Lately I am aware that my thought is quite unique, if not eccentric: no one else really thinks like me. I share values, beliefs and sensibility with many close friends and family, but with each there is a clear difference. This is probably good and wholesome, but it brings a loneliness. For example, recently I have been thinking about the charismatic renewal, which greatly influenced me, and it strikes me that almost no one in my social world shares that with me. An additional sadness is that recently several younger family members who are very close to my heart have differed on important issues on the meaning of sexuality and related realities.
So, I have recollected seven important sources that have greatly influenced me.
1. I grew up, 1947-65 St. John's Parish in Orange NJ, in a family which was loving, safe, peaceful and nurturing so I was able to receive a Catholic faith that was traditional, observant, pious, steady, quietly confident and certain, open-minded, optimistic and expansive. This is my bedrock. My faith is indescribably lovely and has opened me, despite the shortcomings of my person and my tribe, to receive, affirm and embrace the True, the Good and the Beautiful. The next six currents flow into and out of this font of life; they deepen, elaborate, and expand on it.
2. Already in childhood I felt an impulse to serve the suffering and the poor. This, of course, was encouraged by my entire Catholic education/upbringing; led me to college seminary with the Maryknoll priests; and prompted me to open Magnificat Home with family and friends in recent years. It left me with sympathy for the poor and marginalized even as I moved passionately to the right on cultural/moral divide.
3. In early adulthood, the time of my marriage, I studied Catholic prayer and spirituality with Joe Whelan S.J., himself a holy, wise mystic. He introduced me to Von Balthasar and prepared me to embrace the thought of Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratizinger, my spiritual fathers, my captains, my heroes. These deepened, sharpened, broadened and enlivened my received Catholic faith.
4. Likewise in early adulthood my wife and I encountered the Risen Jesus in the Cursillo movement and then the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the charismatic renewal. This likewise deepened, inflamed, and exploded my faith with joy and zeal.
5. Concurrent with these two trajectories, our society surrendered to the Sexual Revolution and pushed me into the role of Cultural Warrior, defensive of innocent life; the dignity of sex, masculinity/femininity and marriage; the sacredness of tradition, authority and the Church. I defined myself and what I value in opposition to the emergent culture of "liberalism."
6. From adolescence I was drawn to countercultural figures and movements critical of bourgeois consumerism, careerism, meritocracy, technocracy, and materialism. Some were non-Catholic or even anti-Christian in many ways, but my spiritual sensibility and feeling for the poor resonated with them: Eric Fromn, Paolo Freire, Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, Christopher Lasch, Saul Alinsky, Catherine Dougherty, Dorothy Day and the like. With one foot I softly distanced myself from mainstream suburban life in favor of a moderate quasi-bohemian, countercultural life even as my wife and children kept my other foot firmly planted in ordinary, working-middle class routines. Maintaining this equilibrium within this tension has been a challenging for my wife and children. So we have lived in a sweet twilight zone: never quite middle class but never jumping into the various countercultures that we admired: charismatic covenant communities, Catholic Worker farms, the Neo-Catechumenal Way, Latin Mass groups and others.
7. In middle age, I found in the 12-steps (especially "acknowledgment of powerlessness" and "surrender to higher power") comfort and encouragement in the contest with resistant patterns of compulsivity. This again came to me as a deepening and clarification of my received faith.
These confluences collaborate in my heart, intellect and spirit in a joyous, serendipitous and creative manner. Far from contradicting each other, they compliment, balance and arouse each other in a happy symphony (is what I experience). For example, the ego-deflation of the steps brings relief to the fevers of indignation, anger, defensiveness and arrogance that come with the task of culture warfare.
No one fully shares all of this with me. Thus a certain loneliness. My wife has been through all of this with me; we are in communion in the truest, deepest, loveliest things...which is why our marriage is happy. But our sensibilities and thought habits are radically contrasting. This is both painful and fruitful. The fruitful part is in our seven children who (along with their spouses and children) reflect our dearest realities but in utterly distinctive, creative, and delightful fashions.
I find comfort, however, as I consider that those I most admire and emulate all are themselves outliers, mavericks, creative combinations of a symphony of disparate influences. This includes old heroes like Illich, John Paul, Balthasar, Day...and more recent inspirations like Heather King, Brennan Manning (of happy memory) and Judge Amy Coney Barrett (herself a Catholic Charismatic...Praise God!)
No comments:
Post a Comment