If God Is Love ...

... as I believe, then why do we argue about him (or her) so much?

It seems like Jesus's admonition to love thy neighbor has, in many Christians' view, a loophole exempting neighbors with whom those Christians happen to quarrel theologically.

I've just come across two Peter J. Boyer articles in The New Yorker: "A Hard Faith" in the May 16, 2005, issue, and "The Big Tent" (not available online?) in the August 22, 2005, issue. The first is subtitled, "How the new pope and his predecessor redefined Vatican II"; the second, "Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, and the transformation of American evangelicalism." Both are about divisions within, respectively, the American Catholic Church and Protestantism in America.


American Catholics, at least some of them, are flirting with a new devotion to orthodoxy, says Boyer in "A Hard Faith." Not that Catholic liberals have disappeared from the scene. Leading liberals of the faith, however, have been brought somewhat to heel during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, and can expect no more latitude under Benedict XVI. (Full disclosure: I myself am a practicing American Catholic. I think of myself as a liberal.)

Meanwhile, there is a whole new generation of seminarians and priests who, led by higher-ups such as Denver's Archbishop Charles Chaput (pronounced "sha PEW"), want to continue John Paul's hard line against the likes of "masturbation, premarital sex, birth control (including condoms used to prevent the spread of AIDS), abortion, divorce, homosexual relations, married priests, female priests, and [if it matters any more] any hint of Marxism."

Out of this orthodox approach to the faith came, in 2004, the suggestion by Archbishop Chaput and other bishops that Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry, a Catholic who supports legal abortion, ought not be allowed to take Holy Eucharist at the Mass.

Of course, the other name for the sacrament is Holy Communion, implying the importance of the community of the faithful. Chaput and others would have barred Kerry and other pro-choice Catholic politicians from participating in the most sacred rite performed by faithful Catholics as a community ... without actually "excommunicating" those politicians!

Fortunately, though, a direct confrontation was averted, as other prelates in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — Washington's Cardinal Theodore McCarrick prominent among them — decried the politicization of the sacrament.

Still, battle lines were drawn at home and abroad. Conservatives were increasingly prepared to insist that all Catholic politicians — and all Catholic voters — place their souls in mortal peril if they don't take a firm, consistent, single-minded anti-abortion stance in exercising their public duties. Liberals, for their part, continued to insist on a "seamless garment" approach to public policy: "Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker."

Catholics, or so "seamless garment" liberals say, should "concern themselves with the entire 'spectrum of life from womb to tomb'." Translation: no single-issue politics, pro-life or no, will satisfy God ... or the church, thank you very much.


The conservatives of the American Catholic Church think of themselves as "evangelicals" who respond to the late pope's call to evangelize the world. "The eternal mission of the Church, [John Paul] wrote [in his 1990 encyclical, Redemptoris Missio], was Christian evangelism to the world," Boyer points out.

Of course, there are millions of Protestants in America who have long thought of themselves as evangelicals, and they form the topic of Boyer's other article, "The Big Tent." The article discusses the passing of the torch from the star evangelical preacher of the 20th century, Billy Graham, to his son Franklin, whose theological line is considerably harder and more orthodox than Billy's ever was.

In describing what Billy Graham's ministry has meant to Americans for a half century or more, Boyer first recounts its backdrop. In the early 20th century, the leadership of American Protestantism, the mainline variety especially, went modern and liberal. The leaders took a leaf from Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution and tried to show that God works his will through worldly progress. They interpreted the Bible metaphorically in ways to bolster that view.

In reaction, dissenting theologians urged upon their fellow Protestants what they called "The Fundamentals," the title of "an influential series of books ... published between 1910 and 1915 [laying] out the case for Christian orthodoxy." The whole idea was based on a strictly literal reading of scripture, which was posited to be the divinely inspired word of God.

These "fundamentalists" found a lot of sympathy among rank-and-file churchgoers in the Sunday-morning pews and built a movement which continues to this day. It quickly became a schismatic, separatist movement, pulling itself away from those other American evangelicals who continued to wish to engage with those having more progressive points of view.

Fundametalists' ongoing antagonism to the general culture of modernism was expressed in the present day in Boyer's article by Bob Jones III, "the president of the university founded by his grandfather, [who] suggested in 2002 that fundamentalism drop the name" to avoid confusion with Islamic fundamentalism.

But Jones, who calls himself a "preservationist," conspicuously refers to his brethren as "separated unto Christ." I find that choice of words significant. In other words, fundamentalists, by whatever name, have long gloried in being separate from more liberal Christians, not to mention all non-Christians.

