Though I'll admit, exploring that latter point - how far I really do mean well, and can know that I do, etc - is a topic that's been leaving me more than a bit confused lately. Or rather, more than ever confused. I mean, if I can hardly be sure of the goodness, or sufficiency, or abundance of my own intentions (as in fact I can't - not if I plan to be a good Catholic), how much less can I presume to be sure of the badness or insufficiency or poverty of someone else's?
Indeed there are times, I can well imagine, when my very sense of the overwhelming goodness of my intentions succeeds in making me - well, pretty darn hard to work with. Which is to say, not just uncompromising, but far more obnoxiously uncompromising, than even I would find attractive. Or would, if I could but see myself in action. And might it be just this, as it were, mutually-canceling-out sureness of ourselves, on both sides, that makes it gradually harder and harder for us both to work together?
Collaboration can be difficult enough, then, given a standoff between two or more people, each of whom is more or less equally convinced of his own right intentions, and no less equally unsure of the other's soundness, integrity, maturity, etc. But now let's imagine an altogether different scenario. Suppose you and I were to become pretty much equally convinced of the same thing: of, say, my greater knowledge, and your greater ignorance. A kind of natural hierarchy might then follow, in which I agree to teach, and you consent to learn. And might that not clear away all or most of the pre-existing obstacles to our co-operation? Or is there yet one more thing that we both - or even just I myself? - might still need to learn?
My own suspicion (though it is one I hope to substantiate) is that there is, in fact, One Greatest Obstacle to my working together well - i.e., working in Christ - with someone who seems not to be of my own level or caliber. It is my sense of my own accomplishment, my own greater advancement. My all-but-unshakeable hunch that, however far you may progress - well, in any case you'll never quite catch up with me.
Now I welcome other suggestions. But frankly I can think of no greater roadblock to you or me, or anyone, working together in Love - in Christ - than that one. And I suspect that holds true, no matter how humble and sincere my sense of my own greater advance may be, or even how genuine and indisputable - to any number of observers! - the advance itself may be. "After all [or so I might protest], would I give any less deference than I expect from him, were it just as obvious that he was MY superior???" Well, maybe. And again, maybe not.
I'll grant you, the gulf between someone else's inferior learning, overall competence, or growth in holiness and my own - or your own - may seem all but unbridgeable. As in fact it may well be, in human terms, given of course the poverty of our natural human resources. Yet the stubborn further fact remains: Nobody but nobody can overturn even our most well-thought-out, solidly grounded hierarchies more surprisingly, more embarrassingly, or (for that matter) more efficiently than God. Who else but God could make an 11th-hour worker more productive than the one who's been working all 10 previous hours to the best of his prayerfully conscientious ability. Or make, say, a barefoot homeless church-restorer more theologically astute than even the holiest (or most administratively expert) cardinal. Given then these rather, let us say, unpredictable ways in which our Maker has been known to equalize the unlikeliest and unequallest of co-workers, I feel it may be time to ask my main question:
When do you suppose we Christians are going to learn how to do the really hard stuff right?
When are even we Catholics going to learn to co-operate, and work, and build and organize on the basis of - I don't know, our commonalities? and not just our differences? Or even in terms of what equalizes, and not just what subordinates (makes a hierarchy of) us?
No doubt some of you will think I'm being unduly hard on our poor, beleaguered, doing-after-all-the-best-it-can modern Church. And especially those of you who share with me a common Catholic faith. It's true that lately even we Catholics have been feeling a rather stronger-than-usual push from the world. Or at least in regard to some of our leadership's more experimental projects. Like, for instance, the chronic anxiety among certain bishops to make over the Church's image - or even her teaching? - in a direction somehow more modern, or relevant, or pastoral. Or more sensitively attuned to the ever-wisely-changing Spirit of the Times. In short, some of us have been feeling a perhaps stronger-than-ever reinforcement from the world, in our own current drive to place an ever more positive faith in Man Almighty.*
*Though - please be advised - always with God's blueprints, duly reinterpreted in light of the unprecedented nature, wisdom, emergency, etc, of our times, close at hand.
