Christ Meets the Samaritan Woman

During my last two years of high school and first of college, I was deeply involved with the pro-life movement.  I helped at a counseling center located in the same strip mall and across from an abortion clinic.  I wept once after a girl who spoke with us, even having an idea what she was doing, went ahead with her abortion.  One afternoon I was going to class at the local community college and during a break I met a young woman.  I have no idea how the subject came up, but it turned out that she had previously worked at that same clinic, quite possibly at the same time that I was volunteering across the parking lot.  Our conversation was amicable, we didn't bother with the arguments, but I recall that she had quit her job from discouragement at the lack of responsibility on the part of her clients. 

I was struck by Christ's words in today's Gospel addressed to the despised Samaritan woman, adulterous and not an adherent of the true Jewish practice. 

“If you knew the gift of God
and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink, ‘
you would have asked him
and he would have given you living water.” (Jn 4:10)

He doesn't avoid the subject of divorce.  And still she does recognize Him, as Messiah, as a promise of life.  Everything changes from receiving this living source.

Like many others (for one example see Gregory Wolfe's "Why I Am a Conscientious Objector in the Culture Wars"), there is always the risk to get lost in the cause.  I became discouraged with activism at that young age and have never been quite convinced since.  Having said that, I recognize that some are called to a single-hearted engagement, full of love and sacrifice, and I honor that.  Circumstances and interests have drawn me down another path.

I was already active in pro-life work when the Roe v. Wade decision came down like the plague.  The stakes are incalculable as life has infinite value, each one, and there are the related horrors that are unfolding now which were predictable from the start.  Sometimes a woman is won over at the steps of the clinic, as in a fascinating recent local case, when a woman intending to abort threatened a protester with a knife.  She was arrested, sentenced to probation, and forgiven by her would-be victim.  Instead, the thanked the woman for her witness, for ultimately changing her mind and saving her baby.  It was that strange meeting that changed everything.

It's not for me to dictate, even if I have opinions, how we in the Church will manage given the moral norms we can't compromise which are increasingly in conflict with social policies.  But we should consider how we will continue to meet people across a cultural divide where the other can seem as abhorrent as a leper.  How will our Catholic institutions continue to offer hospitality to all?  And when will we come to terms with the fact that reasoning alone will hardly convince anyone, without a new presence to accompany them on a difficult journey with the promise of joy.

Fresco from the Roman Catacombs, Christ with the Woman at the Well

Weakness of Faith and the Irish Church Scandal

The Pope's meeting with the Irish bishops over the pedophilia scandal did not bring closure to the crisis.  Nor could it.  This is the long task for the Irish church as it is for the U.S.  From reports, the Pope pointed to a "weakening of faith" as the cause of this crisis.  This seemed abstract to many, even "shocking" to one victim advocate, as most are looking for more resignations and rules.  On the contrary, it is the incisive key not only to the past but to the future where the temptation to power lurks in so many forms.

Faith in Christ engenders the community where trust flowers as in the best of families.  Conversion as a life process is fostered in fellowship and with the sacraments.  Formalistic roles and rituals without the heart of faith resist the change that every human heart requires for healthy relationships.  John Waters, who has been following this crisis at ilsussidiario.net, describes this loss of the practice of faith in recent decades:

Irish Catholicism had long since ceased to offer a coherent version of Christianity to the generations it had itself educated out of poverty and ignorance. Despite the fervent shows of devotion at the time of Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1979, the writing was already on the wall. Although now speaking to one of the best-educated populations in the world, the Irish Catholic Church was still pushing the same limited and simplistic moralism it had promoted in the dark days of post-Famine Ireland, an essentially fear- and rule- based religiosity that achieved no productive engagement with the freedoms that had become available to the generations born after the middle of the 20th century. The scandals of the 1990s and after, therefore, provided the perfect alibi for those generations to reject the Church and all it stood for, exposing Irish Catholicism to charges of rank hypocrisy and enabling many of the formerly faithful to dismiss certain inconvenient elements of the Church’s teaching.

The victim's work is a challenging one.  There is the human need for acknowledgment and for some form of justice, something admittedly in short supply in the real world and even where it should first be found, among believers.  This is owed to those the Church is responsible for in her ministries.  Then there is the need to practice forgiveness, for the good of oneself as well as another, which particularly given the seriousness of the offense can hardly be done without the help of the innocent One who offered himself for every last one of our sins.  This can be a very long process which demands our patience and prayers.