But the Reverend Billy Graham, when he came along in the late 1940s and hit it big in the early 1950s, would have none of such fastidious separatism. He would not draw lines between one Christian and another. He said that Christianity is more a matter of faith than it is of theology. He accordingly, says Boyer, "liked the New Evangelical program of engaging the culture, and, especially, of ecumenical fellowship with Christians with whose doctrines he disagreed — even including Catholics."

Now Billy Graham is old, and his son is stepping into his shoes. Franklin Graham, whose "stongest trait is certitude, which extends to the divisive issues that Billy chose to avoid," has shown himself to be a hardliner for orthodox doctrine. Abortion and homosexuality are sins against God, pure and simple. The global war on terrorism is a war on Islam, make no bones about it. It's a black-and-white world.


What's my take on this? I would have to be a first-class dodo to think anything other than that there is a strong resurgence of "hardlinerism" among both Catholics and Protestants in America. And, clearly, there is a strong resistance to that movement among liberals of the faith.

My own inclination is, first of all, to think that the various "litmus tests" hardliners want to impose are bogus. I agree with Billy Graham more than I do with Franklin Graham: anything which promotes schism and separation is bad.

To wit, consider how hardliners might respond to "Keeping Our Loved Ones Connected to the Body of Christ," an August 7, 2005, column by Fr. Ron Rolheiser, whose weekly essays can be found in leading Catholic newspapers and also at his web site. Fr. Rolheiser writes of the concerns expressed by a friend of his who has grave doubts about religion: "I guess if there's a heaven, I won't be part of it."

But, no, Fr. Rolheiser says to his agnostic friend: "Don't worry about heaven. You'll be there. Too many of us love you. A lot of us church people, including me, won't accept a heaven that doesn't have you in it."

As the Body of Christ on Earth, says this priest, we "are meant to do all the things [Jesus] did, including the forgiveness of sins and the binding of each other, through love, to the family of God. ... We can say to God, 'My heaven includes those I love'."

"Anyone who is sincere" — anyone who is "a wonderful gift ... to so many people" — can be bound to the family of God in this way, says Rolheiser.

Is this too good to be true? Rolheiser counters that sentiment with: "That's simply a description of the Incarnation."

So, if Rolheiser is right ... whither litmus tests?


There's yet another partto my take on this. People like Bob Jones III and Franklin Graham are equally "sincere," there can be no doubt — and the same is true of John Kerry and all whose souls' salvation is supposedly gravely endangered by their pro-choice politics. Who is to say these folks are not "wonderful gifts" to a great many people. They, too, are members of "The Club," by which I mean not just the family of God but the family of all those who were born of mothers who loved them ... which pretty much means everybody in the human race, doesn't it?

Some people are just born "litmus testers." That's all there is to it. They're in The Club, too. Who am I to suggest that earthly schismatics and separatists, assuming they are sincere, don't qualify for the kingdom of heaven?

They probably serve a vital social function, even, these latter-day Jeremiahs. True, I personally don't get it ... but never mind. My point is that, even if such tendencies are (in Rolheiser's term) "shortcomings," as I tend to believe they are, Jesus is bigger than the theological conservatives and I are — along with all my fellow liberals — combined.

Christ weaves even people whom you'd never suspect of being worthy of it into the family of God. That's because God is love ... and if we really believed that, maybe we could stop arguing so vociferously amongst ourselves about our different takes on religion.

Time, the Bible, and the Kingdom of God

Can there be any support for religion in the theory of evolution? From my unabashedly odd perspective, the answer is yes.

Evolution has to do with, first of all, events in time. Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity says time, in the Bible and in Jesus's understanding of it, is quite different from our modern concept. In Chapter 11, "A New Time," Nolan says we think of time as a quantitative measuring tool, a yardstick for events. That's anything but biblical. In the Bible, time can't be separated from events.

Nolan quotes Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad: "Today one of the few things of which we can be quite sure is that [our] concept of absolute time, independent of events, and, like blanks on a questionnaire, only needing to be filled up with data which will give it content, was unknown to Israel." (pp. 89-90).

To Jesus and the Hebrew culture of his day, time was not quantitative and absolute, but qualitative. It was knowable only in relation to the intentions of God, which could change, and the events which reflect those intentions. This was what Jesus meant by reading "the signs of the times." For Jesus, his Jewish contemporaries, and their forebears "time" was anything but the abstraction we take it to be. Rather, time was synonymous with expressions we use such as "what a time it was" or "considering the times."