And that's just what leaves me more than ever confused. I mean, whatever the Great Globalizing World may be doing to redesign or reconfigure basic human nature - or even basic Catholic dogma - you would think that whatever even it has left of humanity might make it want to regroup, or take stock. That is, you'd think that something residually human (residually God-given?) in even the world at large might make it, too, want to stop, or pause, in its Great Push towards human overconfidence and redefinition. Remember, this is more or less the same Great World that gave us a largely redefined Europe, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, arguably even Turkey?, etc. And that may be bidding even now - however abortively - to give us a wholly reinvented Syria, Iran, North Korea, possibly even Russia and beyond. Given its less-than-glorious track record of the 21st century so far (and not just its Trump-record), one might have hoped that we all, Church and world alike, would want to consider putting a tad less confidence in our natural human powers. And maybe least of all in our global powers of discerning, arranging hierarchically, and deploying human talent.
After all, what is globalization in principle? (Assuming, of course, we cretinous humans ever prove ourselves worthy of its wisdom and beneficence.) It is all the best people from throughout the world, aggregated so as to do all the best things in the very best possible ways. The upshot of which is that, today more than ever (or at least until The Donald came along, or Barack, or George II or whoever), the cracks through which sometimes even the best talent was occasionally known to fall are at last being properly sealed. The tacit premise being that if we've overlooked you today, sister, you're probably not worth looking over. Or, to put it more sacrally, what Man has seen fit to demote or downgrade let no god exalt.
But now notice, too, how this same Great World and Age, if you will, continues to exalt, refine and purify Robotic Intelligence. Possibly even to the point where some of our more forward-looking types will soon be moved to say (again, putting it more sacrally, if not Scripturally): "It is no longer I who live, but Roboticity that lives in me." (Almost gives me goosebumps.) But in any case, why stop there? Who's to say, in some not-too-distant future, just how some fervent souls may be newly inspired to reinterpret St John's own words:
"What we shall be has not yet been revealed."
Leave it to our Age - at least I shouldn't be surprised? - to discover in I John 3:2 the kernel of a state-of-the-art transhumanist manifesto.
Now, joking aside, I realize this whole thing is a much longer, more winding thread than certainly I could ever follow unassisted. At the same time, much like a cat with a spool, that's hardly enough to stifle my curiosity. For one thing, I can't help noticing that this same Great World, for all its unprecedented pooling of global talent, has so far failed to ensure even a modicum of predictability, much less peace, to the Korean Peninsula. If anything, rather the reverse (or at least until fairly recently?).
Note also that the two biggest stakeholders in the matter - outside the two Koreas themselves - are also the two mega-economies both
(1) most deeply enmeshed in each other, and
(2) most heavily mortgaged to Our Robotic Future.
Now I also realize that, in this recent Age of Trump, Trade War and Shutdown, certain options that were previously wide open may have been rather sharply foreclosed or curtailed (or are they being in fact opened wider?). Besides which, God knows what other vital points I may be missing. Still in all, does anyone mean to tell me that, in the course of the previous 17+ years of the Utmost Sino-American Commercial Trust and Intimacy, these two prodigies - what with their superior aggregate wisdom, efficiency, rationality, roboticity, etc - could have done NOTHING to walk us back from that brink?
No doubt that's a job for our Super-robots of the Future. My question is how distant a future. How soon on the horizon can we expect geopolitically-inclined robots who've been engineered to surpass the combined human resources of both Superchina and Superamerica? Even if it's within the next 5 years - even if by then our AI advisers are in their turn able to engineer some sort of breakthrough geostrategic revolution sufficient to guarantee a lasting peace - what if we fail to invent them fast enough? so that they can't intercept us in time?
