Father Peter's Forum

Val J. Peter

Our world is very different from what went before. It should also be clear our response to it should be such that we Christians are able to be “in the world, but not of the world.”

This paper will not so much survey what is new in the world in the 21st century (we all live every day with MP3 players, IPods, the latest in cell phones, wildly gyrating gas prices and a collapsing economy) but rather show how being in the world we can be “not of the world,” in some ways quietly different and slightly countercultural.

Let us start with a second century view of Christians as they saw themselves. This is a letter by an unknown early second century Christian writer to Diognetus which speaks eloquently to us about Christians, who these Christians were, what they did and how they were, in some ways, quietly different, slightly countercultural:

“Christians are indistinguishable from other men, either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based on reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it be Greek or foreign.

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they are only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor on all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on level that transcends the law.

Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference is their answer to insult. For the good they do, they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they rejoice as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.

To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As a visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen.”

In the last chapter, we talked about the need to pass on to our children our Christian faith and morals as traditionally understood yet clothed in post modern garments. In this chapter, we will examine in greater detail the contrast between this Christian view and the post modern view that pervades our society. There are many things that will make us indistinguishable from our contemporaries, but there are some things that will make us distinctive. By pointing this out, we hope you will come away with a concrete plan of action for your own family, school and church.

To be true to their calling, Christians need to follow the Lord even it means being seen as holding a different world view, starting with how we view ourselves. In our secular world, the self is the unfettered individual in isolation. The focus is inward, not outward. We Christians, true to our vocation, begin not with a sense of isolation, but with a sense of belonging, a sense of relationship, a sense of the redemptive. So if Christians are asked how they define themselves and are asked to explain who they are and what is this thing called the “self,” their answer is: “The self is relational. It is not in isolation. It begins with relationships.”

When someone says: “who are you” the response of a Christian is this: I know who I am. I am a child of God, the Father who created me, the Son who redeemed me and the Holy Spirit who empowered me. Blessed Mary is our mother. The saints are our brothers and sisters. In addition, I am the son of Carl and Anne Marie Peter. I have two brothers and a sister and a vast number of uncles, aunts and cousins.” Yes, that is the proper way Christians define themselves.

So you and I are defined first by the relational dimensions of the human person as son/daughter, brother/sister, father/mother, nephew, grandson and all of these. The divine family of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the human family are what define us first and foremost. Your goal and mine is union with God and others in God. That is why God created you and me.

Through the many chapters of this book, we have seen something earth shaking began to occur after World War II. At the close of this book, it can now be described as a subtle shift in the definition of self, moving from the communitarian, relational and family definition to a definition that looks inside the person as an individual, to the needs and wants of that individual. In other words, the secular world would suggest you are you first and foremost an isolated person, an inner self with inner needs. The gospel, on the other hand, suggests you are first and foremost a member of the divine family with God as creator, redeemer and sanctifier with a dad and a mom, brothers, sisters and grandparents. Our secular culture believes you are an individual. Our religious faith starts with the belief you are a family member. The first is lonely. The second is a matter of belonging.

How did this change occur? As we have seen after World War II, there was an enormous amount of economic prosperity. During the Depression and World War II, there was great need to tough it out and to sacrifice in extraordinary ways. That reinforced our Christian notion of belonging. We stressed the good we had in common and most tried to make an individual contribution to our family, both the human family and the divine family. God put us on earth for this purpose. We were clear about that. Heaven was our goal.

When the Depression and World War II ended and affluence set in, this need for each other seemed less urgent, less apparent. Along with this lack of urgency came an increased impatience, perhaps even intolerance of family dysfunction, which we had chosen to overlook before. We began to stress what was wrong with our families instead of what was right. Affluence does not mean that we have more needs and wants. It is the subtle shift from wanting more to expecting more…even from our families. So we began to see our families as less functional then they ought to be. Stress was now on what was wrong in relationships. We expected an easier life.

