What we mean by love

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." … So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?  - Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Today we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a holiday, and I am lucky that many of my friends have spent the day sharing quotes and reflecting on King’s legacy of firm love in the service of justice. I am partial to the quote above, and thought of it when I woke up this morning. I can’t think of a better challenge than to be an extremist for love.

Never satisfied by soundbyte answers, I asked myself this morning "what does love mean?" What does it mean to be an extremist for love? Most people think of themselves as loving, most people think that they are doing the right thing. History fixates on the obviously horrific practitioners of hate, but most people are not that sort of extremist. And yet we, motivated by love, reach wildly different conclusions about how to act justly.

I just started learning a song cycle by Lori Laitman that I will be singing in a recital in April. The last song of the cycle has captivated me – it feels like it was written for my voice, and the poem, like all the poetry in the cycle, regularly moves me to tears (this complicates my learning process, to say the least). The poem, Pioneer Child’s Doll, begins: Here, child, is what we mean by love. 

The poet, Judith Sornberger, described her inspiration in an interview. She saw pioneer child’s doll in a Nebraska museum: The head of the doll was actually an old, beat-up bedpost. You know, the knob at the top of a bedpost. How hard up would you have to be able to love a doll with that kind of head?

Here, child, is what we mean by love:

a block head doll of coarse-grained wood,

eyes two knife-pricks, mouth a crooked stab.

As we are given to love land

that few would covet, where no tree

dares stand up to the sky,

So shall you love her whose grain sack skirt

covers not petticoats, but sticks

whose curls must be imagined in the wood.

And as we break the stubborn sod

of our backs to know what we

can be on this earth,

So by the sweat of your palm

on her brow will you bring

to her flat face a sheen.

We know that love can transform, and we know that we are in need of transformation. About 6 times a day I pray Ignatius’ prayer for generosity: “Lord, teach me to be generous…”. I pray to be loving, to be kind, to be patient, to be fortified and transformed, to be better. And these are the prayers I think of as selfless. Could I sacrifice my prayers and my love to transform others instead?

Could love be the willingness to look at an ugly doll and see something lovely? Could it be the determination to be devoted to that which others would throw away? Could it be beholding the beauty in others? We lament that the world needs transformation, but are the true acts of heroism to see the world and behold in it the possibility of goodness? Isn’t that why we still envision Dr. King’s dream?

Maybe it’s more self-centeredness to imagine that the world hinges on how I see it, that if I look on it with love it will meet my expectations. I’m not sure I know how to pray for anyone other than myself.  A self-emptying prayer that turns me inside out could be the loving extreme to which Dr. King exhorts me.  Perhaps I am called to an outward facing love that wills the other into grace.

Love, grace, God, prayer – these things are the types of wonderful mysteries that we could talk about for eternity and never explain or exhaust.  Dr. King set big, lofty goals that stretch us and our world. For me, it’s goal enough to try each day to discover more of what we mean by love.

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Mary the Apostle

Does anyone really exist, or are people only who we make them into?

Yesterday a bunch of folks in my quirky Twitter world were tweeting away about St Mary of Magdala, the apostle to the Apostles. A lot of people in my circles are set on exonerating Mary, and with good reason. She picked up a bad reputation throughout the middle ages. I was fascinated to discover that a rise in a presentation of a penitent Magdelene occurred during the Catholic Reformation, when the whole Church was repenting and looking for a model of contrition.  In retrospect, learning that was probably the turning point toward a favorable view of Church history and a frustration with retroactive indignance: no matter how we’ve messed up, there is always a reason why.

And boy, did we mess it up with Mary of Magdala. For better or worse she is part of our collective consciousness as a loose woman, a characterization which is found nowhere in Scripture. Better writers than I have documented the conflation of various biblical women into Mary. If we look at the evidence, we see that she was a dear disciple and a leader among the Apostles, but even those of us who struggle to proclaim this are evangelizing the in the shadow of myth, aware that what we are trying to do is fundamentally an un-doing.

Yesterday I was also privy to conversations about another Mary, and her sister, Martha, both stars of one of the few Bible stories that features two women.  Unfortunately it also features sibling rivalry and the chastisement of a hard-working woman, something hard-working women everywhere have been trying to explain away ever since.

I couldn’t help thinking, in the midst of both of these discussions, “how much does any of this matter?” If we get these women figured out, does it really change anything? They lived 2000 years ago and have long since gone to a place where their reputations cannot harm them. Reimagining them doesn’t change them – but it does change us.