So much for the world, of course. That still leaves the Church, to whatever degree she's managed to keep herself pure and unspotted from today's omniconfident globe. Now I'm also aware that, inside the Church no less than out, we've been raising to a fine art (if not an exact science) the business of promoting individuals with some Pretty Impressive Pasts. Or certainly credentials, in any case. Or if nothing else, resumes. My question is, at what point does my oh-so-heavy, weighty, gloriously impressive past cease to be a gateway to a happier future - my own or anyone else's - and become only so much lumber and stubble waiting for the right spark? At what point does, say, 8 years or more of intensive seminary higher education become more of a barrier than a bond between pastor and parishioners? or more an overhanging ledge than a level, straight, easy doorway path? Or even, as we're discovering these days, more of an inducement to pride and (sexual) depravity, cynicism and compromise than a portal to further holiness?
Perhaps most dangerously of all, at what point do I - say I'm a priest, deacon, chaplain or other minister - at what point do I become too keenly conscious of even the most genuinely giving, serving and sacrificial career? ("Ask me how I've suffered."*) So that it ceases to make me humbler and more grateful, but if anything, slowly, quietly more sullen, bitter, jaded? And meanwhile, all the more stoically disgusted with the ingratitude and incomprehension of the people I'm serving?
*Or so I read once, many years ago, on a bumper-sticker. As I recall, I actually rather liked and identified with it at the time.
Now I realize that the Church even here on earth, and in this present time, is more than a human institution. It would just be so much more reassuring these days if every so often she would act like it. You would think that she of all human entities (and even quite apart from what makes her Divine) would see the practical point of scrutinizing - more prayerfully? more expectantly? - the gifts and treasures actually secreted by God in our human nature. As distinct from the ones engineered by even our best talent-scouting, vocation-discerning, fund-raising and -budgeting hierarchies. In short, you'd have hoped that by by now (or at least since c. 2002?) she'd want to lend a more discerning ear to the various unter-Marys tucked within her fold, in Bethany and beyond. And especially the ones all our Ubermarthas have been busy drowning out. Then again Martha, almost as it were by definition, nearly always has the bigger, completer resume.
Again, pardon me if I seem nitpicking. It's just that the older I get, the more it seems to me that if there's one piece of work that's hardest to yield up to the Potter, it is the one belonging not to the future, but to the past. And all the more so when the poor clay-in-question happens to be my own miserable Life (though I keep suspecting both its credits and its debits are seldom nearly as commendable, or unforgivable, as my ever-anxious self-importance would have me believe).
My point is that in a sense, we can know the past - even our own pasts! - hardly better than we know the future. It's rather like using only chemistry and physics to comprehend the entire earthly life of Christ, from Conception to Ascension. As with any living thing, we can't really know its insides, except as our Father takes us by the hand . . . In and of itself, the Past is as full of sediment and depth, echo and resonance as any good old folk-tale. Or good old oak-tree. Most often the best we can do, again, not just with history but with the past of our own lives, is to analyse and categorize and quantify it, usually pretty much to death. Or, failing all these, we can always moralize about it. We can make ourselves more or less the Ultimate Judge of the quotas, the real measures of good and evil in our lives so far, and of exactly where in our lives those quotas are to be found (always with God on hand as Chief Consultant, of course).
And I think this last exercise, in particular, is the one we do with the most disastrous results: the reason being, as I understand it, if there's one tool of information our Maker holds extremely close to His vest - loaning it out here and there only on probation of our strictest humility and prayerfulness - it is the moral weights and measures of our lives. Too often we think of God as redeeming primarily our futures; after all, what's done is done. And surely some of us in any case have managed to gather under our belts - in however many or few years of life - rather a hell of a lot to be proud of, and to take positive credit for. So who can know our real credits better than we do? Who among us - and least of all the most accomplished - can afford to have even God messing around with, reappraising, reapportioning that roster of solid achievement?
And yet, even if just once, we let Him move about freely on the whole spread-out map of our lives, I daresay there's no guessing what long-buried treasures - some of such beauty and antiquity we'd barely recognize them as our own - He was liable to dig up. Or maybe even lend us pick and spade.
