Pastoral Paradigm

Frank Bruni of the New York Times has shouted “Hallelujah”!¹ I can only add “Beautiful, Wonderful!” A very prominent person has, essentially, endorsed the process of metaphorical thought—and a person in an organization that has, until very recently, functioned to buttress absolute ideals at the expense of concrete realities. I'm talking about Pope Francis, of course, and the ideas he expressed in an interview published recently in several Jesuit magazines.²

I'm not saying that the Pope has entirely abandoned boiler-plate Vatican pronouncements. His interview comments on women in the church were highly abstract and, I felt, evasive. And a couple of days after the interview was released, Pope Francis made some very standard comments about abortion. But the change in tone from the Vatican in this interview is enormous. Bruni noticed that the Pope “didn't present himself as someone with all the answers. . . . he recognized that authority can come from a mix of sincerity and humility as much as from any blazing, blinding conviction, and that stature is a respect you earn, not a pedestal you grab.” Carol Zinn, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (criticized by former Pope Benedict), stated: “What we're seeing is an incredible change in the atmosphere. And when you have change in the atmosphere, it's amazing what kinds of things can unfold.”³ I agree. I think Pope Francis has the potential to bring about great change in our world, and the way he's changing the atmosphere is through language.

As two other reporters put it, the Pope “is assuming the tone of a parish priest.” That means that he's presenting himself as more concerned with actual people than with upholding church doctrine. He has become a pastoral presence in the world. All parish priests assume a very large pastoral role, in caring for the members of their congregations. “Pastoral” from “pastor” derives from the Latin pascere, meaning to feed. Shepherds physically feed their flocks; pastors spiritually feed their congregants. It's an old metaphor in the Church, but Pope Francis is using it in a new way. Thus, the Pope can assert that too much is being made of church doctrines on abortion, gay marriage, contraception. He keeps returning in this interview to the greater importance of the spiritual health of the people than abstract doctrines; the interviewer states that Francis is concerned when “the rules threaten to overwhelm the spirit.”

The Pope uses some very telling metaphors in the interview. In reference to the consequences of the Church putting rules above the spiritual health of the people, Francis says: “I see clearly that the thing the church most needs today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after a battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. . . . And you have to start from the ground up.” Beautiful. A suffering person cannot be healed by abstract doctrine; he or she needs a pastor on the spot who cares for his or her soul (or psyche), before he cares for how exactly that person abides by church doctrines. That is why the Pope has turned away from judging homosexual people; he is more concerned with the state of their souls than with their sexual orientation. This is true compassion, humility, a recognition that we are all struggling mortals and equal in that regard. As Francis has said, “I need to live my life with others.” And he cites the thought of St. Ignatius, the founder of his own Jesuit order: “great principles must be embodied in the circumstances of place, time, and people.” Thus, Francis understands that even doctrine must change with time and events, that the Church consists of the people and the hierarchy of priests, bishops, etc. For this reason, “We should not even think . . . that 'thinking with the church' means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.” What theologians think of the Virgin Mary is often different from what the people think of the Virgin Mary, but both are part of the larger truth. This seems to me to be a radical change in vision; I do believe the Pope is implying that the people have a say in the meanings and values asserted by the church as a whole.

Amazingly, given the history of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope believes that “Religion has the right to express its opinions in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.” This is apparently true because no one walks in another person's shoes, experiences another person's life in a concrete way. Thus no one, even priest or pope, can judge another—only try to walk with that person with mercy: “It is necessary to accompany them with mercy.” Throughout the interview we see this emphasis on caring for the real person as more important than imposing certain doctrines on that person and judging that person by those doctrines. No individual can live up to abstract doctrine, as we have seen quite clearly in the scandals among Catholic priests and bishops in the recent past. To assert that anyone can be perfect is hypocrisy; the Pope says his most essential characteristic is that he is a sinner. In truth, one has to be consciously a sinner in order to be compassionate toward others. C. G. Jung has differentiated between perfection and completion.⁴ While many in the Vatican have oriented their lives toward perfection, including Francis's predecessor, who wanted a more limited church of true believers, Pope Francis is seeking completion. To him, the church should be universal; it should belong to everyone. And this can only happen by not insisting on or even seriously aspiring toward the unattainable goal of perfection. But the main value of completion, as opposed to perfection, is that it allows growth, whereas perfection produces stagnation. As the Pope puts it, “In ecumenical relations it is important not only to know each other better, but also to recognize what the Spirit has sown in the other as a gift for us.” Again, beautiful.