With the rise of affluence, came a group of humanistic psychologists (as distinguished from experimental psychologists and behavioral psychologists) who had the following view:

• Your family is a mess. It is an increasingly depressing experience to look at family relationships and define yourself that way. You need to embrace the idea that self-actualization is your goal. You need to look inward instead of outward for your identity. Your emphasis should be on the internal authority of the self, not on the external authority outside yourself. If your family is a mess and you look at family relations to define yourself that will be an increasingly frustrating. Yes, look inward.

• As you look inward, you will find yourself defining fulfillment inwardly as the realization of your potential and not outwardly as you did in the Christian scheme, namely of loving one another, of helping one other, of worshiping the Lord and all meeting some day in heaven.

• If you look, you will find inside yourself a multiplicity of needs, feelings, wants. In some sense, this multiplicity can take the place of your many dysfunctional relatives. Cater to these needs and feelings.

Jung said in so many words: As you go inside yourself, you meet archetypal figures. As you develop interest in your inner-self, you will have less interest in your brothers, sisters, parents and family. It is a move towards narcissism.

After World War II, Catholics also witnessed a surge of vocations. Many soldiers returning from the war had seen enough death, destruction, hatred and revenge to long for a monastic routine of prayer and solitude. Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain was their inspiration. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was their search, too. Faith life was identified with the interior life. After the fall of Nazism, faith life was not a search for peace and justice because the Cold War had now begun and peace and justice seemed even farther removed than before.

So when Maslow, Erickkson, Rogers and others came upon the scene with their insistence on the centrality of the therapeutic, Christian faith in America began to wander off the beaten path that Christians had taken through the centuries and often turned to the therapeutic more than to the redemptive. Of course, this was a huge loss. Some interpreters of Vatican II made this trend formidable. Why? Vatican II told us to open ourselves to the insights of modern psychology and sociology. But Maslow, Erickson and others were being read uncritically, yes uncritically, by these in interpreters. If you start to define yourself as a bundle of internal needs, then the ascetical practices (prayer, mortification and fasting) so essential to gaining freedom for union with God and others in God started to diminish in importance and even vanish. Many interpreters following Maslow, Erickson and others were saying that certain ascetical Christian practices (mortification and fasting) and feelings, (guilt and shame) are out of bounds and bad by definition. Out of style are self denial, the Divine Office, penitential practices and especially fear of the Lord. The notion of sin diminished and in its place there were only errors or mistakes. We did not sin so much. We made mistakes. The remedy for sin is repentance, but if there are fewer sins there is less need for repentance. And the remedy for mistakes is therapy/education. And if there are more mistakes, then there is greater need for therapy. This was a conscious attempt on the part of some humanistic psychologists to do away with the relationship with God. They acknowledged it as such. Yes, to due away with the relationship with God is to deny the existence of sin and personal moral responsibility.

Like Rousseau’s noble savage, the self began, at times, to be defined as thoroughly good and happy. According to Eric Berne and Thomas Harris, the Child inside us is basically happy, fun-loving, energetic and filled with good things. The only thing that makes the Child inside us bad is Parent contamination, Parent data that comes from the outside and fills us with guilt, shame and a sense of sinfulness.

It is easy to see the progression, the developmental pattern, evolving. Many in America began to move away from a Christian perspective of redemption to a more humanistic therapeutic perspective. August Comte in the 19th century debunked Christianity as not being fulfilling or not truly human. He was a prophet of our times.

Yes, at some point after Vatican II (1960-1964), the search inward, the search for identity and the need for fulfillment began to skew the renewal of the Catholic Church in America. Catholics were told to open the windows to modern society and there were many things we needed to be open to. But we could have been more critical, more discerning in what was worthwhile and what was not when we opened the windows. Sand and dirt came in, together with fresh air.

