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More than anything else, I believe, we are facing a crisis of meaning The world seems so complex, and we seem so small. What can we do but let the waves of history carry us and try to keep afloat somehow?
Francis stepped into a church that seems to have been largely out of touch with the masses. He trusted a deeper voice and a bigger truth. He sought one clear center and moved out from there.
First, he walked into the prayer-depths of his own tradition, as opposed to mere religious repetition of old formulas. Second, he sought direction in the mirror of creation itself, as opposed to mental and fabricated ideas or ideals. Third, and most radically, he looked to the underside of his society, to the community of those who had suffered, for an understanding of how God transforms us. In other words, he found depth and breadth—and a process to keep us there.
The depth was an inner life where all shadow, mystery, and paradox were confronted, accepted, and forgiven. Here, he believed God could be met in fullness and truth.
The breadth was the actual world itself, a sacramental universe. It was not the ideal, the churchy, or the mental, but the right-in-front-of-us-and-ever...
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We can argue doctrinally about many aspects of Jesus’s life and teaching, but we cannot say he was not a poor man, or that he did not favor the perspective from the bottom as a privileged viewpoint.
Francis taught us, therefore, that the antidote to confusion and paralysis is always a return to simplicity, to what is actually right in front of us, to the nakedly obvious.
The Enlightenment produced a wonderfully scientific mind. Its materialist worldview taught us how to measure things. Belief hinged on what could be proven by a certain paradigm called science. Science assumed—and this became the arrogance of the modern mind—that it knew more than anybody else ever had.
We have been dazzled by our new abilities to know for three centuries now. The modern mind is enthralled with its ability to make things happen, to rearrange genes, chromosomes, and atoms. Being able to predict outcomes feels like an almost godly power—and it is. It led us to a philosophy of progress, as opposed to most cyclic or paschal worldviews.
Asia is the source of most great religions. In that more harmonious worldview, death and life (along with everything else) need to be kept in balance. In contrast, we prefer to think that we can overcome the death mystery. Modern people believe that things will only get better and better.
But then the Holocaust happened—in the very country that was perhaps the most educated, logical, and reason-loving in the world. For Europeans, the collapse into postmodern thinking began at that point: “If we can be this wrong, maybe nothing is right. All our major institutions failed us.”
For the last fifty years, we’ve begun to speak not of modernism but of postmodernism —a critique of modernism’s false optimism and trust in progress. We’re in the postmodern period now, at least in Europe and North America and those countries influenced by them (which is, for better or worse, almost every country).
We’re seeing that the postmodern mind forms a deconstructed worldview. It does not know what it is for, as much as it knows what it is against and what it fears.
This is the world in which most of those living today were formed. It is starved for meaning, grasping at anything and everything.
The irony is that the same postmodernist also believes that he or she knows more than anybody else—that there are no absolutes, no patterns that are always true. We end up with a being who is both godlike (“I know”) and utterly cynical (“I have to create my own truth because there are no universal patterns”).
Postmodern thinking allows us to discredit and discount everything, which also leaves us in a lonely and absurd state. Philosophically, it’s called nihilism— nihil meaning “nothing.” Nihilism affects us all in some way, but most especially those at the top and the bottom of any society.
He says there’s no belief in anything except power, possessions, and prestige in America, despite a religious façade. Michael Lerner, a Jewish philosopher and psychologist, says much the same to his audience.6
Another aspect of the postmodern mind is what we call a “market” mentality. In a market-driven culture like ours, things no longer have inherent value, but only exchange value.
Once we lose a sense of inherent value, we have lost all hope of encountering true value, much less the Holy.
For many, if not most, Western Christians, it is basically a crime-and-punishment scenario, instead of the grace-and-mercy world that Jesus proclaims. This is the only way that the postmodern Christian can hope to give shape to this basically shapeless story called human life.
There are no heroes or heroines, so the individual feels a kind of negative heroism in exposing all human failings, foibles, and phoniness. I do not really have to grow up myself; I will find my meaning in pointing out that everyone and everything else is phony.
Strangely, this is almost a secular form of Puritanism. We are still trying to expose and hate the sins of the world; they are just defined differently. The sex scandals of Washington are not much different from the old Irish priests preoccupied with ferreting out fornicators in the parish.
It is much easier to look for someone to blame, sue, expel, or expose when there is no coherent meaning or divine purpose in the world. Someone has to be at fault for my unhappy life! As long as we keep trying to deal with the mystery of evil in some way other than forgiveness and healing, we will continue to create negative ideologies like fundamentalism and nihilism in all their endless forms.
Private feelings are our form of truth today, a kind of ultimate self-absorption—understandable because there are no universal patterns. Yet, in expressing private feelings, people really think they’ve done something great.
If you are an individualist you are surely not a believer, and if you are a believer you are utterly responsible, connected, and aligned everywhere. Before we can reconstruct this deconstructed culture, we must be utterly reconnected ourselves. That is the work of healthy religion (re-ligio = “re-bind”).
