful coreligionists passing down insight over time. An individual’s conscience plays a role, of course, in her own interpretation of the tradition; but the weight of time and expertise are instructive, and they whisper through space and centuries that you are not alone.

I had been persuaded that this method of dealing with interpretation and authority made sense by my experience of Judaism. Early in my career at Brandeis, my predominately Jewish college, I had the privilege of taking a class with a rabbi who approached familiar texts with an inquisitive, demanding intellect, but also the company of several hundred interpreters, whose collective thinking bore weight and balanced the affective prejudices of modern readers against those of the ancients.

College is likely when most people come into Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and though I had read them before I, too, found my interest in left insights into political economy refreshed around that time. And it made me all the more curious about Augustine, who seemed to speak for a manner of thinking that could critique and even reject the aspects of modernity that are corrupt without receding into sterile nostalgia or abandoning the witness of history altogether. The reasoning was just as flexible as it needed to be, and no more. It was beautiful, elegant even.

As a Protestant, I had learned that commentaries on Scripture were just that: the ephemeral striving of mere mortals, bereft of meaning in their own right, useful only insofar as they happened to be correct according to one’s own judgment. But more and more I was convinced I could not carry out a Christian life by myself. I did not want to read and draw my own conclusions; I wanted guidance, clarity, authority. God had not seen it fit to leave Adam alone in Eden, nearer to God than we are now. He needed help, and God gave it to him.

I began to see God had already done the same for me. I just had to accept it.

Change of Heart

Plenty of converts to Catholicism prize the church’s prudence when it comes to evaluating modern conditions. Because the church is a pre-modern institution, it does not take for granted many of the givens of modernity: that personal freedom ought to be endlessly maximized, for instance; that the most important goal in life is finding oneself; that politics and religion are two sharply and rightly separate spheres.

In an essay in 2005 about his conversion to Catholicism from Episcopalianism, R. R. Reno, editor in chief of First Things, wrote that “modern theology is profoundly corruptive. The light of Christ must come from outside, through the concrete reality of the Scriptures as embodied in the life of the Church. The whole point of staying put is to resist the temptation to wander in the invented world of our spiritual imaginings.”

By “modern theology” Reno means the (mostly) liberal theology that rose up after the Enlightenment to defend Christianity from its cultured critics. In those defenses, however, Reno finds a profusion of mere theories—thin lattices of argumentation constructed to prop up denominations whose commitments, if not their doctrines, are compromised. “What my reception into the Catholic Church provided,” Reno wrote, “was deliverance from the temptation to navigate by the compass of a theory.” Instead of the ephemera of ever-generating theories, Reno found he could rely on the solid pre-eminence of the Catholic Church, whose internal life is marked by striking continuity with the past.

Ross Douthat, a prominent columnist for The New York Times, described his reasons for converting in similar terms in 2014. While Douthat noted that he could “easily imagine [Andrew] Sullivan, or some of my other eloquent critics, regarding the remarriage-and-communion proposal as an ideal means of making their conservative co-religionists grow up, of forcing us to finally leave our fond medieval illusions behind and join the existentially-ambiguous, every-man-a-magisterium chaos of our liberal, individualistic, postmodern world,” he suspected a reversal on the issue of divorce and remarriage could undercut what drew many to Catholicism in the first place: a long, documented historical integrity that has withstood political and social pressure to change.

Reno and Douthat, both of them sensitive and extremely learned critics of culture, religion and politics, are also (as one might expect of those with a healthy skepticism regarding modernity) political conservatives. I, with equal concerns about many of the conditions that make up the current political and social order, am not.

Part of the reason I found Catholicism’s challenge to modernity so compelling was that it critiques aspects of our world that mostly go unquestioned, even by those who have disputes with liberalism in sexuality, marriage and so on. For me, the case in point was property ownership, the underlying question beneath all our current debates about poverty and wealth.

Early Christian writers, Augustine among them, thought deeply about the nature of creation. God made our material world, of course, but what for? Knowing what the bounty of the earth was meant to achieve would help them figure out how to use it rightly, that is, in accordance with God’s will for it and for us. In the view of the early church (and indeed), the world had been made and given to all people to hold in common to support their flourishing. “God made the rich and poor from the one clay,” Augustine wrote, “and the one earth supports the poor and the rich.”