We read in the Old Testament:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, NIV)

We think of time as consisting of fixed points along an abstract time line to which events attach. We locate ourselves at a fixed point in the exact middle of this imaginary time line. To Jews of Jesus's time, though, the fixed points were the events themselves:

The Jews of ancient times did not locate themselves anywhere, they located events, places and times and saw themselves as on a journey past these fixed points. Sacred events like Creation, Exodus, and the Covenant with Moses, places like Jerusalem, Sinai, Bethel and times like the festivals and times for fasting were fixed points. The individual travelled through or past these fixed points. (p. 91)

What's more, we think of the future as lying ahead of us. Jesus and the ancient Jews did not think of the future in the same abstract terms as we do, but as actual events that are coming up behind us as we experience our present day lives — just as the later finishers in a foot race finish behind the earlier ones.


Those are just some of the ways in which our understanding of time ill prepares us to read the Bible. Here's a yet more important one. Crucially, we think of events in the future as having no power to determine events in the present.

Jesus had a radically different view. To him, the meaning of his times was qualified and even determined by "a real future event which will be qualitatively different from all future events" (p. 92). The Greek word for such a determinative future event was eschaton, from which we derive eschatology. The "signs of the times," properly read, Jesus said, tell us of this future event.

The future event or eschaton Jesus expected was the coming of the "kingdom of God," also called the "kingdom of heaven." In this "kingdom," God in his compassion would forgive the world's sinners, just as the father in Jesus's parable rushed out to embrace his prodigal son, no questions asked, when the son finally returned home.

To Jesus, "the 'kingdom-power' of the future was already influencing the present situation," writes Nolan (p. 95). Accordingly, Jesus's times were ones for rejoicing — "a time to dance," in the words of Ecclesiastes.


This was a truly radical idea. Something had changed, and in a big way, between the "time" of John the Baptist, who baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, and Jesus's own "time," when it came:

John's mood is like the mournful mood of a funeral dirge; Jesus' mood is like the joyful tune of a wedding dance. John's behavior was characterized by fasting; Jesus' behavior was characterized by feasting. And yet they are not contradicting one another. Both John and Jesus represent the actions of Wisdom (that is to say, of God), but they speak to different times and different circumstances. John's time was in fact a time for mourning, and Jesus' time was in fact a time for rejoicing. ... The time of John and the time of Jesus are radically different because they are determined by two radically different future events. John prophesied the judgment of God; Jesus prophesied the salvation of God. John lived off the prospect of a great catastrophe; Jesus lived off the prospect of a great "kingdom." John was the prophet of doom and Jesus was the herald of good news. (pp. 94-95)

This, despite the fact that John and Jesus were basically contemporaries! What had so radically changed?

Nolan says that "as Jesus would have thought of it, God had changed. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was doing something totally new and unprecedented" (p. 96, italics mine).

When Jesus says, in Matthew 11:4-5, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor" (NIV), it's to be read a sign, says Nolan, that "goodness is triumphing over evil. God has relented and is no longer intent upon punishing the people. God now wants to save them. The implication of Jesus' praxis [his customary practice or conduct] and his words is that God has changed. One can see it in the signs of the times" (p. 95, italics in the original).


What? God change? God relent? (The Revised Standard Version even, in several places speaks of God "repenting from evil.") Isn't God supposed to be eternal and unchanging? Aren't his intentions supposed never to vary? How can it make sense to speak of a good God as "repenting from evil"?

No punches are pulled by Nolan in this regard: "The God of Jesus is totally different [in terms of God's "image," to use our modern word] from the God of the Old Testament or the God of the Pharisees — indeed the God of Jesus is quite unlike the God which most Christians worship" (p. 96).

In an endnote (#17, p. 179), Nolan lists several Old Testament passages which show that, as he phrases it, "Nothing was more typical of the Hebrew's Creator God than to do new and unprecedented things, to create means to do something new and unprecedented." Among these passages:

Isaiah 65:17: "Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind" (NIV).

Isaiah 66:22: "As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before me," declares the LORD, "so will your name and descendants endure" (NIV).

Habakkuk 1:5: "Look at the nations and watch — and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told" (NIV).

When God switches from intending to punish sinners to intending to save them — when he repents from evil," in the sense of no longer intending to cause us woe — that clearly qualifies as "doing something in your days that you would not believe."

So God's intentions change, and when they do, we can look forward to a wholly unprecedented future event, an eschaton, which will determine what our experience is like now.

