“Communion” of a different sort…
June 6, 2008, 11:05 am
Posted by David Gibson
James Wood’s theodicy essay in the latest New Yorker, which Matt Boudway posted on below, was among the many fine entries in this double issue. While this is ostensibly the “Summer Fiction Issue,” there is a religious core to it, including a series of brief essays under the title “Faith and Doubt.” The best (to me) was the first, by a Nigerian Jesuit, Uwem Akpan, a talented writer who premiered in the magazine a couple years back with a short story. His essay is titled “Communion,” and apart from an affecting story, is I think a useful counterpoint to some of the “wafer war” rhetoric in the U.S. church these days.
Tobias Wolff’s “Winter Light” is also very good, but Akpan’s was first and best for me.
I, too, enjoyed both essays, and I agree “Communion” was the better one. I also found it a strangely reassuring reminder of the universality of the Church that there is an Our Lady of Guadalupe parish in Nairobi, Kenya, that hotbed of Hispanic and Latino culture.
Great choices, but I also liked”Crabs>”
Apropos of Haitian approaches, see the discussion at Archangel between author, Msgr, harry Byrne and his Haitian cabdriver.
Does this tie in with the CTSA stress on brown theology?
I paraticularly like “Winter Light”. Here’s the ending of Eliot’s “Little Gidding” that so impressed the author:
And all shall be well
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
The first lines are from the mystic Julian of Norwich. It seems to me that theodicy is the main theological question of our time, and possibly Julian’s too. That the New Yorker would publish “Winter Light indicates to me that at least some skeptics now permit honest doubters to consider the *possibility* that there might actually be a rational answer to “How is unjust suffering possible?”
On the other hand, It also seems to me that the Vatican is now willing to concede — contrary to what I was taught — that honest doubt is possible in believers. Quite a reversal. I suspect that Mother Theresa’s letters have had something to do with the reversal.
Please let me go back to Wood’s pining for a world without the suffering and injustice that we see all around us. He takes this world to be one that makes it unreasonable to believe in a God worthy of our belief. But the only humanity we know of is the one we’ve got, with all that’s wrong with it, but also with all that we have reason to think is right with it. Neither Wood nor any of us can really know what a humanity without suffering and injustice would look like. We can say the words “no suffering, no injustice,” but we cannot have any filled out conception of what such a humanity would be. It makes little sense to ditch belief in God for a “flatus vocis,” a set of words pretending to say something about reality.
Similarly, when the “New Atheists” (Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.) pine for a world in which there is no religion, they can utter the words “no religion,” but they have no thick reference. They simply utter a vacuous wish. As J. S. Mill, among others have seen, without experiences of injustices we have no significant sense of what justice is or requires.
We know of the “utopian” efforts to eradicate alienation, etc. that the Soviets embarked upon, with their purges of the people out of step with their program to eliminate injustice. Dangerous stuff, thinking we could design a better world for humanity, out of whole cloth.
For us Christians, we know that we’re all sinners. Christ’s redemptive work, for us as individuals as well as for us as a human family, presupposes sin, suffering, injustice, etc. That work is in progress, but is not to be completed until the parousia.
All this serves as a reminder to me when I start complaining about the foolishness, selfishness, blindnes that shows up so often among our church leaders. But how could there be a church that is not in something of a mess? Were it all that it should be, what would Christ and the Spirit still have to do?
For that matter, what would we bloggers have to spout off about.
I know that I should have said this in the earlier thread about Wood, etc. But I just figured out what I wanted to say. I’ll try to keep the “rules” better in the future, most of the time.
Very nice thread David and there may be few comments due to all the other powerful threads going on. Powerful short stories. How they can get one to think many times more than any other words. Does the New Yorker run this series every month now? This is the first time I ever saw anything that was short in the New Yorker. There is hope.
Some of the greatest messages of history were ever so brief. The words of Tacitus can apply to the Iraq war as well as many other. “Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” They make a desert and call it peace.
Also his description of the young virgin, daughter of Sejanus’ being led to execution wondering what she had done. She was even raped because the law said a virgin could not be executed.
And the naked twenty three year old girl at the dubno shooting pits pointing to herself and telling the engineer Hermann Graebe, “Twenty Three.” This was on October 2, 1942.
Such incidents hit us with the force of a hurricane.
Bernard, nicely said. I would add that belief is not passive. It is a relationship with God and needs constant cultivation. “Pray without ceasing” Paul advises. This is why we have the hours or if we cannot do that, there is that simple communion that all can do with God. When that is neglected, problems ensue. Everyone struggles with faith. Prayer brings us through it.
Many thanks to Bernard Dauenhauer for the insights, and to Bill Mazzella for the elaboration, and everyone else. No, this isn’t a series as far as I know; indeed, first time I can recall seeing such a theme, and in the Summer Fiction Issue, which seems odd.
I don’t know if anyone is reading this thread any longer, but I thought I’d mention that Fr. Uwem Akpan’s book of short stories about Africa, “Say You’re One of Them,” was recently released, and it is getting very good reviews.