We rely on our sacred narratives for permission on how to behave.  If Mary and Martha is a story of passivity vs. activity, we know who wins. And for women, that’s what we’re stuck with, because so few of our sacred stories have female characters. I wonder if men pore over the characterizations of Peter, Thomas, or other Apostles, go searching for the “stories about men” the way some women scramble to find in “stories about women” evidence that God loves us, and that we matter too.  I doubt it – all history is “stories about men”. Why would they imagine themselves Matthew or Zaccheus when they could be Paul? They could be Jesus.

This is not to disparage the exegetical or imaginative skills of the wonderful men I know who look to the Bible for guidance.  They are lucky to have so many models, and in truth I often share their models – loving Zaccheus as inspiration to short people everywhere, and Peter as a model of loud-mouthed-bozo-makes-good. We should take inspiration where we get it. But I won’t pretend that women and men are on a level interpretive playing field.

The woman at the well tells me it’s ok to question and to challenge. Phew. The woman with the alabaster jar tells me I can be lavish in my giving. Good to know. The woman with the hemorrhage (are we noticing a theme of namelessness here?) tells me I can take initiative. That's a relief, since I probably would have anyway.  When I look over my academic history I realize most of my Scripture study has been focused on these women.  I have spent countless hours picking apart these stories, searching for historical context and literary types, and anything else that would help me understand these few, mostly nameless female characters.

So who is Mary of Magdala, and why does it matter? The historical Mary is long gone, lost forever to the mythologies that make figures a reflection of our age.  Can our age allow her to be what the simplest evidence points to: a faithful follower of Jesus who stayed with him until the end, and a proclaimer of the Gospel? 

Every year we read or sing the Easter Sequence, in a translation packed with facile rhymes. And every year when we get to the line “Speak, Mary, declaring what you saw, wayfaring” I literally thank God. Tucked away in that tiny couplet, in which the Church talks back to the Scripture that week by week talks to us, is permission to proclaim what we see.  Sometimes that sliver of guidance is all we get, and it’s up to us to figure out the rest of what it means, for us and for history.

St. Mary of Magdala by Eileen Cantlin Verbus. Copyright FutureChurch. For more information about St. Mary of Magdala celebrations, go to www.futurechurch.org

They'll know we are Christians by our love.

Something awful happened today.

The shooting of Congresswoman Giffords is a specific, personal tragedy, and I don't want to distract from it's specificity by making her a symbol. Yet we can't deny the country was shocked into awareness today, and many of us are thinking about the consequences of mean-spiritedness.

I think a lot about mean-spiritedness in my own religious context. Sometimes I wonder if anyone can be quite as mean as Catholics can be. So many of my fellow Catholics have bought the current politicial us-vs-them mentality hook, line and sinker. They are embattled, in the fortress, sole and indispensible defenders of the Body of Christ. If they do not keep the unworthy from the community, no one will!  I don't have the heart for that sort of combat, and I have the historical perspective to know it's not up to me to decide who is in and who is out.

That's where my head was when I got to mass this afternoon. The first thing I did with the organist was run the psalm - "The Lord will bless his people with peace". It was almost laughable in light of the heartwrenching afternoon. The Lord will bless us with peace - will we have it?

The first reading announced a favored one of God who "shall bring forth justice to the nations, not crying out, not shouting, not making his voice heard in the street." How often do we who cry out think we are being prophetic when we are really just being loud? The 'soldiers in the army of Christ' who profess a Church militant, who want to root out those who are unworthy of the faith - they may be as misguided as those who expected a zealous and violent Messiah.

God confounds us, and rather than drawing the boundaries we would like upon the Chosen People, God opens wide the doors and does what we least expect.

Fast-forward to the second reading. "In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him." Remember, this is Peter talking - not exactly one for welcoming the stranger and opening wide the doors. If a primary theme of Acts is the demarcation of boundaries, its ultimate conclusion is that the net Christ cast was much wider than initially imagined. However you want to put it: "All God's critters got a place in the choir" or "Here comes everybody", the message is clear. Those who fear God and act justly are acceptable.