To Jesus, the looked-for event was not a simple one. Rather, it was an either-or proposition. Either the kingdom of God would come, and soon ... or else there would be a catastrophe instead.

Jesus called for faith: specifically, the faith of men and women in believing that a new, widespread reign of heartfelt human-to-human compassion would usher in the kingdom of heaven. If that very brand of faith itself simply became strong enough and widespread enough, it would avert the catastrophic judgment which God would otherwise render upon us humans for our lack of humility toward and service to our fellow humans. That was the essence of Jesus's either-or prophecy (see p. 105 of Nolan for more on the either-or nature of it).

So the eschaton as Jesus saw it was conditioned upon our choice: we could choose compassion and faith — or we could choose their opposites, which we might call ... what? Oppression and self-righteousness? Narrow-mindedness and selfishness?

To Jesus, the coming of the kingdom was recognized as a miracle, says Nolan (p. 99). It would represent a utopia in which all humankind would be liberated from oppression, including oppression by those internal forces of the psyche which keep us as individuals from releasing our built-in potential for freedom (p. 100). This internal capacity for compassion, faith, and the liberation of others and ourselves is within each of us, but nonetheless beyond us; it is God, called by whatever name one chooses.

The kingdom could not come if there is no God, if God doesn't exist. Nolan: "Anyone who thinks that evil will have the last word or that good and evil have a fifty-fifty chance is an atheist " (p. 103).

On the other hand, the truth that there is a God guarantees that the kingdom will come someday. It could come suddenly and immediately if people have enough love, compassion, hope, and faith. Otherwise, Jesus taught, we are in for not just one catastrophe, but possibly many, many wars, disasters, and other sufferings. Still, at the end of the day, goodness will win out over evil, simply because there is a God, and God is good. This is Jesus's teaching in a nutshell.

I see parallels between this teaching and my understanding of the earth's evolutionary history as discussed by Stuart Kauffman (author of At Home in the Universe) and others who study the science of so-called "self-organized complexity."

Kauffman believes, according to Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, that life evolves in a mathematical domain which is not chaos per se but which has the same caapacity for producing novelty. This "edge of chaos" is also capable of allowing the novel beings which do arise to persist without being immediately superseded by vast new novelty; chaos can't do that. Chaos, in fact, is inimical to life.

But living systems, evolving at the edge of chaos, are occasionally plunged into chaos per se. They experience, in other words, catastrophes. Sometimes the catastrophe stems from an unfortunate external perturbation, but sometimes the internal dynamics of the system can get so far out of whack that they provoke an equally disastrous catastrophe of chaotic system behavior.

What can rescue them then? Rescue can come from the very habit their constituents have of working together, checking up on one another's current states, adjusting their own states and behaviors accordingly. No elemental constituent is any other's slave; all units are autonomous and equal. Yet there is a sort of system-wide web of cooperation going on, a network of interdependence whose result is the ability of the system as a whole to recover from chaotic catastrophe and wind up even stronger than before.

Chaos and catastrophe — and the re-emergence therefrom, stronger and better — can happen simply because the units of which such a system is built are, albeit indirectly, in touch with all the other units. No units are ostracized. No units are shunned.

Neither are there any "elites" who boss the "non-elite" units around. Furthermore, no one unit is directly connected to more than a handful of others. There are no true "kings" in such a system — if the system may be metaphorically thought of as a "kingdom"— no actual monarchs to which all the other units are connected and owe direct obligations of fealty as "vassals."

Such "kingdoms" do develop "order for free," though. Out of bottom-up interactions among units that are autonomous and equal emerge top-down regularities. The "kingdom" as a whole turns out to be far greater than the sum of its parts.

This sounds like the "kingdom" of God preached by Jesus, described by Nolan.

That ideal "kingdom" will come someday without fail, Jesus said. He said it would even come right away and suddenly, if only we would immediately establish compassionate, non-stigmatizing, supportive relationships amongst ourselves — among all of us, not just the so-called "children of light."

But if we wouldn't do that, there would be a catastrophe instead. "In the event, as we know," writes Nolan, "it was the catastrophe which came and not the 'kingdom'" (p. 108).

The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70.

Then the Jewish nation was expelled from Palestine in A.D. 135.

By that time, Christianity had for some time been busily establishing itself as a religion separate from Judaism. It had originally been a Jewish sect. The new Christians needed a way to re-interpret Jesus's prophecy of a Jewish catastrophe so that the same prophecy would continue to mean something to them.

