3rd Sunday of Advent

How to bring it off

3rd Sunday of Adven

Today, continuing to attempt to analyze religious hope, I'd like to propose what I think is the very heart of the phenomenon of religious hope. To get to that I'd like to first of all suggest that religious hope is humanly impossible. We can have optimism, or we can even be "Pollyannish" in our outlook on life. We can have confidence that every day in every way things are getting better and better, and that we're on this great cosmic train racing forward into the future and progress is its hallmark, thinking that somehow things are going to get better. But it is important to distinguish religious hope from those almost biological, genetic kind of impulses to say that “I can manage".

In order to say that it is humanly impossible, I'd like to go back to the previous two weeks where I suggested that, first of all, hope is personal in the sense that it is the hope that I can transcend my own impulse or instinct for self-preservation as the fundamental dynamic of my life. That I can somehow move beyond that in a non-neurotic way. I think that's very important because I recognize that neurosis and neurotic impulse in myself . Mercifully, I think, I have largely outgrown it, but I'm not so sure. I certainly know all kinds of people who are neurotically selfless, who want to pour themselves out into a cause or onto another human. I think, I see that in myself and in other people that I know. But, that kind of tendency is basically sick. It comes out of a sense of worthlessness, and out of all kinds of impulses, none of which has anything to do with God or even mental health. So that's clearly not what I'm talking about.

It is whether people can, in a non-neurotic way, get beyond that desire to save one's own backside at all costs. That, I propose, is humanly impossible. It is counter intuitive. It is counter-factual. It is counter to experience. And yet that is precisely the hope that is offered to us in the figure of Isaiah or Jesus or Jeremiah or these people around us to whom I'd like to come back in a little bit. But the second aspect of hope that I tried to say something about last week is as inaccessible as the first. Namely, that I can't hope for myself in some kind of solitary fashion. I have to hope for everybody. Everybody, co-equally. My hope is only real, is authentically religious, only when it is the hope for everybody, when it is the hope for the cosmos. For all creation which is groaning because we, in our insecurity and our greed have reduced the cosmos to vanity, emptiness. I do not think that we can get to that point under our own steam and because it is so difficult, I think, if you look at the history of all kinds of religious bodies, there has been an unconscious but almost systematic attempt to trim the dimensions of hope so as to make them somehow less threatening. To make them somehow accessible. I think this occurs over and over. It was in the earliest days of the Church there was a guy named Pelagius. A guy from the third century who said... I'll just bring it – the Christian life - by my own steam. I think that the inheritors of the Pelagian view of things are always with us. In fact, I think that they are always in us. All the time. In this, we are often not helped by the Church. Think of the Church. I've been in it 62 years, excepting my 2 years as an atheist. If someone said to me, Trojcak look at the Church as a place that engenders this kind of religious hope, I would reply, I don't think so. That has not been the hallmark of my experience. Instead, there is all kinds of clarity. We know canon law, we have dogmatic things and we have all these big buildings and we have head counts and we have all these wonderful statistics. A billion Catholics on the earth right now. Must be something going on there, right? Because they have so many. As if that is supposed to engender genuine hope. I do not think it does.

Therefore we have to re-envision what the Church is. I suggest to you the Church is basically a “cloud of witnesses”, these eccentrics, these strange people, these anomalies. Precisely in their very anomalous quality they open up their perspective to real hope.

There’s an oblique pointer to hope. I just read an article in The Tablet, a great Catholic magazine from England, by Kenneth Woodward. You may not know that he was, and may still be, the religious editor of Newsweek Magazine. He's one of the few journalists covering religion that knows anything about religion. He wrote a book called Saint Making. He analyzed the canonization procedure in the Roman Church. Then he wrote this piece for The Tablet referring to what is going on in the Church right now. The pope is canonizing more people than anybody in the history of the papacy. And, he's going to dig up more. But Woodward points out that things have changed drastically. In other words, saint making involves an enormous and intimate amount of historical investigation. He says the people that are doing it right now are incompetent, historically. The number of miracles required for canonization has been cut in half. The devil's advocate, this guy that is hired by the Church to question the sanctity of these people, his whole office has been removed. So there is almost, he's suggesting, a kind of glibness or facility in our saint making today that puts it really into question. I don't know. I'm not privy as he is to the inner workings of Vatican offices but I know, let us say, that the fact that they have beatified the founde of Opus Dei, Msgr. Escriva.

Even in Spain, his native country, it was a scandal. This man who sought privileged office, noble titles, screamed around like a maniac often enough and yet he is now up for canonization. There's something wrong there.

Why is there something wrong? Because again we have this darkening, this obscuring of the harsh, sharp outlines of what really constitutes religious hope.

But I think there may be even bigger problems in the society. I just wrote down a number of words and I want to propose this group of words as an apt description of what we think is a really successful human being. You are effective, competent, in control, in charge, they manage well, they organize well, they facilitate well. In other words, I believe it is very easy for us to answer this totally secular notion of efficiency into this religious realm and call that hope. But it's not hope. Because the hallmark of religious hope is that the religiously hopeful people are basically incompetent. They are basically out of control. Nor are they in control. Why? Because their life is a matter of being suspended between who they are and this mysterious other that we call God. And so, you cannot control them. You cannot manage them. That is the shape as Buber refers to as "Divine insecurity".

So, to come back to my proposal. Why is religious hope impossible? First, I don't even think that given who we are and how we are and the shape of the world, that we normally even envision the possibility.

A psychologist friend of mine, after I discussed this with her, gave me a whole stack of articles psychologically establishing that religious hope is absolutely impossible. No surprise to me that they thought that. Even to envision it, to conceptualize it very well is impossible. But then, there is the second level of impossibility: how to bring it off, how to live in that fashion. To manage to live in that kind of obscurity which is the very hallmark of this kind of hope. How do you do that? We can't. I know for a fact that I don't. By God, I want to count everything. I want to be certain of everything. There was a Jesuit teacher of mine who represented precisely this kind of thing. He says, "When I die, I'm going to be buried with this big list. Every confession that I've heard. Every anointing that I've done. Every baptism. I'm going to have them all pinned to my chest." And he meant that. Then hand it over to God and say "You owe me." That's not hope. That's an insurance plan. To hope in God is what we are talking about. To hope in God. Not in my own competence. Not even if I am introspective enough and careful enough.

Paul and John said that we don't even know who we are supposed to be. So what does that mean? What's a perfect Trojcak? Beats me.

Now because Advent is the time of waiting and because we live in this world where such hope is counter-factual and because we don't believe in the ground, the one single ground that makes such hope plausible. .. that I am loved by God. Because if I do believe in that then I can cast myself forward into that great darkness. And that's what hope is about. But once that belief is in place there is nothing in our world, badly beaten up, so tawdry, so mediocre most of the time (again I'm speaking of myself) that cannot be swallowed up, absorbed, transcended, transformed. And to clarify that is what Advent ought to be for. To build one’s like on that possibility, that is hope.

To other sermons