Our task is to recover or rediscover, if you like, the incarnational and redemptive Christian view where relationships take precedence over our inner self and where one looks outside of one’s self to find meaning and fulfillment. Our goal is union with God and others in God. If the pursuit of this goal makes us slightly countercultural, then so be it. We need to regain our family focus, our community focus, our church focus and move away from an almost narcissistic self-focus in our Christian lives. The self-esteem movement hurt us more than it helped us. “Have I loved myself enough today” is not a good place to start. The move inward also coincided with the anti-authoritarianism of the time. In the past, our moral lives had rules, external rules, The Ten Commandments which, if we searched our hearts, we would find already there. In the past, this was healthy and helpful. But now there was only internal authority, not external authority and that often went hand in hand with more family dysfunctionality. Now there were only internal rules, not external rules and they were the rules of developmental psychology often gone astray. I dislike saying that because so much in developmental psychology was so very healthy and so good. But it is true and it needs to be said.

Once again, it is important to note that many of the advances in psychology and sociology were very, very good indeed, but not all of them. And to be countercultural, we need to distinguish between the good and the bad. And we need to follow St. Paul’s advice: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil by doing good.” Certain experiences are enormously harmful to human flourishing, to human freedom. No matter how hard we try, they will not be healing experiences.

If the self is the measure of all things, then the gospels have to undergo pruning because they call for self-denial for taking up one’s cross.

In addition, people discovered that simply getting in touch with one’s past and naming it does not always or necessarily bring health. Christians would say that the healing comes at the point when we are able to turn this past over to God and to experience true repentance, true reconciliation, true feelings of acceptance and newness of life.

It is the Christian who says: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and Thee.” It is the secular humanist who says: “Our father has sinned against heaven and me.”

So the description our humanistic psychologists gave of our needs and wants is valid only as long as it remains descriptive and not prescriptive. It describes many of our inner needs and wants, but it does not give us a moral path.

It is quite wrong to say the self is innocent until it has contact with others and then it is contaminated by parents, by family and by social contact. It is a denial of original sin, a doctrine which teaches self is not wholly innocent at the start. In this scheme of things, social justice is a matter of “sinful institutions,” or “sinful structures.” It is a matter of sinfulness outside ourselves. Karl Marx believed that. Lenin did too. Communism tried that with singular lack of success. They were wrong.

The self is not totally innocent. That was an old Pelagian view. Neither is the self totally corrupt. That was an old view found in some of St. Augustine’s writings. The Church has taught clearly the self is wounded and needs spiritual healing. And the healing cannot happen in splendid isolation. The self is capable of great virtue and, of course, great viciousness, too.

Viktor Frankl, whose book Man’s Search for Meaning has touched the hearts of so many and sold more than 12 million copies says it this way:

“We may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but
only these two – the race of the decent man and the race of the
indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into
all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or
indecent people. In this sense, no group is of pure race – and
therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the
camp guards.

Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and
exposed its depths. It is surprising that in those depths we
again found only human qualities which in their very nature
were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from
evil which goes through all human beings, reaches into the
lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the
abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.”

That means that if social justice is to come into our world, changing sinful structures is important, but changing the self is just as important.

The founders of the American Republic insisted that we cannot have a truly democratic society without self-discipline, self-denial and private virtue in the4 service of others. If everyone only has self-interest as the highest priority, democracy will not flourish. Private virtue, the spirit of sacrifice for the sake of others, is important if America, as a true republic, is to survive and prosper. More and more people today recognize this truth about private virtue being an important component of a free democratic society. What has been forgotten for a long time but, as a result of our worldwide economic downtown, is slowly coming to our consciousness is that this is equally true in business and commerce. When the attitude of “we can do no wrong” combines with greed, the world economy gets better only for a short time and then collapses. The world will not get better unless the greed and the arrogance and the lying and the cheating stop. A healthy economic system is impossible without honesty, humility and integrity. If you recall, Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations insisted that if everyone simply pursued their own private good (their own self interest or selfishness), then the common economic good would be taken care of. Balderdash. History, past and present, shows it does not work that way. The scriptures are clear about it, too.

Two examples come quickly to mind. I had lunch recently with an Executive Secretary here at Boys Town. I asked her why three years ago she quit her job at a national mortgage firm to join us. She paused and explained ever so slowly: “I was tired of falsifying salary stubs for home loans.” A 21-year-old grad told an auto dealership his salary would only allow him to borrow $9,000 and he liked the $12,000 auto. “No problem” said the dealer. “We will just use someone else’s paystub.” That happened a few short days ago, too.