Francis understands God as being in the present as a “'concrete' God. . . God is to be encountered in the world of today.” And since God continues to reveal himself through history in all the moments of the present as they pass, certainty and even absolute doctrine do not make sense in understanding the movements of God. “. . . God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. . . . If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. . . . Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person's life. . . You can, you must try to seek God in every human life.” Amazing! This is a courageous man whom we really need to continue to speak out in this world of sectarian violence and hatred.

According to Pope Francis, God is more process than certain truth—an ongoing revelation: “God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. . . . human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. . . . we grow in understanding of the truth. . . . The view of the church's teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.” And doctrines must always be renewed by contact with real people, especially for Francis the poor, or what Christ called “the least” of us. “When does a formulation of thought cease to be valid? When it loses sight of the human or even when it is afraid of the human . . . .” Thus, Francis says he prays even when sitting in the dentist's office, a setting that might surely remind us of our common suffering, mortal nature.

I am not a Catholic--never have been and never will be, but this man moves me to hope that we can better ourselves as human beings, by tempering our rules and laws and paying most attention to caring for other human beings—by being pastors ourselves, each of us toward the other. Isn't that really Christ's message, in its essence? And this is the attitude of metaphorical thought, which anchors the abstract in the concrete. Pope Francis uses several striking metaphors in his interview, but I'd like to focus finally on one in particular, which he repeats. In commenting on a description of the vision of St. Ignatius (“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”), Francis notes “. . . we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are.” In that imagery is a description of metaphor itself: a vision of the abstract (the horizon and all we project onto it) anchored by our position in the real world, in a certain place and time. What we can know about the horizon and all it represents is dependent upon our roots in this world, and what the horizon represents takes on value in relation to our roots in this world. Or, as Christ said, “. . . as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40, RSV).

1http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-popes-radical-whisper.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130922

2Quotes from the interview in this spot are taken from “A Big Heart Open to God,” in America, retrieved online at

http://www.americamagazine.org/print/156341 . Copyright America Press, 2013.

The interview was conducted in the Vatican by Antonio Spadaro, SJ, and translated from Italian into English by Massimo Faggioli, Sarah Christopher Faggioli, Dominic Robinson, SJ, and Griffin Oleynick.

3Carol Zinn's quote and the quote from two reporters in the next paragraph are taken from

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/world/europe/with-his-remarks-on-sexual-morality-a-surprise-pope-keeps-on-surprising.html?pagewanted=all

4C. G. Jung, Answer to Job, ed. 2, tr. R. F. C. Hull (NY: Bollingen, 1969), pg. 33: “. . . just as completeness is always imperfect, so perfection is always incomplete, and therefore represents a final state which is hopelessly sterile.”

Authority & Responsibility

As the last soldiers of World War II die off, it's worthwhile to review the mental states of the Nazis, of those who thought it was not only acceptable but even admirable to participate in genocide. Recently the New York Times ran an obituary for Rochus Misch, one of Hitler's bodyguards. Apparently Misch lived openly and happily in post-war German society, often visiting the bunker where Hitler died and bragging that he was there! But what really caught my attention was this statement by Misch: “I ask you, if Hitler really did all the terrible things people now say he did, how could he have been our Fuhrer? How is it possible?”¹ Fuhrer means leader in German; Misch is expressing incredulity that any person could accept that the leader of the Germans (“our Fuhrer”) could have done “terrible things.” To people like Misch, leaders are seen by definition or out of necessity as infallible. Such willful blindness arises, surely in part, out of fear of the dissolution of society without a strong and trusted leader. An emphasis on loyalty, to groups and leaders, is a marker of the conservative mentality even today, while liberals tend to value fairness over loyalty.²

The danger of placing too much trust in authority is not only the very great tendency of power to corrupt those who assume it, but also the excuse it can give those subordinate to that power not to have to think for themselves, and Misch is a good example of the latter problem. That power corrupts is not just a cliché. Brian Resnick published an interesting article in The Atlantic recently that summarized recent laboratory studies on the phenomenon of power, titled “How Power Corrupts the Mind.”³ Perhaps in part because authorities have to look at the big picture, “powerful people . . . tend to think more abstractly, favoring the bigger picture over smaller consequences.” Often, Resnick reports, because they are not so closely linked to the actual lives of others, being cocooned in their authority, powerful people tend to develop the traits of hypocrisy, infidelity, and dishonesty. We need only look to politics and, recently, some religions, to see how this scenario develops, unfortunately. People to whom certain authority figures, such as a priest, carry great value at times will deny their own observations and the reports of their own children to preserve the power of the authority. Then, great tragedies can occur. Can you see the connection to metaphor here? To overlook the negative effects on your child in order to preserve authority is essentially a yielding to the abstract and neglecting the concrete.