One of the ways in which that happened, according to Nolan, was this:

The early Christians simply adapted Jesus' prophecy to the new set of circumstances in which they found themselves.

Jesus' message, like the message of any prophet, was not timeless. Nevertheless it did point to something about humanity and God that was so fundamentally and definitively true that it could be re-interpreted in relation to other times and other places. Once the message had been taken outside Palestine with its particular political crisis, and more especially once the Romans had destroyed the Jewish nation, it was felt that the message had to be adapted to other situations or indeed to any and every situation. (p. 108)

As things actually happened, the early Christians, including the evangelists who wrote the Gospels, "apocalyptized" the message, says Nolan. By that he means this:

The eschaton becomes a supra-historical event distinguishable from the historical and political catastrophe [the fall of the Jewish Temple and nation] which was just about to take place [from the point of view of the Gospel of Mark] ... . The supra-historical judgment on the last day is then used, in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual [i.e., the state of his or her soul] rather than society. Matthew takes the process very much further, laying great emphasis upon the judgment day and upon the apportioning of reward and punishment. (pp. 108-109)

It is clear to me at this point (subject to my reading further) that Nolan prefers to dissociate himself from this apocalyptizing, moralizing strand in Christian history, "by 'de-apocalyptizing' the gospels," as he puts it (p. 109). He wishes to revive our ability to respond to Jesus's teachings as prophetic, not apocalyptic. (And note that in his lexicon, "catastrophe" and "judgment" are virtual synonyms.)

In other words, Nolan wants us to recover an understanding of the Gospel message as being more social than individual. Theough we must each personally choose to commit to a life of compassion and faith, the thrust thereof is necessarily outward, toward others, toward humankind as a whole.

I think of that as being theologically progressive. By that I mean Nolan rues any tendency Christians today may have to look only to the salvation of souls, their own first and then perhaps those of wayward others. Such an otherworldly focus tends to turn religion conservative, even fundamentalist. (I'm now intruding my own thoughts among Nolan's.)

Social justice is not a priority among Christians of that stripe. From Nolan's point of view, any sort of Christianity that doesn't emphasize social justice is completely missing the point. (Again, that's my understanding of his position.)

Perhaps not coincidentally, I'd say, conservative, fundamentalist Christians tend to be creationists, or at least they are typically opposed to Darwin's theory of evolution, in all its guises.

But I find (see above) that the "self-organized complexity" branch of Darwinian science today can give us a way to re-interpret the prophecy of Jesus in the Gospels and adapt it "to other situations or indeed to any and every situation," without apocalyptizing it.

Or, depending on exactly how you define "apocalyptizing," it may permit apocalyptizing the message without then going on to use it "in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual rather than society."

Either way you define "apocalyptizing," applying certain lessons of the "self-organized complexity" branch of Darwinian science today can serve to re-orient Christianity in a more progressive, social justice-oriented direction, based on faith and compassion as Nolan understands the original Gospel meaning of those terms.

"Evolution supports religion!" the headlines might read.

Pain, Chaos, and the Evolutionary Blues

I continue to make my way through Professor Arnold Weinstein's book on how literature and art reveal to us a fundamental, if hidden, human unity. A Scream Goes Through the House has it that "the generosity of art" is that it "tells our collective story" as it "brings at last out into language and life the buried history of our hurt" (pp. 29-30).

Weinstein makes this point in the context of his discussion of James Baldwin's short story about two brothers born in Harlem, "Sonny's Blues" (pp. 25-31). One of the brothers, the narrator, "escapes" and "goes straight," while the younger brother, Sonny, stays and is busted for drugs. The elder brother comes to Sonny's rescue and, in so doing, learns about the blues.

Specifically, he learns "that the blues are pain and suffering set to music, transformed into music." They are, in words Baldwin places in the mouth of his character Creole, "the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph. . . . There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness." (p. 28)

Weinstein says it's too facile to think of art, as we often do, as "little more than opening up one's mouth and unloading . . . as narrowly confessional." In fact, he goes on, "Baldwin blows this concept right out of the water. Making music is a cosmic event, on the order of a reverse hurricane where you tame nature's chaos. You don't just emote or emit; there is indeed an explosion, but you shape it's very elements into song: [here Weinstein quotes Baldwin] 'the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air'."

There is accordingly a congruence between private pain and everyone's pain — and, furthermore, between pain and chaos. By imposing musical or artful order on "the roar rising from the void," we perform "an act of domestication, of yoking suffering into personal style" (p. 28).