If business men and women engage in these tactics, they have made no advances from the days of Alexander the Great who sought great wealth by war, pillage and plunder. Many historians think that the growth of commerce was an enormous advance over the view of the ancient conquerors. But commerce is an advance only to the degree that private virtue rules in commerce, as well.

Take away private virtue and commerce can be as rapacious and as destructive as Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. We need to change ourselves. We cannot do it by ourselves. We need the grace of God. That sounds slightly countercultural. It sounds like the loyal opposition.

The Lord has told us: “Take up thy cross and follow Me.” This means that to be faithful to the Lord we have to, not only express ourselves appropriately but also to deny ourselves appropriately to gain freedom.

In our long Christian tradition, there are two practices that make us counter-cultural. The first is the practice of virtue and the second is the practice of self-denial and self-restraint.

The 2nd century Christian writer quoted at the beginning of this chapter quite rightly said we Christians are only slightly counter-cultural. We have already seen what this means for defining the self. We now see our identity consists of really and truly called by God and sent on mission as we come into the world.

This means we Christians need to begin with an affirmative response to God’s call: “Come follow Me.” Our call echoes the call of God to Abraham and Sarah. It echoes the call of God to Sampson whose response was: “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.” And, of course, then there was Joshua: “As for me and my family, we will serve the Lord.” In the long Christian tradition, this commitment to serve the Lord is called devotion. And devotion is described over the centuries as an act of the will whereby we surrender ourselves to the service of God. It is an in-depth decision which sometimes comes gradually and other times quickly. Sometimes it slowly builds up and then bursts upon us. The rest of the world does not notice this happening in our lives, but we notice it profoundly because our hearts are now flooded with joy.

In reflecting on this, St. Thomas suggests there are two kinds of things to notice that bring us to this dedication of our lives to God. (page 72)

It should be clear that our becoming the Lord’s good servant means that we are entering into a new profound relationship with God. The direct effect of devotion is joy. When the world sees a joyful Christian, it often calls that person simply a happy personality and nothing more. But there is so much more to it than the world can see.

Once one decides to follow the Lord then the question arises: what does the following of the Lord entail? The gospels unanimously respond: “Take up thy cross and follow Me.” Be a good Samaritan, the gospels tell us: “Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, visit the sick, clothe the naked, love your neighbor as yourself. The scriptures tell us we cannot do this by ourselves. We need virtue, grace under pressure, spiritual courage. And we need moral muscle which is strength.

To grow in friendship with God also requires considerable self-mastery on our part, the purpose of which is to gain freedom to serve God and neighbor. The scriptures are filled with admonitions in this regard. There is the story of the king who, before he does battle with an opposite king, has to sit down and figure out whether he has strength enough and forces enough to conquer. Or the person who wants to build a house who has to figure if he has the resources to do so. And at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, there the fool who built his house on sand and the winds came and the storms, his house was washed away and it collapsed and what a fall it was.

It is through repeated acts of virtue with works of charity and works of self-denial that hope grows in our lives. Real hope is nothing more and nothing less than the deep seeded confidence that things will work out, developed by daily trusting in God over long periods of time. Hope is the profound realization God is in charge and we will make it through with trust in Him. Our primary role model for this kind of hope is Blessed Mary. In other words, as we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, deny ourselves, say no to our anger, hatred, revenge and laziness and just plain selfishness and live through rocky times, hope springs up, grows strong and energizes our emotional and spiritual lives.

If we give up our practice of prayer, our practice of fasting and self-denial, our devotion to God grows very cold, slowly but surely. And then we abandon the practices which the anonymous 2nd century writer said make us visibly different from others.

In summary, we need to integrate our ancient traditional, ascetical practices whose goal is to give us freedom to serve the Lord. Yes we need to integrate those with the best insights of postmodern psychology so that we may be in the world, but not of the world.