Misch's words also reminded me of Hannah Arendt's works on the mentality of the Nazis, in particular her chilling observation on the “banality of evil.” In a recent article on Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem,⁴ Roger Berkowitz reminds us of what Arendt observed and recorded during that trial: Eichmann's “evil acts were motivated by thoughtlessness that was neither stupidity nor bureaucratic obedience, but a staggering inability to see the world beyond Nazi cliches. . . . an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of someone else.” Again, power allows an individual to disconnect himself from the experiences of other human beings. Berkowitz continues:

“The insight of Eichmann in Jerusalem is not that Eichmann was just following orders, but that

Eichmann was a 'joiner.' In his own words, Eichmann feared 'to live a leaderless and difficult

individual life,' in which 'I would receive no directives from anybody.' [To Arendt, Eichmann

was] an ideologue, someone who will sacrifice his own moral convictions when they come in

conflict with the 'idea' of the movement that gives life meaning.”

And, importantly, Eichmann saw his actions of buttressing the movement (including genocide, which he admitted to be evil) as “a heroic burden demanded by his idealism,” which he called “the fatherland morality.” Thus, he “relied on his oath to Hitler and the Nazi flag, a bond he calls 'the highest duty.'”

So, Berkowitz summarizes: Eichmann “acted thoughtlessly and dutifully . . . convinced that he was sacrificing an easy morality [do not kill] for a higher good [fatherland]. . . . Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats but by 'joiners.' That need . . . originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. . . . Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists [ideologues] to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.”

Other than the last sentence, this description could be of the Tea Partiers of today, or even just strict conservatives in Congress, couldn't it? And some violence is perpetrated by our current ideologues, isn't it?--both physical (bombing abortion clinics, shooting abortion providers) and psychological (warning of government death squads). And the people who engage in such activities are, indeed, very proud of themselves for their defense of “traditional values.” They seem to be quite blind to the fact that not harming others is also a traditional value: Do unto others . . . . As for the role of technology mentioned by Berkowitz, consider this statement by Thomas Nagel:
“ . . . science and technology have put extraordinary knowledge and power at the command of

beings who come into the world with the same brains and mental faculties as humans born

5,000 years ago. . . . we are faced with a secular version of the problem of evil: how can we

expect beings capable of behaving so badly to design and sustain a system that will lead them

to be good?”⁵

I don't think this is an exaggeration. I had an experience some time ago, in which someone apparently spread a lie about me over the social media. After experiencing shunning and other negative effects, I tried to find out what was said about me and who said it. One young man I spoke to about this said, with a smile, “Why do you want to blame one person, when we were all involved?” This attitude concerns me quite a bit. It reveals that an individual can hide from responsibility for individual action in a group and that a group will believe the reports of an individual within that group and act on it (and even consider it fun) without bothering to verify the report by discussing it with the accused person. This is another case of abstraction. I do not really know who my accuser was or exactly what that person said; I can do nothing about it because the concrete experience of facing my accuser is not available to me because of the anonymity of social media. Also, the individuals who embrace the “movement” of social media, if I can echo Berkowitz's term in that way, apparently feel no concern for me as a physical being who has been psychologically and socially insulted. I'm an adult and can deal with it, but what about all those adolescents who show up in the news after harming or killing themselves because of abuse via social media?

This is a serious problem. Arendt had something to say about a phenomenon like this as well: “What stuck in the minds [of men like Eichmann was] simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique.” As a college teacher and mother of two young adults, I know that young people today are quite conscious of participating in a paradigm shift. They seem not to have too much concern about individual responsibility and privacy; they are very much engaged in the sharing of selves and information in an awesome new world. I am concerned that they do not see the possible downsides of this phenomenon yet—after all, they were pretty much born into a world of great technological powers; they take it as their norm, even though they realize that historically it is quite a mind-blowing time. Again, to the extent that technology leads us humans to ignore the physical and psychological realities on the ground of others, it will lead us into abstractions that will far too easily overlook the sufferings of some in order to reenforce the movement. Humans have never before had such powers, and so we believe this really is a new and different world that commands new ways of behaving and a new ethics. It's way too easy to believe this and not to see how deferral to authority or to abstraction has caused very great problems in the past and probably still can do so today if we are not thoughtful and watchful.

