Newmania – 9: “Divine calls”
One of Newman’s finest sermons is entitled “Divine Calls.” I just re-read it and was tempted to reproduce the whole of it. But here are just a few sentences from it, but, please, read the whole of it, and you will appreciate the power of Newman’s preaching. (It should come with a Warning for those allergic to conversion!)
It were well if we understood this; but we are slow to master the great truth, that Christ is, as it were, walking among us, and by His hand, or eye, or voice, bidding us follow Him. We do not understand that His call is a thing which takes place now. We think it took place in the Apostles’ days; but we do not believe in it, we do not look out for it in our own case. We have not eyes to see the Lord; far different from the beloved Apostle, who knew Christ even when the rest of the disciples knew Him not. When He stood on the shore after His resurrection, and bade them cast the net into the sea, “that disciple whom Jesus loved saith unto Peter, It is the Lord.” [John xxi. 7.]
Now what I mean is this: that they who are living religiously, have from time to time truths they did not know before, or had no need to consider, brought before them forcibly; truths which involve duties, which are in fact precepts, and claim obedience. In this and such-like ways Christ calls us now. There is nothing miraculous or extraordinary in His dealings with us. He works through our natural faculties and circumstances of life. Still what happens to us in providence is in all essential respects what His voice was to those whom He addressed when on earth: whether He commands by a visible presence, or by a voice, or by our {25} consciences, it matters not, so that we feel it to be a command. If it is a command, it may be obeyed or disobeyed; it may be accepted as Samuel or St. Paul accepted it, or put aside after the manner of the young man who had great possessions…..
No one has any leave to take another’s lower standard of holiness for his own. It is nothing to us what others are.
“It is nothing to us what others are.”
These words, which I am taking out of context and so not fairly to Newman, hit me at just the time that the Pakistan tragedy is damn near unhinging me. Now I have some sense small sense of the Jew’s anguish at the Holocaust. What is God up to? have we brought this upon the Pakastanis? Have they? What is this all about?
These days, besides some feeble blogging, I’ve been trying to think clearly about forgiveness and its relation to justice.
Big Deal!
Justice to the children of pakistan? To all these simple, very poor people? The extraordinary poverty of our vaunted philosophy and theology.
Ah, yes, evil is an absence of due being. Spare the suffeing parents in Pakistan and elsewhere this sophistication. And yes, we’ll get a new text for the Mass that is “More reverent” because it is “closer to the Latin.”
Yes, I’ll calm down and go back to my last. But maybe I won’t be able to return to it with the same “relaxed asurance” that I’ve had.
Do any of you share these sentiments? Don’t hesitate to criticize what I’m saying here! No, I’m not in despair. But I hope against all hope that God is really loving the Pakastanis. And i hope that I can find some way of never forgetting their tragedy. I hope that I will never again think : “It is nothing to us what others are.”
Bernard ==
I don’t think Newman is implying that it’s OK to be indifferent to other people’s needs. I think he’s saying that holiness isn’t a competition. But sometimes I wonder if some people treat it something like that, as a sort of self-challenge. I guess that’s the influence of the existentialists and Buddhists on me. Holiness isn’t about self in the first place, it’s about God’s will, His “call”. Newman shows that very clearly in the first half of the sermon.
I do have some reservations about the second half of the sermon, though. The first part is thoroughly now centered, doing the will of God right NOW. Yes, we must expect to do His will over and over in the furture. But I think it’s dangerous to think of ourselves on a journey or going up a ladder to higher things, as Newman puts it. That implies judging our own progress, our own supposed increase in virtue. I don’t think we’re called to that.
I can think of many times when that call from Christ has come to me loud and clear. Sometimes I have heard and responded; other times I have kept on my way. Often, it seems to me that the official pronouncements of the American Bishops are feeble attempts to be Christ’s voice on critical issues, but the statements have no sting, no passion, no sense of urgency. They write essays when they should be sending telegrams marked “response required ASAP!”
I think Newman’s point in that last couple of sentences is that we more often use the example of others to indulge ourselves than to challenge or rebuke ourselves: I am tempted to do this thing so I conveniently remember that most do it and many do worse. I feel called somehow to do something beyond what the church’s general precepts require so I remind myself how few have done this thing, how odd they seemed to others when they did it, how no one will notice if I don’t do it — and that, even if anyone did notice, no one would fault me. A strong Christian conscience is one capable of feeling guilt even when there is no risk of shame.
You’re right, Matthew. That is ambiguous — it could mean both.
Bernard –
The effects of Katrina, awful as they have been, have not as bad as the effects of the Pakistan flood. Still, I am inspired by the people who have lost everything to pick themselves up and go on. And there has been a great deal of help from the outside, which has also been inspiring. So it’s true that out of evil good does come. It’s the old, old problem of the suffering of innocents. For me the only thing that helps when confronting it directly it is fact that Christ accepted the suffering of the cross. God. And I can’t help but believe that God the Father suffered it no less. In other words He asked no more of Jesus than He has suffered Himself.