But since the "narrowly confessional" is not what art is all about, the blues — and in Weinstein's view, all art is blues — restore our solidarity, our sense of connectedness and community, too. Art/music/blues "resurrects the ghost's of the family's and community's past [as] one fuses with one's loved ones, feels their pain, feels the calvary some suffered . . . recovers one's own walled-off, living deaths . . . repossesses the emotional plenitude of one's existence, extended long back into time and space, preceding even one's birth." (p. 30)


I find the twin idea of taking shared pain (or, more generally, shared feeling) as being congruent with "nature's chaos" and as being the taproot of human solidarity appealing for several reasons. One is fairly personal: over the course of several years, in the not too distant past, I spent a good deal of time pondering, in writing, what might be the religious or spiritual significance of recent investigations into the scientific field of "complexity." Some of these inquiries have turned up an unsuspected domain of dynamical systems' behavior: in addition to order (two types of it) and chaos, there is also the "edge of chaos."

Dynamical systems are, admittedly, mathematical abstractions, but life on Earth apparently bears many of such systems' characteristics. There seem to be reasons to believe — subject to further empirical confirmation — that life evolves at the edge of chaos. When systems have too much order, they cannot evolve at all. When they are in chaos, nothing new can survive for long.

It seemed to me that there was something profound to be apprehended here, something that ought to inform our religion. But I spent a lot of time and energy worrying that our traditional religious insistence on commandment following and pious rectitude was at odds with an edge-of-chaos theology.

Put simply, it looked to me as if evolution, which I, a Christian, do believe in, tells us that divine creation in our world — "ongoing genesis" in an evolving world — takes place by virtue of laws a lot less rigid than some Christians would accept. Many Christians, it seems, are wedded to the idea that God is entirely for order and wholly against chaos. But if that's so, how could an edge of chaos figure so prominently in the process that brought humankind into being?

At some point, my cogitations bogged down, being unable to cut through that Gordian knot. Now, Professor Weinstein provides me with the sword I've been searching for. Just as "the man who creates music . . . is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air," so too does nature do just that, as it evolves.

Testifying to the notion that this is the right sword is the above-mentioned congruence of the chaotic void with the commonality of pain and suffering embodied in art/music/blues. I have suggested in other recent posts that Jesus's teachings of universal brotherhood and societal solidarity were primarily a response to the pain, suffering, and oppression felt by the vast majority of his fellow Jews in 1st-century Palestine (see Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity). His blues — the original Calvary — were thus the definitive blues, if you will.

The blues as a metaphor for life emerging at the edge of chaos amid considerable labor pains patterns strongly with a view of Christ as preeminently a teacher of universal compassion and communal solidarity. We all, in such a world, share in the anguish of the ongoing birth of the new and different, and in the ubiquitous death of the old and outdated. We ought not to add to the misery by despising, marginalizing, and mistreating one another.


Put another way, the "evolutionary blues" are our common heritage, in a world in which we all can hear "the roar rising from the void" — that roar is chaos — and we all are tasked to do our part in "imposing order on it as it hits the air." We each thereby make our own kind of music, an alchemy that can turn our personal hurt into some semblance of societal health.

It has been suggested by such proponents of edge-of-chaos dynamics as theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman — see Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos — that all complex adaptive systems, living and otherwise, experience occasional catastrophes. Something untoward happens, and they are plunged into the dynamical domain labeled "chaos." If they don't perish, they modify their behavior, thus to make their dynamical way back out to the fecund edge of chaos. As they do, they learn tricks that will help them survive future catastrophes. They get stronger in the broken places.

I'm sugesting that woe is the way we humans experience such a process, when it happens to us.

When our lives are bumped over into the chaotic regime, as is apt to happen from time to time, we are traumatized. Though we may survive to get back on an even keel again, the trauma continues to reverberate in the depths of our soul.


