Lessons From Dying

Lilies1

A few paragraphs from Michael Davitt Bell’s 1996 article recounting his experiences with cancer and mortality:

I doubt that I can account fully for the level of happiness, even euphoria, I’ve now reached, three years later and in the face of much worse news. But some of it comes, I’m sure, from the fact that since the cancer’s appearance in my lung in the summer of 1994 revealed that the original treatment hadn’t eliminated the disease, and thus the statistical odds of my surviving were close to nil, I have determined to be open and honest with other people about my disease and my prognosis. I think this has also allowed me to be open and honest with myself.

My relationships with friends and family — above all with my two daughters, now in their twenties, whose mother and I divorced when they were small — have thus taken on an emotional openness and intensity almost inconceivable for someone who, like me, grew up in an upper-middle-class WASP family in the Midwest, a family in which the word "love" was never spoken or heard except, perhaps, to express admiration for an object or article of clothing ("I just love the way that sweater looks on you!"). So I find I’m not overcome with remorse or anger, or with terror of the fate awaiting me; instead I’m cherishing each moment, each mundane experience I have left. This is, for me, a magic time.

I felt the same urgency and magic in the years immediately after being infected with HIV. I fully expected to be dead by now. The news did transform my life, and my view of the world, and my human relationships, and my faith in ways I am still grappling with. It forced me to understand that I am not in control of my own existence, and that humility before what we cannot know, along with love for those we do not easily love, is the important thing. I didn’t lose faith; but it changed in its tone and nature. It became deeper and yet less certain. That is partly how I came to relinquish the attraction of fundamentalism. Because in the face of the last things, its brittleness is what stands out.

As the immediate threat of mortality recedes, you return of course to the rhythms of forgetfulness and shallowness and trivia. Humankind cannot bear very much reality. But you never quite forget "the infirm glory of the positive hour." I’m glad that I wrote it all down before it receded from memory.

Religious Bridges

Paul Moses worries about inter-faith ruptures

I think some bridge inspectors should be called in before too much weight is put on these structures of supposed interreligious friendship. In particular, the bridge to Islam has corroded  in the last three years. The chief engineer, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, the Vatican’s top expert on Islam, was moved from his key post and dispatched to Egypt. The pope then famously insulted Islam in his Regensburg lecture. And he upset Muslims again by giving such a high profile to the conversion of a Muslim journalist who criticized Islam, baptizing him in St. Peter’s at the Easter Vigil.

In short, much of the good will that John Paul II built up is  being lost. There is reason to be concerned with this new direction.

Atheists At Church

For community:

Novak, 54, is a member of the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago, a religious group that focuses on respecting others and does not worship a deity. He found it 16 years ago when looking for a nontheistic moral education for his children, and knew right away that he wanted to get involved.

"It’s a place where atheists and agnostics can get what a lot of people get out of church and temple," Novak said of the society.

Novak is part of the growing group of American atheists who have left traditional religions but still feel a desire to be part of a religious group. Many had a positive experience with religion before losing their faith and now miss the community, the tradition and the chance to talk about values with like-minded people. So they join religious organizations that are accepting of atheists, form churches just for atheists or even attend traditional theistic churches.

(Hat tip: GetReligion)

Who Do Men Say That I Am?

From the archives, Cullen Murphy’s 1986 article:

Christology and related fields are extraordinarily active enterprises. David Tracy, a Catholic priest who teaches at the University of Chicago, says, "More has been written about Jesus in the last twenty years than in the previous two thousand." The subject has engaged not only prominent clerical theologians from many Christian denominations but also feminists, Jews, and agnostics. In a very direct way the current wave of scholarship (together, of course, with social conditions in Latin America) is responsible for the emergence of liberation theology. By its nature the study of Jesus is rooted in the past, but it is among the least antiquarian of historical or theological pursuits.

Those involved are modern men and women with an eye on the modern world, and the end that many of them have in mind is a reformulation and refinement of the Christian message for the kinds of people who inhabit our times. Tracy compares the present era to that of Saint Paul, in the first century, when the message of Jesus, a Jew speaking to Jews, was refashioned by Paul and others into a thought-language that the larger gentile world, unfamiliar with Palestinian Judaism, could understand and accept. Edward Schillebeeckx, a prominent Dominican theologian, expressed the same idea to me in another way: "In every age we must try to embed the faith in a new culture. That is the delicate function of hermeneutics—the reacculturation of the Gospel. This is the only possible way, in a new period, to believe in the same Christian faith."