And then the familiar Gospel reading, with it's beautiful climax: "he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, saying, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.'" That's what I expected to blog about when I woke up this morning, how we need to listen to the voices that tell us we are pleasing, and listen for God's voice among them. After I was shocked by violence today, the Scripture did its marvelous work of meeting me where I am. The voice did not whisper to only a few. God's voice thundered to all.

I give a lot of thought to ecclesiology, enough to know that no religion exists without some sort of boundaries. How much damage do we do when we draw the lines too violently, when we presume the worst of people and don't act with charity?

As we prepared our altar to participate in Christ's sacrifice and the Church's feast, we sang "They'll know we are Christians by our love". Love is not pompous, nor rude, nor self-interested. I have to work as hard as anyone to live the love that Paul describes in 1 Cor 13. I know there are people who claim to be acting out of "tough love" when they harangue Christians who don't meet their expectations. Sorry folks, but I have to call shenanigans on that. I know what charity looks like, and vitriolic criticism it ain't.

It's not good for any of us to live in a constant state of defensiveness, ready to throw a punch at anyone who endangers our Church (or our country, or our paradigm, or...). I for one am ready to relax, to let my guard down against a Them who may not even exist, and trust that God can take care of us, of the Church, and even of God's self.

A Soul that Shouts

One occupational hazard for a church musician is that we rarely come across traditional hymns that are new to us: we’ve literally heard it all before. But just a few years ago I got the gift of a new Advent/Christmas hymn when I heard Gabriel’s Message for the first time. I like the tune (when it’s not done too slowly!), the refrain is catchy, and the poetry is above-average. When I got to church last weekend I was happy to find it on the song sheet.



Like many singers, I have the capacity - either enviable or regrettable - to sing on auto-pilot while thinking about any number of things (for instance, yesterday I discovered I could sing the entire Halleluiah Chorus from memory while deciding what to have for dinner). Last Sunday I found myself analyzing the text to Gabriel’s Message. “Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head/to me be as it pleaseth God, she said.” At the word "meek" I groaned, thankfully silently, since I was singing into a microphone.

“Mary was that mother mild.” “A Virgin pure both meek and mild/In Bethlehem brought forth her Child” “gentle Mary laid her child”… There are plenty of problems with the idea that all women will feel an unqualified affiliation with Mary, who is often presented as the only role model Christian women are allowed to have. There are even more problems with the relentless stereotyping of Mary as docile and tame. Do we really believe a shrinking violet would have had the nerve to do what she did?

This week we are hearing the Gospel readings from Luke 1, starting with the Annunciation on Monday and concluding with the Canticle of Zechariah. Today’s Gospel is Mary’s Magnificat, an unapologetically bold declaration of praise. This is a saint I can get behind. So with all due respect to late Romantic Marian piety, I’m taking Mary back.

The idea of an ideal woman as meek and submissive may seem like an anachronism, but we’ve kept her alive in our religious iconography, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I’m sick of it. Give me a role model who questions an angel, bravely says yes, deals with a life lived in the rumor mill, does some bossy maneuvering at a wedding to restock the bar, and proclaims God’s praise and promises. When my soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord it doesn’t do so timidly - my soul shouts, and there’s a possibility that Mary’s did too.

My other church

I received an unexpected blessing a few weeks ago. It took the form of an email stating "the campus ministers have decided there will be no 9 pm mass on December 19". I conduct and worship with a collegiate musical ensemble every Sunday at an hour that to me seems impossibly late. I've written before about how they inspire me, and the assembly with whom we worship has become an important part of my spiritual life.

Still, for someone who works early Monday mornings, a standing Sunday night gig can be a drag. I was not-so-secretly happy to squeeze one more week out of winter break. Ever busy, I had two other church gigs in my neighborhood this weekend. After last night's 6 pm mass I dashed home, got changed, and drove to the apartment of two newlywed friends who are also hosting another couple at whose wedding I sang and who now live in Germany.

We briefly did the basic "catching up" small talk and then conversation plowed right into education: Jesuit schools, charter schools, diocesan schools, rigor, standards, you name it. As the part moved from the living room to the dinner table we talked about the homilies we'd heard at our parishes that weekend, about how parishes (and their liturgies) feed people (or don't). The Dream Act, Vatican II, the SSPX, a train station in Stuttgart - nothing was outside our purview. We agreed and disagreed, challenged, supported and edified each other. And I thought "here is my other church".

I hold the sacramental life of the Church in a place of highest honor. It is the Church's public prayer made up of particular actions that give us grace. But I can only be as positive as I am about the communal prayer of the Church - its liturgy - because I have experience of church that is intimate, local, and relational.

