Where Has All the Wisdom Gone?

The whole month of May has gone by since my last post. I've tried, but finding big-stage wisdom on the edge of summer during a presidential campaign is nearly impossible. Normally, I can turn to people of faith for wisdom, especially within my own tradition. Not this time. Wisdom is not strident, yet "loud and louder" is all we too often get from religious leaders in the U.S.


So where does sanity reside in the late spring of 2012? Let me toss out a few rays of hope I cling to on these overcast days: Stephen Colbert, the American women religious, National Catholic Reporter, US Catholic Magazine (print and online), Fr. Richard Rohr, Sr. Joan Chittister, Fr. Brian Joyce and the people of Christ the King Parish, Jean Valjean and Bishop Charles Myriel inVictor Hugo's Les Miserables, and--of course--my wife Esther, a truly wise woman.


I invite the readers of this blog post to add their own wisdom sources to mine.

Adult Faith: Growing in Wisdom and Understanding

Catholics wondering when their church will rise from scandal’s ashes can take heart. The change they desire is already present and growing like the gospel mustard seed. The roots of this movement are scattered but taking hold.

This is the hopeful message of Diarmuid O’Murchu’s Adult Faith. This straight-talk volume takes its place among a body of wisdom literature emerging from spiritual guides at the forefront of this growth spurt, including Joan Chittister, Richard Rohr, and Ronald Rolheiser, to mention a few. Discerning Catholics are invited to reimagine the Good News and actively cocreate a spirituality and theology suitable for 21st-century evangelization.

With razor-sharp clarity, O’Murchu presents not only a vision of what must come but a chronicle of the Spirit-led movement already underway. He identifies three concurrent approaches to faith in today’s Catholic experience: "conventional inherited wisdom" (controlled by a patriarchal, male-dominated institution), "embedded codependency" (passive enablers of the gatekeepers), and "adult empowerment" (openness to new ecclesial and universal realities through adult understanding and wisdom).

Diarmuid O'Murchu

Adult Faith may evoke a mixture of reactions, depending on the reader: anger and fear among those who currently hold power; discomfort and denial among their enablers; reenergized hope among disaffected believers who long for church-wide spiritual and theological adulthood.

Lest anyone criticize O’Murchu as bent on tearing down the church, he dismisses neither the relevance of the hierarchy nor the millions of clerical and lay Catholics who support the inherited structure. Rather, he challenges his brothers and sisters to recognize that the renewed, post-scandal church they hope for is in the making. Adult Faith is a major and welcome contribution to the spreading wisdom revival within Roman Catholicism. 

 - - - - - - -

Copyright (c) 2011 by Alfred J. Garrotto

This article appeared in the May 2011 issue of U.S. Catholic magazine (Vol. 76, No. 5, page 43).

This Imperfect World

Here's a ray of wisdom that needs to be proclaimed from the housetops:

"Being human means to be imperfect, to be limited, and thus to change and travel on a perpetual journey. Mature spirituality gives us the ability to live joyfully in an imperfect world. This is important because an imperfect world is the only one we have. And if God does not love imperfect people, God has no one to love."

Richard Rohr, OFM
On the Threshold of Transformation: Meditations for Men

Day 255

On the Threshold of Transformation: Daily Meditations for Men

Loyola Press

2010

$14.95

380 pages

Something has gone terribly wrong when a Catholic parish with wise leadership, vibrant liturgies, consistently challenging homilies, and over sixty active lay ministries reports a weekly attendance of 20-25 percent of registered parishioners. 

In On the Threshold of Transformation, Franciscan Father Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, offers the clearest connect-the-dots reasons yet for our current Roman Catholic ennui: absence of a focused male spirituality and disinterest among church leaders for encouraging men to develop their unique inner lives. His solution? Churches must "validate, encourage, structure, and teach men an inner life." 

What is at stake if churches continue to stand on the sidelines and simply watch as disenfranchised men drift away? Rohr's high-alert warning is, "I'm not sure what the church's reason for continued existence might be."

For generations, traditional parish ministry has promoted a unisex spirituality, one designed even to meet women's needs better than men's. Connect the dots. Rohr has made it a central work of his ministry to identify men's particular spiritual needs. In his latest book, he draws a year-long roadmap of one-page meditations, challenges, and journaling prompts that free men to honor their distinctly male way of being with God. 

On Day 363, he offers a summary statement: "At the heart of male spirituality is the knowledge that we are imperfect, that we come to God not by doing it right, but ironically and wonderfully by doing it wrong!" In a grave assessment of parishes' failure to promote male spirituality, he says, "More transformation is taking place . . . with things like twelve-step meetings, than in Sunday morning sanctuaries."  

On the Threshold of Transformation is a book that needs to be in the hands of every Catholic priest and every adult male parishioner--now. We can only hope it is not too late.

The Naked Now, by Richard Rohr

U.S. Catholic online (August 24, 2010) has published my review of Richard Rohr's The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See.

I invite you to learn more about this terrific book on contemporary Catholic Christian spirituality.

http://www.uscatholic.org/culture/art-and-reviews/2010/08/naked-now-learning-see-mystics-see