Reading and Thinking this week
Written by Dan McDonald
I am officially on my two week
vacation. It could hardly be more needed. I had planned to attend the Image
Journal sponsored Glen Workshops in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There were some
things going on in life closer to me that seem to need special attention at
this time, and I have some things to do at the house, and some need for simple
rest – so it is a staycation. I did notice Wendell Berry’s book Imagination
in Place resting in a place with some other unread books. Since I bought my
copy of that last year at the Glen – I thought this would be a good time to
start reading it. If any Glen people happen to see my blog – fat chance (it is
the one time when people aren’t checking their browsers for something to read),
I will definitely be thinking of you. The Glen is a wonderful place to meet
talented writers, artists, and creative people. It is humbling because you
might live in a place where you don’t meet many and you begin to think you are
pretty good and then you meet people that are really good and you aware of
mediocrity in your writing, and thus become slow to say things like “I blog.”
You also happily discover that creative people tend to love encouraging people who
are simply trying to be creative.
In addition to just starting Berry’s
book I have been plodding so very slowly through Living Justice by
Thomas Massaro SJ. Massaro’s book is a textbook on Catholic social justice
teaching. Although I am a Protestant, I find myself increasingly respectful of
the insights of the Catholic Social Justice tradition. One advantage Catholics
have on speaking to these issues is that Catholicism represents people from
industrialized and developing nations; with constituencies that fill the scope
from deeply conservative to progressive, and fill the spectrum of human
existence among people of many languages, cultures, and national settings. Much
of Catholic social teaching is the result of perspectives percolating to the
top from the localized levels of church life until they are finally represented
by Bishops, councils, and Popes. Being a Protestant I do not have to take everything
as authoritative, but for the most part I find everything discussed as
something useful to be appropriated into life at some level. Since Massaro’s
book is a textbook I find myself reading it like I did an important textbook in
college. I found when I read a book for the first time I simply saw what
interested me. It took me a second reading to see what really interested the
author so that I began to get an idea of what his message was and not just as a
vehicle to appreciate what I appreciate. I won’t say much about Living
Justice in this blog, but hopefully in future blogs as I read the book a
second time I will feel more confident of my understanding the author’s
concerns and not just mine.
Both of these books are books which
seem to fit into the sort of works that address aspects of a general theme I am
seeking to better understand. Years ago I passed through a sort of crisis in my
Christian life. Since becoming a Christian, I have never had any trouble seeing
that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was taught in the Holy Scriptures. I did
go through a period when I began seeing that we Christians seemed to say the
Trinity was an essential doctrine according to the faith, but in every day
Christian life we seemed not to present it as a very useful teaching with
useful applications to life. Eventually I discovered that this was not so for
the ancient church fathers, and one could include the ancient church mother
Saint Macrina who helped her brothers Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa
towards their Trinitarian doctrinal understandings. For the church fathers, the
doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation stood in the
center of what they called the Christian Gospel.
For me one of the eventual practical
ramifications for me in understanding the Trinity was in understanding the
nature of our humanity, as created in the image of God. We understand in the
Trinity that God is one in three and three in one. He exists as God in union;
one God. He exists as God revealed in three persons; Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, three persons but one God. This is holy mystery but God is seen as
distinct existing persons and one God in unity. I will never try to explain
God, for to do so I am convinced will only lead to confusion. But looked the
other way what I understand only vaguely in mystery helps inform me as to our
human complexity. We exist individually and communally. We cannot truly
separate the individual and communal existence. Why do I believe and behave as
I do? How much is because of my unique individuality, and how much is due to my
unique setting in place, in culture, in family, in tribe, tongue, nation, and
varied experiences? How much of me is me because of choices I made consciously
and how much is me because of environment that shaped me unconsciously?
These two books help point me to
aspects of this mystery of the human experience that exists in part because of
genetics, in part by cultural shaping from varied aspects of culture including
family, community, education systems, church influences, and national issues.
Berry’s emphasis in writing has as one of his most important themes how to
maintain an emphasis on local community when we are being shaped by a nearly
omnipresent pressure to be people who are global, online, taking their place in
the big issues, while hard pressed to know an actual neighbor. He yearns to
maintain a localized community where issues instead of floating from the top to
the bottom of the layers of life percolate from the experiences of the local.
That seems to me a worthy venture.
Massaro’s textbook would not argue
against the importance of the local, but would seek to bring together collected
wisdom to encourage people to responsibly seek out ways of dealing with various
social and cultural issues of our day. I have happily found Massaro to be more
interested as a text book author to present general perspectives on cultural
issues than trying to express his agenda. He gives us information about the
formation of the social justice issues as presented in Catholic teaching but
reminds us that while there are general teachings, there are still varied ways
those who take the teachings seriously would seek to apply the lessons of
Catholic teaching in a large world, with varied cultures and ways of living.
I suppose because I believe in the
Holy Trinity and man created in the image of God, these sorts of books that
help give me additional perspectives into the connected life of humanity in collective
and humanity in individuality will interest me for the foreseeable future.