Every viewpoint is a view from a point. Unless we recognize and admit our own personal and cultural viewpoints, we will never know how to decentralize our own perspective, and we will live with a high degree of illusion and blindness that brings much suffering into the world.
First, modernism believed that reality is ordered. Postmodern thought says there is no order at all.
True Christianity never believed in either perfect order or total chaos, but a reality fraught with contradictions.
Second, the modern mind believed that reality is knowable by our human reason. Nature is predictable and, therefore, to some degree controllable. Quantum physics, however, now says that indeterminacy, probability, chaos theories, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle perhaps more truly express the final mystery of reality than classical physics ever did.
Physics has discovered that when we get to the smallest points (atomic particles) and the biggest points (galaxies and black holes)—it’s mystery again!
Great religion always said that the best we could hope for would be metaphor, symbol, and image. Here, we do not know as much as we are known; we do not make the connections as much as realize that we are connected.
Yet, the churches, at least the Roman Church, had grown used to a philosopher’s God much more than the biblical God, who scandalizes us with particularity, preferences, choices, and absolute freedom.
Third, the modern mind believed that human fulfillment consisted primarily in knowing and discovering all the laws of science and nature. Modernism said we should utilize them whenever possible and comply with them when we can’t know them or change them.
Yet, there is little in the biblical revelation that ever promised us an ordered universe. The whole Bible is about meeting God in the actual, in the incarnate moment, in the scandal of particularity, and not in educated theories—so much so that it is rather amazing that we ever tried to codify and control the whole thing.
The Bible seems to always be saying that this life is indeed a journey, a journey always initiated and concluded by God, and a journey of transformation much more than mere education about anything.
The dualistic mind seemingly has a preference for knowing things by comparison. The price we pay for our dualistic mind is that one side of the comparison is always idealized and the other demonized, or at least minimized. There is little room for balance or honesty, much less love.
It is the “folly” of the cross, where we cannot prove we are right, but only hang between the good and the bad thieves of every issue, paying the price for their reconciliation (see Luke 23:39–43).
The tertium quid, the “reconciling third,” is very often the Holy Spirit—but, as many have said before, the Holy Spirit is the rejected or forgotten member of the Holy Trinity.
For Christians, the abandonment of modernism’s certainty is going to be a journey deeper into both biblical religion and the tremendous mystery of Jesus.
He’s the son of God and the son of Adam. We need to realize that we also are daughters of God and daughters of earth, of divinity and of flesh, of ego and of shadow. Both are good, and they are even better when they are put together. That’s why we follow Jesus! He is the icon of what salvation means. When the two can happily coexist within us, one might say that we are “saved.”
The Apostle Paul intuits this when he speaks in Ephesians (4:4–6) of “one Body, one Spirit ... one hope ... one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is Father of all, over all, through all, and within all.” Yet, if I talked that way today, I would be accused in many Catholic circles of pantheism or lightweight humanism—so I just quote Paul.
The cross, as we will see again and again, is the “coincidence of opposites”: One movement going vertical, another going horizontal, clearly at cross-purposes. When the opposing energies of any type collide within us, we suffer. If we agree to hold them creatively until they transform us, it becomes redemptive suffering.
This is so obvious and self-evident that most people cannot see it. Maybe that is why John’s Gospel seems to make blindness the primary metaphor for sin.
I move in some circles where the word Christian, unfortunately, is a negative adjective. To them, “He’s a Christian” means he knows nothing about history, nothing about politics, and is probably incapable of civil conversation about anything. Five Bible quotes are the available answers to everything. How did we ever get to this low point after developing such a tradition of wisdom?
The sadness of modern people is that we don’t feel at home. No wonder we have Doctor Kevorkians. Euthanasia, abortion, capital punishment, and war itself will only increase unless there’s a larger story like the paschal mystery that gives transcendent meaning to human suffering.
God makes grace out of our grit, salvation out of our sin. We are saved, ironically, not by doing it right as much as by the suffering of having done it wrong. We come to God not through our perfection (thank God!) as much as through our imperfection.
Playing the victim is an effective way of getting moral high ground without doing any moral development whatsoever. We don’t have to grow up, we don’t have to let go, we don’t have to forgive, we don’t have to surrender—all the things that great religion has deemed necessary.
One of the few generalizations we can make in the field of universal spirituality is this: No one else is your problem. You are always the locus of conversion and transformation. It is always about you first of all—always.
Is it leading you to suspicion, paranoia, accusation, and blaming? Then it is from the “Accuser,” which is a quite significant New Testament name for Satan (Revelation 12:10). The Evil One is not only an Accuser, therefore, but also a “father of lies” (John 8:44), because the other one is not your problem, even though Evil would prefer to have you think so.
The message of the crucified Jesus is a statement about what to do with our pain now. What we’ve done, for some strange reason, is make Jesus into the one who could keep us from pain later. We’ve missed the entire transformative message!