People often roll their eyes at my devotion, because "the Church" does this or that that they - and maybe even I - don't like. In my heart the Church is not just a series of pronouncements or dogma or the College of Cardinals. My Church has always been my people: my family, my parish, my school, my work, my diocese.

If you don't 'get' community, I don't see how you could 'get' Church, or liturgy. Two nights ago with another group of friends - not from my Catholic circles and not monolithically religious - a dear friend looked around at everyone hollering and laughing in one couples' basement and whispered to me "this is magical". Magical it was. A group of people who a few years prior were strangers are now like family. This is my other church.

I come across people who want to get the Church out of the modern world. Let us go back into the fortress, drape the nuns in black habits, cover the women's heads and put back the altar rail to guard the table from the faithful. Let's bring the Church back to a different era (one we have arbitrarily chosen as 'the most Catholic' - give us the 19th century with indoor plumbing). While we're at it, let's make sure we know who's in and who's out . There are "real" - pure, elect - members of the Body of Christ, and then there's everyone else.

The people on that side of the culture war shout the loudest because they know they have lost. The world has turned and they are still in the past. I don't want an anachronistic Church, frozen in time. I like my Church in the here and now, around all the tables of my life. I recognize the current of grace in which I swim  because of real people and relationships. No old-fashioned fantasy can compete with the living, breathing sanctity of my community drawn together by the Spirit of love.

Retroactive indignance

A dear friend who works in politics once admitted he occasionally tells people he is a social security actuary in order to avoid the ridiculous political comments people make when he reveals his true line of work. I have considered doing the same thing at times, because when I tell people I teach Church History - or even that I am committed to the Church - I get negative responses ranging from disbelief to horror, from an implied “But you seemed so normal!” to a sputtering “But- but- but - WHAT ABOUT THE CRUSADES??”


Uh, they were bad?

Seriously, I get the Crusades question a lot, almost as often as I get invasive lines of questioning about my take on sexual ethics, a field in which I have no academic background, no professional purview, and which is the topic of another post entirely. Either way there are a lot of assumptions made right off the bat, and as often as not a visible disapproval of my line of work This disapproval frequently manifests as a list of wrongs committed throughout history. Clearly, my interlocutors would have handled things differently.

Of course they would have, because they were born in the 20th century in America, they’re mostly middle-class, mostly well-educated, swimming in the postmodern current like all the rest of us. So I find their retroactive indignance alternately annoying and amusing. It’s almost childlike the way they imagine time-travel, that they could plop themselves down in the driver’s seat 1000 years ago.

There’s always a context. There’s always a culture. There’s always a why. Even our famed “religious wars” (which I frequently remind my students, had little to do with doctrine and a lot to do with “stuff”) was partially prompted by the fact that there were bored knights running all over the empire getting in fights, and Pope Urban thought to himself “I have a way to get them all far away from here…”

We laugh at the 19th century Popes clinging to temporal power (because to our 21st century minds that’s not what a Pope is ‘supposed to do’), but you can’t understand that without understanding the rest of the story. Pius IX acted the way he did because Constantine moved the capital of the Empire in the 300s…because Leo the Great met Attila the Hun in the 400s…because Pepin the Short foresaw a prudent alliance in the 700s… With our 21st century minds sometimes we just don’t get it, and it’s ok to admit that.

I’m not advocating a retroactive indifference either - we should look at history with a critical eye, with dismay or admiration or even horror. But to be smug about decisions made centuries ago is silly. For how will history judge our own era of ‘tolerance’ and ‘prosperity’ and ‘peace’? When in the year 2500 someone judges our social sins of action and inaction will they interpret it in light of our world, or will they immediately condemn us?

There is so much progress still to be made in our world, and I admire those prophetic voices who insist the change must come immediately and without delay. But in my heart I’m not convinced we can change the outcomes without changing the context. When I think of the issues that distress me the most - particularly issues of gender, both in and out of the Church - the great sadness for me is not that I can’t have my way. I mourn that the world is not with me in my desire. I don’t just want the outcome, I want the world to be ready for it, I want the world to want it too.

We will get there, but it takes time. If the study of history has taught me anything it’s that it takes a long time to turn around a big boat. When I started studying Popes I never thought it would make me more patient, but there you have it.