But as Waters points out further on, a scandal is always most convenient for all those who would project all evil outside themselves.

 There are, of course, elements of disingenuousness about these responses. Reports of sexual abuse by priests have been deeply shocking for many people, but few can say that they were unaware of the picture outlined in last year’s Ryan Report, concerning physical abuse and maltreatment of children in church-run institutions over many decades. But, far from relieving the Church’s situation, this has made things worse, because the society now seeks to find ready scapegoats for a cultural phenomenon in which many more people – judges, policemen, social workers, child protection officers – are implicated than are now willing to admit to their roles. For as long as the church remains the centre of attention, the other guilty parties will be able to avoid the wrath of a culture seeking to purge its guilt and shame by expressing as much outrage as is humanly feasible.

The forms of violence that we practice today are not so easily recognized and reviled, but we will be called to account for them later and may not be found innocent.  Speaking of children alone, with abortion as the obvious and catastrophic pinnacle:  we also accept the severing of families as normal; we hand our young people over to "safe sex" practices, short-cutting the maturing process they need for lifelong bonds; we push and stress out and over-medicate kids to produce an image of ourselves that we could never be.  Without faith, which admits that not we but Christ is the answer to our wobbling hearts, we will do all this and more.

Photo: Crucifix, La Mercè Basilica, Barcelona

Local Sorrows: Break Any Woman Down, Dana Johnson (Book Review)

This is not a book I would have found on-line.  It's one of those books I found by slow shuffling through a local bookstore.  A while ago, I was at the USC bookstore in LA, waiting for my daughter, and wandering.  Without the little award balloon on the cover, I probably wouldn't have picked it up for a look.  These are stories from the hood, South Central Los Angeles, and they're very good.

I'm so impatient with books now, especially with pretentious prose.  It's that past-forty hoarding of time.  This book I accepted eagerly, because  I was invited into a pure vernacular.  It's hard to raise the outrage for pity parties or victim chronicles because these are the incessant demands of the media and wear us out.  Even if Johnson's stories dive deep into some shady places, the stories are about the shadows lodged in one's own heart.  There are stories here that made me grieve, not for poverty and death so much as for timidity and hardheartedness, what I find in myself.

There's a particularly painful story about a girl whose cousin is dying, "Something to Remember Me By".  She's completely resistant to this fact.  Her cousin is trying to help her along, but she refuses, refusing life as well as death.  She doesn't want to talk about  the three-piece white suit he plans to wear for his funeral; she doesn't want to dance when they go out.  She recalls going to church the first time and hearing Gospel music and being so moved she then had to flee, until her aunt made her return.

The reverend hollered and pointed and stomped his feet, stopping only to wipe his dripping brow. And when the choir sang, the ladies in the front row screamed, and the organ was so thick and loud I couldn’t breathe. I ran down the aisle and out of the church. Aunt Mavis came after me and asked me what was the matter … “Auntie Mavis, it feels like I ain’t got no clothes on.”… She retied the blue ribbon woven through one of my pigtails and took my hand to walk back into the church. I sat under her for the rest of the service, scared and squeezing my eyes shut, trying to keep out the spirit. 

There is also the timidity of an 11-year-old girl in "Melvin in the Sixth Grade", a black teenager befriended by a white southern boy, who then denies him during a test of friendship.  The same girl, Avery, is found in "Markers" as an adult who feels helpless to acknowledge her strong impoverished mother.

What happens during an ordinary party among three friends, in “Three Ladies Sipping Tea in a Persian Garden”, reveals something else always bubbling just below the surface:

As I walk I remember a moment earlier in the day when the sun had not quite left our side of the world and Sharzad was painting my toes and Nasim was telling me that I should wear eyeliner to bring out my brown eyes, and there was this thing, a feeling like a voice, a nagging voice, trying to tell me something, maybe trying to tell me a way to be. It felt like being so happy and so sad. I couldn't name it. Almost, though. Almost. I was so close to getting it, like that song of Zeba's I can almost remember. The melody, I have, but the missing words to the lyrics, I don’t have. They’re just on the tip of my tongue.

I was startled by the way these stories prod at that resistance to life and ultimately to goodness.  It's rare to read a book that so directly addresses our fears.