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz was a defender of religion in the modern world; indeed, he credited the Polish people's strong Catholicism with their ability to eventually turn back totalitarian Soviet rule. But note how he phrases this admiration: “For me, the religious dimension is extremely important. I feel that everything depends on whether people are pious or not pious. Reverence toward being, which can be formulated in strictly religious terms or more general terms, that is the basic value. Piety protects us against nihilism.”⁶ Personally, I'm happier with Gaia than with God, if only because the problem of authority is not so great when thinking of earth as one integrated organism, whereas God will always have his priests and zealots. Either way, “reverence toward being” is the key—recognizing that no matter how much power you have you are not worth any more than the least powerful person on earth and that the daily realities of that least powerful person must be considered and respected as much as yours are. The word “piety” comes from the Latin for “pity” and is related to “compassion.” If we can see ourselves all as created beings, part of one whole creation—none more important than any other, essentially, we may have a chance. We must always anchor the abstract in the concrete, in being itself, lest we defeat ourselves with our very intelligence.

1http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/world/europe/rochus-misch-bodyguard-of-hitler-dies-at-96.html?emc=eta1

2http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/opinion/sunday/the-whistle-blowers-quandary.html

3http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/how-power-corrupts-the-mind/277638/

4http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/misreading-hannah-arendts-eichmann-in-jerusalem/?emc=eta1

5http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/books/review/john-grays-silence-of-animals.html?pagewanted=all

6http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/feb/27/an-interview-with-czeslaw-milosz/

Seamus Heaney

I was the sort of child who found more satisfying relationships in books than in real life, on the whole—and certainly more rewarding understandings of reality in books than in the social world I inhabited. I got vicarious satisfaction, for instance, from the power Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames had in their lives—how they were free to act out of their own understandings of the world.

As an adult I have received great pleasure and affirmation from the writer–reader relationship in poetry and from the depths and variations of perception and insight that poetry can make possible. Seamus Heaney was coming into his own as an internationally recognized poet just as I was initiating my own academic career in literature. I had the honest pleasure of meeting Heaney several times, once sitting next to him and conversing (as he later put it in his typically concrete way) “on the cusp of that formal horse-shoe bend at lunch.”¹

Seamus Heaney was an unpretentious man who lived in a very sensual world. His poetry is anchored in imagery and metaphor to a greater extent than for most poets. For Heaney, a “spirit level” (for instance) is not only the thing itself (what we call here a carpenter's level), but also the intangible concept the words evoke. I learned most of what I appreciate in metaphor from his poetry.

Heaney's poetry is mostly simple on the surface and very deep--comprehensible because anchored in the everyday images of this world, to which both poet and reader can respond sensually, via the five senses in the imagination. Simplicity in literature is mostly derided, especially in poetry, by academics. It is an achievement most poets and academics could never approach and thus dismiss.

But it gives hope to those who can accept it and see into it—hope that we tortured, bifurcated bags of flesh and bones and blood and brains can live with meaning, metaphorically, with our feet planted in the ground of our origins and our heads swaying in the passing winds of ideas. Seamus Heaney wrote two poems about the mythical character Antaeus², son of Gaia, who could not be killed as long as he maintained contact with his mother Earth, “cradled in the dark that wombed me / And nurtured in every artery / Like a small hillock.” It is only Hercules who can defeat Antaeus, Hercules who

. . . lifts his arms

in a remorseless V

. . . lifts and banks Antaeus

high as a profiled ridge,

a sleeping giant,

pap for the dispossessed.

I gather some hope from this ending, despite its apparent agony of loss for those of us who are not “sky-born and royal,” like Hercules, son of Zeus, nursed by Hera. Heaney specifies that despite Hercules' triumph, Antaeus is not dead but sleeping, thus revising the myth that has Hercules smother Antaeus by breaking his ribs while he is elevated.

I cannot help but feel that we are becoming the dispossessed, that we are dispossessing ourselves from our native, physical world. Like Heaney's Antaeus, though, I hope we are just sleeping and that we will escape one day the very powerful grasp of the abstract realm and understand the vital necessity of our relationship with the natural world—not only for our own continuance as a species in this world but also for our ability to see and share through metaphor the greater values and meanings that emanate from this world. It is our “pap” and always will be.

With the death of Seamus Heaney this past week, we have lost a spiritual companion, a truly alert and hopeful soul, who loved this awful, aweful world. Thankfully, we can still be nourished with his words.

1Personal letter.

2The first and third quotes to follow are from the poem “Antaeus,” the second from the poem “Hercules and Antaeus,” both from the volume North (1975).