Property entered the equation with sin. Since people could no longer be trusted to honor the original purpose and use of creation, governing authorities were able to maintain order by dividing it up. But the church remained sensitive to the pre-property purpose of creation, and with its own authority (throughout the Middle Ages, for instance, ecclesiastical courts heard many cases regarding property and contracts) and power to persuade states and subjects, it urged vigilance against the tendency of the wealthy to amass more than their due, to the detriment of the poor. Individual actors departed from the counsel of the church, of course, but never succeeded in altering its doctrine to advance their own purposes.

But that changed after the Protestant Reformation. While Erasmus and Thomas More had each been meditating on the common ownership of all things just prior to the schism, Luther and his adherents took a different approach. Reacting to the radical communitarianism of the Anabaptists, the Reformers took the view that all things ought to be held in common as a thin veil for idleness, debauchery and sloth. With their assault on the authority of the established church, they sapped the moral force from the church’s teaching on property, which was now up to each person to decide for himself; and with their remonstration against the temporal authority of the church, they appointed the regulation of property strictly to the state, which was meant to order human affairs toward sober efficiency, not some final good.

In the years after the Reformation, increasingly strongly articulated and absolute rights to private property gained ground in European thought, finally flowering into “the rights of an individual to resist the extractions of both church and state,” per British historian Christopher Pierson in Just Property. If this situation sounds familiar, it is because it is the rallying cry of almost all those who resist efforts to broaden our country’s support for its poor. Taxes, they say, are theft, and governments have no right to seek the good, only the maximal liberty of its client-citizens.

Yet the church remains firm, unmoved by this current in modernity. And while it is impossible to speak for all Protestants—and important to note there exists a vast array of opinions on property ownership within the Protestant tradition, some hewing close to the Catholic view—the Catholic Church, at least, bases its position on property in a moral universe far more stable than that which has been constructed since the Reformation. And by the time I neared the end of my time in college, I had become convinced it was the only firm ground from which a Christian could fight back against the domination of the poor by the rich, against poverty, against the destruction of families and communities at the hands of businesses and their political lackeys, against a world stripped of meaning.

Confirmation

By the time I graduated from college, I knew I was not through with Augustine. I left for the United Kingdom at the end of my first summer out of college, where I would earn my M.Phil. in Christian theology, with a focus on Augustine. I studied under an Anglican priest and Christian socialist whose reading of Augustine deepend mine, and it was somewhere between our meetings that the seed that had been planted some time earlier came to fruition. When I told my tutor I intended to convert, it seemed like something I had already put off too long.

In retrospect I do not remember my confirmation very clearly. I was confirmed during a very early Easter Vigil, around 4:00 a.m., in the Catholic chaplaincy at Cambridge University.

I walked to the chapel in the dark: it was cool and damp, and nightclubs were still releasing Saturday night’s revelers in a trickle into the streets. By the time I reached the chapel I was awake on pure adrenaline, exhausted but alert. I was electrified and dazed throughout Mass, aware enough to remember the dreamy surprise I felt when I realized a professor of mine was holding the chalice I drank from for the first time; too tired to recall what she said to me afterward when we all gathered upstairs to celebrate.

When I went home that morning it was daylight—very bright, and all the mist had warmed to dew. My friends parted ways near the chapel, and I walked home through a few little alleys that rounded gardens where light-colored roses were already in full bloom. It is in my nature to wander, and I had never seen the streets so bright and placid before, but I was too worn out to linger.

I felt changed when I arrived back at my room, though everything seemed the same: a desperate pile of books by my bedside, a stack of xeroxed papers spread over my desk and the Confessions alone on my squat nightstand. I fell asleep contented, following the shape of the letters on its spine. It felt good to rest.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline "Ever Ancient, Ever New," in the August 7, 2017 issue.

 

About God's work

God co-operates with all those who love him.

Romans 8:28

Picture if you would, St Joseph's School, 1963, a class of Standard (Grade) 2s, sitting two abreast, each child with a small sheet of newsprint, a bowl of warm water in which were soaking postage stamps still attached to a corner of an envelope. Our job, as we did most days with Sister Gabriel, was to peel off the stamps and place them onto the newsprint sheets and put each completed sheet onto a drying rack. When dried we would pack the stamps into large brown envelopes. Somehow, beyond the understanding of little Peter Douglas, the stamps were sent to 'The Missions' in order to save the souls of the 'black babies' of Africa.

One thing Sister Gabriel made perfectly clear was that we were doing God's work. What little each of us does, acts and words of kindness up to those moments of grace-filled generosity and selflessness all contribute to the mustard seed-like growth of the Kingdom.

