Surprise: (See Bart Geiger, "10 Things that Ignatius Never Said or Did" in Studies in the Spirituality of the Jesuits, Spring 2018) the beautiful reflection, "Falling in Love," popular in the Jesuit community and widely attributed to Pedro Arrupe S.J., it turns out, was actually first spoken by Joseph Whelan, S.J., easily the best teacher I ever had and the single greatest direct, personal influence on my own theology and spirituality.
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than
FALLING IN LOVE
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will effect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love. Stay in love. And it will decide everything.
September, 1970, I am sitting in the introductory lecture of Whelan's "Catholic Mystics" course at Woodstock Theological Seminary, recently moved to Morningside Heights near Union Theological and Columbia University. At that moment, I am myself head-over-heals in love with Mary Lynn, my then girlfriend, my current wife. Happily, I have stayed in love.
I am blown away by this man. I have NEVER felt such a radiance of love, of joy, of inner serenity. I say to myself: this man is in love, really, really, really in love. It must be with a woman. At the time, tons of priests were falling in love and leaving for marriage. I later realized he was in love...with God. He taught mysticism. It was his expertise. He had studied it. He was himself a mystic. I think the holiest person I have personally known. (I met Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day but can't say that I knew them.) Since that class I have wanted to be such a mystic.
We might describe Joe Whelan as a "nuptial mystic": what permeated his thought and heart was the nuptial love of Christ for his bride, the Church. To love Christ is to love his Church, the actual, concrete, sinful, institutional, often-scandalous Church. That is what I learned from him: to love Christ is to love his Church.
I don't know why the reflection was attributed to Arrupe. I don't remember him speaking of Arrupe. Stranger still is an article (America, "What Lonergan (and Arrupe) Can Teach Us About God, Love, and Being Human," November 6, 2019) by Richard Malloy S.J. that wonders "if Whelan read Lonergan" and than associates the reflection with Longergan's thought. In a longer piece ("Lonergan, Whelan and the Roots of the Arrupe Prayer," http//icvusa.org 2020/5) Father Malloy develops at greater length the Lonergan paradigm of intellectual judgement, of conversion and the eventual "falling in love" in mystical union with God. He speculates that Whelan read the phrase "falling in love" in a Lonergan lecture and developed the "Arrupe prayer."
In two classes (the second being on "Prayer") I clung to every word out of his mouth, I would have remembered mention of Lonergan. I recall none. I can identify with certainty two prime influences on my mystic-theologian-mentor: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Baron Friedrich von Hugel.
He had us read two pivotal pieces by Balthasar. Prayer is not a work of theology as such, but a series of mystical/poetic reflections. " Theology and Sanctity" is a masterpiece that situates theology always within the prayerful, mystical, liturgical encounter with God in Christ. These two readings were at the heart of Whelan's theology and personal holiness.(And subsequently of mine.)
Catholic theology since 1965 has been a choice between three paths: the progressivism of the transcendental Thomists Lonergan and Rahner; the conservatism of revived classic Thomism; and the Resourcement, nuptial mysticism of Balthasar/John Paul/Benedict. Whelan is clearly in the third school, in my recall, and he placed me firmly on that path.
Von Hugel was a stronger, and more complex influence on Whelan. He had done his doctorate on him. Hugel was to his generation what Balthasar was to his: probably the most erudite living human person. Hugel, an autodidact, unschooled, learned freely, privately and informally. For example, he learned Hebrew from a rabbi so that he could study scripture. He became a leader in the progressive modernist movement which was decisively condemned by the Vatican. He, a well-connected aristocrat and a layman, was not personally targeted. He escaped the unhappy fate, excommunication, of his friends Loisy and Tyrell. In filial obedience, he abandoned that liberal line of scholarship and redirected himself to the study of mysticism, a topic which fit his own temperament. He wrote a classic book on it.
He identified three elements in religion: he historical/institutional, the intellectual/speculative, and the mystical/experiential. He understood, with a sense of complexity/nuance that he shared with Balthasar, the immense tension and drama that occurs between these in real life. He himself exemplified it: he engaged in the most advanced scholarship, but deferred to ecclesial authority, in a deep life of prayer. One story has it that he lectured on the scriptural basis for devotion to Mary; he found almost none at all; but then ended by leading the group in the rosary. He is the rare intellect that could entertain a critical, skeptical scholarship with the piety of a child.
He is surely the most underrated Catholic theologian of the 20th century. Aside from Joe Whelan's classes, I have heard nothing of him in all my own studies. Yet he entertained in himself, all the richness and apparent contradictions of the Catholic intellect, in a manner that we find later in Balthasar, John Paul and Benedict.
Whelan himself is a mystery to me. He wrote a beautiful little work, Benjamin, that inspired me then and that I just ordered this morning. He held important positions: Provincial of the Maryland Province and assistant to the Superior General in Rome. He influenced Flannery O'Connor He died young at the age of 61. While dying of cancer, he wrote a short piece in America in which he said he was incapable of prayer, in his suffering. The piece was heartbreaking. He was writing from deep within the Dark Night of the Soul. But I find little about him on the internet and when I ask Jesuits about him I usually get: "Oh yes. I know the name." Talk about underrated!
Returning to Malloy's association of the Whelan reflection with Lonergan: there is no clear evidence here. Whelan's approach to spirituality showed no influence of the highly intellectualist Lonergan quasi-Kantian itinerary of experience, understanding, judgment, decision, and so forth. His mystics encountered the person of Christ directly, mystically, in the sacramental Church.
Yet, as Catholics, we can rejoice and hope that all of us...whether on the path of Lonergan or Balthasar or St. Thomas...find ourselves ultimately falling in love, together, with God...and staying in love.
It was a happy whimsy of Providence that in 1970, when I was falling madly in love myself, God sent me to the classroom of this Great Lover, who helped me to fall in love with Jesus and his Bride, our mother the Catholic Church.
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