The late (and in my opinion), great Catholic Bishop Kenneth Untener from Saginaw, Michigan once wrote a very practical and illuminating book on preaching. Before doing so, he visited every parish in his diocese and asked parishioners one-to-one how they felt about the quality of preaching at their respective churches. In one such inquiry a woman responded, “Well, bishop, sometimes when Fr. So-n-So preaches about love, I don’t get the feeling he’s ever been in love.” After a brief pause she added, “Come to think of it, when he preaches about sin, I don’t get the feeling he’s ever sinned either.” Ba-dum-tish!
As I get older, I find that the only Christian theology that I can preach, teach, struggle with, stomach, consent to, and abide by is one that is awake to reality and consciously holds together the tension of apparent opposites: gravity and grace, chaos and creation, the presence of indifference and action of love, the existence of evil and the power of goodness, the descent to soul and the uplift of delight. A theology that accentuates personal sins to the exclusion of love and grace is deadening and misses the core of Jesus’ life and teaching. A theology that emphasizes love and grace to the exclusion of sin and evil is anemic, Pollyannaish, and like an ostrich has its head buried in the sand. A theology that is all up, up, and away and never dares the kenosis of descent forfeits real wisdom and soulfulness. Each alone is incomplete and false. The problem throughout the history of Christian spirituality (and this is not unique to Christianity) becomes manifest and toxic when the pendulum swings too far one way and gets stuck there.
The “stumbling block” with sin for so many persons who were raised within certain faith communities or at a particular time in history is threefold:
~ the implied or overt portrayal of God as a mean, punitive judge;
~ the obsessive preoccupation with personal sins and guilt to the exclusion of social sin and systemic injustice; and
~ the almost exclusive association of sin with the body— too much eating, too much or (in some traditions) any drinking, smoking, make-up, dancing, and especially sex, or thinking about all of the above.
When the pendulum swings one way all the way, eventually and understandably there will be a reaction causing it to swing back the other way all the way. The trouble is the further the pendulum swings in one direction the more of a caricature that particular spirituality becomes and, as a result, the more superficial, inauthentic, false, and damaging it becomes. It also becomes more rigid. It is important to see that fundamentalism is the world-view we end up with whether we swing all the way to the right or all the way to the left. Fundamentalism not only lacks nuance, it fears paradox, resists entering into the mystery, and cannot tolerate the tension of opposites let alone endure long enough to discover it as blessed. But as every spiritual sage knows, tension is where the life of Life and the truth of Truth are found, and where transformation takes place. Whereas the duality of strict dichotomies is lethal, the tension of opposites holds sacred possibilities.
The danger of a shallow reaction to a preoccupation with sin is that it implies that there is no such thing. It tends to fill in the space where sin once sat with an airy, warm-fuzzy substance-less new ageism that looks nothing like mature love or radical grace. My conviction is that the more we connect our definitions or understandings of sin and grace to the actual warp and woof of daily life and human existence the more credence and meaning they will have. This being said, it is not the theological terms that are important but the lethality or quality of lives and the failure or authenticity of our love.
In light of all this, the readings yesterday on Ash Wednesday point to the blessed tension that ensures a spirituality with integrity, one that highlights the need for us to take inventory of our lives while spelling out what is indigenous to God’s heart, namely, being gracious, merciful, slow to anger, rich in kindness, and excessively lenient (Joel 2:13). As in the most loving human relationships, love has the capacity to evoke love. The bigger, more unconditional the love, the more we want to return an equally substantive love. My experience is that few homilists focus on this part of the reading from Joel, which is what gives meaning to the “fasting, weeping, and mourning” mentioned in the same passage.
The focus of Lent is not how bad we are but how good God is, and how the lavishness of God’s love elicits self-reflection and evokes the desire to love in return. Such personal reckoning is essential to the health of any love relationship. It functions as a spiritual GPS that locates “where we are” and provides the impetus to recenter our subjectivity from self to God, and then from self to others, which is the purpose of the threefold practices of Lent: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We need to be careful not to make Lent all about us but rather about vital relationships. After all, these practices are intended to move us toward self-forgetfulness. Through prayer we create a vacancy reserved for God, where only God can dwell. By fasting we intentionally create a hunger that reminds us of the need only God can fill. In almsgiving, we take the money saved while fasting, turn our attention to others in need, and play our part in re-creating a world where all can live justly and well. In the three-fold act of self-forgetfulness, we become most truly ourselves and, as Thomas Merton said, love becomes our real name, our true identity.
REFLECTION & PRACTICE:
Lent is a season of mindfulness. Subtract something from your life that gets in the way between you and God, you and the earth community, you and other persons, or you and your authentic self. Consider adding something that calls you back to healthier, holier living. Or consider not filling the vacancy at all but letting it be a space of receptive stillness and silence within you and about you.