Just what that Kingdom is, well, we don't know an awful lot. We have a number of allusions to life in the Kingdom, and a wonderful series of metaphors that Jesus constructed to give his listeners a greater, deeper sense of what he was speaking about. He isn't being literal (either about heaven or hell). What comes through from the various schools of thought is that the Kingdom is: yet to come (apocalytic); here 'already but not yet' (inaugurated); is already here (realised). Nevertheless, whichever school you lean towards won't change the Sister Gabriels, Mother Teresas, Vinnies groups, Care and Concern groups, Neighbourhood Church Community teams, Pastoral Care groups, those who seek to change the world to make it a better place or those who provide food to the hungry or clothes for the naked.

Those who follow the Beatitudes, who live the Gospel everyday: ... inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me (Matthew 25:40) do in fact cooperate with God. God does work and act in our world and requires you and me to be his hands and feet.

When you walk into our Catholic schools and see and experience the great care and love that is reciprocated and freely given, the genuine lack of fear about conversations that involve Jesus and faith, the confidence that is inspired by the genuine desire to be neighbourly, just and accepting then it becomes obvious that God is walking and working with us - each of us realising our fullest potential in doing it for the least of our brothers and sisters. We may be proud, but most of all, like the Peter Douglas of 1962, we must be aware that we must be about God's work.

Peter Douglas

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It is time to get past the snobbery against pastoral theologians

 

by Jim Heft SM

Over the years, I have often heard pastors and teachers say, apologetically, that they were not theologians or academics or that they did not fully understand a book written by some theologian. Such humility may be commendable, but it is misplaced. Let me explain why.

In today’s big graduate theology programs, one sometimes encounters a status snobbery regarding the various theological subspecialties. Dogmatic or systematic theology is assumed to be for the brightest graduate students, those philosophically inclined and willing to tackle how all the doctrines ought to be connected and understood. Then there are people who are not drawn to “big ideas” but take up scriptural and historical studies; they like to focus on specifics and details. And those who go into ethics want to resolve difficult moral situations, to have an immediate impact by addressing particular contemporary problems.

At the bottom of the intellectual talent pool, according to this view, are students of pastoral theology. They are the “people people,” not the critical thinkers. They will not be the ones, it is assumed, who will reorient the theological enterprise. After all, they are called to busy themselves with applying whatever they are able to understand. They work in parish programs and teach catechism, help people through rough patches in their lives and lead Bible study groups. That does not take a lot of intelligence, some assume, just a caring heart.

I remember one professor at a large Midwestern university commenting, “I am not into hand-holding” when he was invited to help out with a campus ministry program. Another dismissed a course that I proposed on the Christian tradition of prayer: “This is not a seminary, you know.” Over the years I have often heard from faculty who want religious education disassociated from the theology department, saying, “We teach theology, not catechetics”—as if theology and catechetics were not fundamentally interdependent.

What is wrong with this picture? I think the highest level of theology is, indeed, pastoral theology. Why? Because to be a good pastoral theologian, you have to be well acquainted with doctrine, be able to put it in its historical and biblical context, and acquire a genuine understanding of what ought to be said to someone confronted with a complex human situation. In other words, competent pastoral theologians understand that all these subspecialties need to be integrated.

Moreover, pastoral theologians not only need to pay attention to doctrine, Scripture, tradition and ethics, they also need to be attentive to the sensus fidelium, the actual experience of believers trying to live their Christian lives in the push-and-pull of their own time and place. Pastoral theologians, like Karl Rahner, S.J., pay attention not only to all the subspecialties but also to their growing edge, remaining ever sensitive to the development of doctrine and ready to discern humbly in what direction the Spirit is blowing. (Rahner did not, it must be admitted, write for ordinary people.)

Scholastic philosophy and theology dominated church thinking for centuries, especially in the United States, until the Second Vatican Council. Scripture was often cited simply to support what theologians and philosophers had already established on their own. Aware of this emphasis on an overly philosophical theology, Vatican II encouraged theologians to pay greater attention to Scripture and history. What is needed now is balance, interplay and a constant awareness of the importance of both Scripture and theology, and how they enrich each other.

One of the gifts of competent pastoral theologians is their ability to understand the people with whom they work. They need to discern and value their lived experience. That requires much listening and reading of the signs of the times in light of the Gospel. Good pastoral theologians must be, therefore, the most skilled persons of all the “subspecialties.” A pastoral theologian combines them all and knows how to communicate the Gospel effectively to ordinary people. Few scholars know how to do that. Good pastoral theologians do. Their great value to the church should be lifted up and acknowledged, and they should not be dismissed as B-level academics.

This article appeared in print in the July 24,2017 issue of America Magazine.