But if such be God's own exquisite discernment - His nimble light-fingered excavation, if you will - of the entire soil, rock and bedrock of our pasts (hard-won, non-negotiable achievements and all), think what even lighter and humbler, more playful and hopeful futures may await us. Might that even be part of what is meant by becoming like a little child? Consider what tiny trickle of past any child has - certainly little enough to be proud of! - and what a wealth of future to be humbly expectant for. Meanwhile we elders, with our (by comparison) fast-dwindling numbers of years ahead of us - and yet, hopefully, having dropped off even our most exemplary, productive pasts at the the nailed Feet of our Lord - what about us? Might our futures be that much less burdened, and so more open, than even a little child's? To go out almost as lightly baggaged as we came in - surely there are worse ways of dying?
These past thirty years, we "Chimericans" in particular have experienced - almost ad nauseam, as it were - the extraordinary things Man can do when he places his confidence primarily in himself and his own powers of judgment and discernment. We Americans especially have seen these extraordinary things - including our steady enablement of Beijing? - reach certain very curious if not deeply troubling limits. Most obviously on our own national level, but also on the global. Neither just primarily outside the Church, but also well within some of her inmost corridors of power, influence and policy. For me the the central and final issue is how far we can afford to continue this furious pace of what are, in many cases, our hyper-adult, hyper-accomplished lives, routines, procedures, organizational agendas and goals, without serious Divine interruption of some sort. And especially - as we keep picking up the pace - the kind of interruption we don't particularly want, and haven't begun to be ready for.
And so I am moved to go back to my original question (Paragraphs 7-8) somewhat expanded: When are we going to start doing and allocating even some of the heaviest work - both inside the Church and out - on the basis of what a humble God can raise up, rather than what the wisest of men and women have (felt no choice but to) cast down? Might it even be high time we started drawing from a certain living well - one not unrelated to the waters of which Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman in John 4 (and all the more closely related, in that both of them bear His stamp and signature). I mean that simple, lowly, light-as-the-future beauty God has made each one of us - and may even now want to remake in us. As opposed, of course, to the complicated, glorious, past-burdened, achievement-constricted, ugly messes we've made of ourselves, and each other?
(Edited.)
But if such be God's own exquisite discernment - His nimble light-fingered excavation, if you will - of the entire soil, rock and bedrock of our pasts (hard-won, non-negotiable achievements and all), think what even lighter and humbler, more playful and hopeful futures may await us. Might that even be part of what is meant by becoming like a little child? Consider what tiny trickle of past any child has - certainly little enough to be proud of! - and what a wealth of future to be humbly expectant for. Meanwhile we elders, with our (by comparison) fast-dwindling numbers of years ahead of us - and yet, hopefully, having dropped off even our most exemplary, productive pasts at the the nailed Feet of our Lord - what about us? Might our futures be that much less burdened, and so more open, than even a little child's? To go out almost as lightly baggaged as we came in - surely there are worse ways of dying?
These past thirty years, we "Chimericans" in particular have experienced - almost ad nauseam, as it were - the extraordinary things Man can do when he places his confidence primarily in himself and his own powers of judgment and discernment. We Americans especially have seen these extraordinary things - including our steady enablement of Beijing? - reach certain very curious if not deeply troubling limits. Most obviously on our own national level, but also on the global. Neither just primarily outside the Church, but also well within some of her inmost corridors of power, influence and policy. For me the the central and final issue is how far we can afford to continue this furious pace of what are, in many cases, our hyper-adult, hyper-accomplished lives, routines, procedures, organizational agendas and goals, without serious Divine interruption of some sort. And especially - as we keep picking up the pace - the kind of interruption we don't particularly want, and haven't begun to be ready for.
And so I am moved to go back to my original question (Paragraphs 7-8) somewhat expanded: When are we going to start doing and allocating even some of the heaviest work - both inside the Church and out - on the basis of what a humble God can raise up, rather than what the wisest of men and women have (felt no choice but to) cast down? Might it even be high time we started drawing from a certain living well - one not unrelated to the waters of which Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman in John 4 (and all the more closely related, in that both of them bear His stamp and signature). I mean that simple, lowly, light-as-the-future beauty God has made each one of us - and may even now want to remake in us. As opposed, of course, to the complicated, glorious, past-burdened, achievement-constricted, ugly messes we've made of ourselves, and each other?
(Edited.)
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