Diving…Deeply

I don’t envy the members of the Church hierarchy and all who follow their mandates.

I don’t envy them when, with consciences afire, biases lit up, monstrous ignorance in flames and dangerous and destructive misogyny ablaze, they finally have to reckon with their treatment of, and discrimination against, women and all genders and all races and ethnicities in the Church.

I don’t envy them because so many of us now have to do the same reckoning with the effects of our own devastating racism and white privilege, and we know what a heart and soul wrenching task that is. We who are in the midst of this process can tell them, too, that it is they who must do it. As so many current Black leaders have pointed out, we need to stop asking them what we should do to remedy pervasive racism (although many in the past have, and in the present could, certainly tell us) and do the hard, painful inner work ourselves. Only then can real transformation occur.

James Parker, in an article “How Did I End Up Like This?” about the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney in the July/August 2020 Atlantic, talks about Heaney’s poem “The Strand at Lough Beg” in which Heaney frames in poetry the murder of his Catholic cousin by British soldiers. Years later, Heaney allows the ghost of his cousin to return in the poem “Station Island” to reproach him for actually being so poetical in the initial poem: “The Protestant who shot me through the head / I accuse directly, but indirectly, you / … for the way you whitewashed ugliness.”

It’s a haunting phrase: Where do we “whitewash ugliness”?  Literally whitewash it?

Any task confronting “isms” like those mentioned is long and arduous and grievous. But it still has to be done. Parker reminds us what Heaney knew and we all know: “You have to dive, you have to find what’s down there, be it ever so monstrous; you have to recover it and bring it back to the light of day.”

I don’t envy any of us, and I don’t envy the Church, in that deep dark descent.

Of course, I cannot end this piece with that last sentence. I am too enraptured and enriched by all the help, gifts if you will, we – and even the Church hierarchy – can access as we take on this tremendous task.

Here is just one gift in an excerpt from a sermon commentator David Brooks gave at the National Cathedral in Washington, July 5, 2020. His title was “Beauty in the Storm”. The gift is faith:

Faith itself is not serene. Faith itself is a storm. It is pushing toward the beauty you tasted amid the storms of life. It is making that beauty, not an interruption as Chris Wiman says, but part of your life. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik understood how bumpy faith is, especially in moments like these, moments of storm. He wrote that the popular ideology contends that the religious experience is tranquil and neatly ordered, tender and delicate. On the contrary, it is exceptionally complex, rigorous, and torturous.

Where you find its complexity, there you find its greatness. It is in a condition of spiritual crisis of psychic ascent and descent, contradiction arising from affirmation and negation. Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and the desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging clamorous torrent of [humankind]’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs and torments. What keeps faith alive during storms like now are the awareness of beauty, the essential goodness at the ground of our being.

Beauty and goodness: These are the rewards of diving so deeply, of confronting the ugliness, and of withstanding the storms.