The Church has taught that God, being perfect, could not be someone who suffers, that suffering is a defect. And surely it is a negative reality. But it seems to me that God’s capacity to suffer for otherr and with them is one of His perfections. Yes, a mystery, probably the greatest of all to us. But that’s how I think it is.
I appreciate Newman’s ability to describe the way someone like himself might respond to the call of conscience and grace. He is subtle and sensitive in his self-reflexive ruminations. But I can’t help feeling there is something undeveloped in him, closed in, uninterested and perhaps untouched by the lot of those less intelligent, less cultivated, less blessed.
I remember a conversation I had with a dear friend many years ago. We were young grad students, talking about our childhoods. He described the way his parents sent him, a half-Catholic, half- Jewish boy of 5 out of Germany in 1939 ,with a tag on his jacket indicating where he was supposed to be taken, an address on New York’s Upper West Side. His journey took him through Switzerland, and Italy, across the Atlantic, to the area around Columbia University, not far from where Commonweal is situated.
I am afraid I naively said something about how wonderfully Providential it all was– such a dangerous journey– so wonderful that he came through safely. But he looked at me, and just said: And what about my cousins, who didn’t make it out of Germany ? It was a revelation, painful, but a growing point of sorts.
So I think I understand where Bernard Dauenhauer is coming from. There is something about Newman that doesn’t open up empathetically to the sufferings of people unlike himself, and the situation of those afflicted with immeasurable losses and pain that can’t be assuaged. His picture of the way things are is very inward-looking, intelellectualized, brilliantly observed–but sadly limited.
Bernard: You admit that you took Newman’s comment out of context. “It is nothing to us what others are” would indeed be an awful statement and sentiment were it uttered right after someone had become aware of the tragedy in Pakistan or even in many another context. But the sentence was preceded, immediately, by these words: “No one has any leave to take another’s lower standard of holiness for his own,” and they completely explain Newman’s meaning.
Susan: I have just reread the sermon “Divine Calls” and must say I do not see any ground in it for your criticism. I still think it one of the best descriptions I have ever read of the process of conversion and growth in the Christian life. It is stated throughout in simple language, intelligible, I should think, to everyone in his congregation. I don’t find it at all “inward-looking,” at least not if you mean this to repeat your earlier “self-reflexive ruminations.” That he is urging his listeners to be self-reflective certainly is true, but I don’t regard that as a mistaken purpose; in fact, I think that many people will be enabled by it to read their own religious journeys more perceptively. It is filled with insights that would help people appreciate the work of grace in them in the new horizons opened up by conversions and steady growth in their religious lives. I do not know what you mean by speaking of it as “intellectualized,” except as having been written by a man with a fine intellect. I find it quite down to earth.
It would, as I know you would agree, be unfair to expect every sermon to address every question, so perhaps you are making a more general point, not just one about this sermon. Perhaps one has to read rather widely also in his Letters and Diaries before making judging whether he was “uninterested and perhaps untouched by the lot of those less intelligent, less cultivated, less blessed” that he found among his parishioners, whether Anglican or Catholic.
There was a famous exchange between Newman and an officious priest living in Rome, Msgr. George Talbot, which ended with this reply from Newman:
“I have received your letter, inviting me to preach next Lent in your Church at Rome to ‘an audience of Protestants more educated than could ever be the case in England.’
“However, Birmingham people have souls; and I have neither taste nor talent for the sort of work which you cut out for me.”
Susan, Ann, Fr. Komonchak, Matthew and anyone else I misled, I apologize. In my comment above, I really was not trying to say anything about Newman. At the time I was absorbed by Pakistan and, in the background, Cottingham’s review of Wolterstorff book and Wolterstorff’s interview to which Fr. Komonchak provided the link.
The sentence I lifted from Newman just set me off.
Again, the following is not about Newman, but aboutphilosophy, theology, Wolterstorff etc.
And it’s just a musing,not a thesis.
Ann mentions divine impassibility. Note that the normal literal sense of activity has to do with something transient, something with a beginning and an ending. So in that literal sense, God is not active either. Pure Act is not like anything else that we call act or action.
But the term ‘pure act’ is tied to a metaphysics that pushes one FOR THE SAKE OF METAPHYSICAL CONSISTENCY to say things like “God is impassible.” So for the sake of this consistency we are pushed into the peculiar position to have to say that much, if not all, of Scripture’s talk about God is some sort of trope, metaphor, etc. So our systematic theology gets couched in metaphysically consistent talk, but all the Biblical talk about God’s involvement in our lives has to be explained as somehow imprecise.
Wolterstorff in his interview rejected impassibility talk. With it he acknowledged that he had no theodicy and that evil is a deep, deep mystery.
Pakistan forced me to stare at that mystery in starkly unsophisticated terms.
Again, my apologies for going into all this on the Newman threads instead on the Wolterstorff thread.