This is the point Professor Weinstein makes in his discussion of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey into Night. All of the play's major characters, a father and mother and two grown sons, have trauma locked in their past. Try as they might to dodge the repercussions, thoughm the echoes of those earlier individual traumas roil their present familial relations:

All of the Tyrones are scarred and formed by their pasts, and in the course of the play the occulted material moves from echo and refrain, a foghorn in the distance, to overt utterance, reaching its operatic crescendo in the final scene where each Tyrone confronts his or her ghosts and demons, and shares this confrontation with the others. ... Such a scheme announces that the individual actor is always/already permeated with the life of the others, not merely their contemporary existence, but the whold dreadful sweep of their transactions over time. Long Day's Journey into Night reveals the sticky glue that joins me to you, as if life in the family were a form of flypaper, a morass of sorts in which each figure is stuck, where your skin is attached to me, so that all the desired hegemony I claim for myself turns out to be a mirage. (pp. 38-39)

In computer models of complex dynamical systems poised at the edge of chaos, one of the key features is always the interconnectedness and interdependence of the various (shall we say) "actors" that make up the system. It is as if the system were a family, in Weinstein's/O'Neill's sense of the word. The actors' "transactions over time" include past traumas to themselves and to the system as a whole. The learning done by the system as it recovers from chaos translates into ongoing reverberations of pain and woe for the individual (but not truly separate) actors.

Along similar lines, Jesus's essential message, per Albert Nolan's reading of the Gospels, could also be put as "the individual actor is always/already permeated with the life of the others." We have no business isolating some of us from the rest of us by stigmatizing the "others" as "sinners."

Habits of the Heart

I'm probably a gonzo individualist trying to repent of his weak community values, a confirmed loner trying to escape from his loner-ishness. So everything I say against entrenched individualism needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, I think, entrenched, gonzo, unencumbered individualism is one of the main things that's "wrong with us" today.

By individualism I mean not so much a high-falutin' political and social philosophy — "belief in the primary importance of the individual and in the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence," Wikipedia puts it — as an attitude. If transmuted into a philosophy of the self, it might become solipsism, the "belief that one's self is the only thing that can be known with certainty and verified." If transmuted into the realm of psychology, it could be narcissism, "the pattern of thinking and behaving which involves infatuation and obsession with one's self to the exclusion of others."

In other words, the assumption I wish to question is the one which says, "It's all about me."


Of course, I live about 99% of my life in it's-all-about-me mode, so this is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black. What I'm really trying to do, I suspect, is make some inroads into my own self-absorption.

I see my religion, Roman Catholic Christianity, as an ally in that cause. And never more so than when I read in Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity that Jesus preached mainly against the anti-communitarian, narrow-minded Jewish elites of his day, the scribes and Pharisees in 1st-century Palestine.

Yet I also realize that the problem Jesus confronted was, if anything, the opposite of the one we face today. In his world, the claims of individual human beings to life, health, sustenance, and personal dignity were subsumed under a rigid social and political hierarchy. That hierarchy was confirmed, supposedly, by the "law" handed down from Moses. Under the "law," as Nolan describes the situation, the majority of Jews were maligned and oppressed by their "betters."

The atmosphere was so anti-individualistic partly because of the Roman hegemony in Palestine. Jews in Palestine had any number of approaches to understanding their enslavement, but most believed God was punishing them for their sins. And who were the worst "sinners"? The masses of poor, demon-ridden, illiterate slobs who were too ignorant to observe the textured nuances of the "law." They were the ones responsible for bringing woe to Israel.

To that sort of attitude Jesus said, basically, "No! The real problem with Israel is that attitude itself. It, the opposite of compassion for and solidarity with the poor and the weak, is what will seal Israel's doom, unless there is repentance, and soon."

(I guess I'd better hastily add that this is in no way intended as a polemic against Jews and Judaism. It's merely a comment on the social scene in Jesus's time and place.)

So Jesus, in saying things like "the law is made for men, not men for the law," tried to move his society leftward on the individualism scale. He tried to show that each human life, no matter how poor or ignorant or disease-ridden or "sinful" the individual may be, is equally precious in God's eyes. In fact, those in the well-off elites who scorn such "little ones" will one day find themselves behind others in God's pecking order.


Many centuries later, in northern Europe, circumstances arose which would move society yet further leftward on the individualism scale. In the late Middle Ages, the rise of well-to-do artisans and burghers in places like today's Germany and the Low Countries — these were self-made individuals whose money and status had not been inherited — started the West on a path toward the multifarious institutions of liberty all Americans cherish.

Until very recently, however, liberty was circumscribed for most Americans by various strictures. Much of the constraint was economic. Well-off as I personally happen to be by historical standards, both my parents grew up in families that were, periodically, downright poor. Not living-in-tenements poor, but certainly having-to-pull-up-stakes-and-move-on poor.

Something happened in the middle of the 20th century that made such brushes with poverty unlikely to beset the lives of the greater number of Americans. Economic wealth and financial independence were democratized. Everybody and his brother became, in effect, a "burgher" — the French word for which is bourgeois. And the American bourgeoisie ballooned in size.

As people cast off economic want, they also burst the bonds of all sorts of other strictures formerly confining their behavior — church and religion prominent among them. Not only long-established church communities and parishes vanished, but also social and political institutions which once held people together in some sort of secular community disappeared, as people migrated from cities and farming villes to the wide open spaces of the suburbs. By the mid-1980s, social scientist Robert Bellah and others published Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, saying, in effect, something is out of whack.


Specifically, there has been a decline of true community. There are many reasons for the decline, but an important one is the search for the "unencumbered" self (see p. 152). Bellah and his co-authors suggest that this is not good — that the wholly unencumbered self actually turns out to be an empty self.

The search for the unencumbered self, in turn, is an outgrowth of "radical" individualism. Bellah speaks of . . .

. . . the process by which a primary emphasis on self-reliance has led to the notion of pure, undetermined choice, free of tradition, obligation, or commitment, as the essence of the self . . .

. . . and also of . . .

. . . the radical individualist's sincere desire to "reconnect" with others [as being] inhibited by the emptiness of such an "unencumbered" self . . .

. . . and goes on to say . . .

It is now time to consider what a self that is not empty would be like — one that is constituted rather than unencumbered, one that has, let us admit it, encumbrances, but whose encumbrances make connections to others easier and more natural. Just as the empty self makes sense in a particular institutional context — that of the upward mobility of the middle-class individual who must leave home and church in order to succeed in an impersonal world of rationality and competition — so a constituted self makes sense in terms of another institutional context, what we would call, in the full sense of the word, community. (pp. 152-3)


Radical individualism can be both utilitarian and expressive. It can be utilitarian when seen as a pragmatic means toward maximizing self-interest. It can be expressive — or self-expressive — when it seems the only way an individual can express his or her "unique core of feeling and intuition" (p. 334).

The former mode of radical individualism, the utilitarian, stems from the philosophy of John Locke and others in 17th-century England, which fed into the ideas Jefferson, Madison, et al. incorporated into our founding documents in the 18th century. Locke held that the individual self is fundamentally "prior to society" (p. 143). Civilization is but a byproduct of individual selves coming together in mutual self-interest to form a "social contract."

The latter, expressive mode of radical individualism was originally a romantic reaction against Locke and others. The reason the self should be unfettered, romantics said, was not rational and pragmatic at all. It was that each of us has a sacrosanct core of sentience which can best flourish only under circumstances of radical freedom.

However, both modes, utilitarian and expressive, have been mingled together in American experience. Both assert the primacy of the self over the community; both seek to make the individual person radically unencumbered by history or tradition.


There are also two other forms of individualism, historically speaking, that contribute to the American way of life: republican, or civic, individualism, and biblical individualism.

We inherit our republican or civic tradition of individualism from classical Greece and Rome. This tradition puts "civic virtue" on a par with self-interest as a proper motivator of human action (see p. 335).

The biblical tradition was, until the early to mid-20th century, republican individualism's ally in shaping American thought and practice. Judeo-Christian values emphasize our moral and ethical obligations to one another.

The civic/biblical tradition came unglued from our American attitude toward individualism during the 20th century, in favor of a more radical form using mingled utilitarian and expressive modes of individualism to the exclusion of more tradition-bound approaches. We demoted religion in particular into a purely "private" choice.


In Democracy in America, as far back as the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that we were in danger of (in Bellah's words) "undermining these traditions." Such an unencumbered individualism (again, in Bellah's words) "weakens the very meanings that give content and substance to the idea of individual diginity" (p. 144).

And in the end, paradoxically, unencumbered individualism is empty unless it is set in a context which informs us how to express our freedom. More than anything else, the individual self needs to be constituted within a "community of memory" (pp. 152 ff.). The stories told within such a community are fundamentally necessary because they alone "contain conceptions of character, of what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such character" (p. 153).


The "older civic and biblical traditions" are our semi-abandoned vessels for these stories, conceptions, and virtues. That's too bad. Yet "a return to traditional forms would be to return to intolerable discrimination and oppression," Bellah writes (p. 144). For example, in Plato's Republic the ideal state was constituted as a strict social hierarchy. And, supposedly, the Bible furnishes scant justification for universal tolerance, seeming to set "God's people" above all others.

"The question is, then," writes Bellah, "whether the older civic and biblical traditions have the capacity to reformulate themselves while simultaneously remaining faithful to their own deepest insights" (p. 144).

I admittedly have given little thought as yet to the republican/civic reformulation — sorry about that. But it seems to me that the sought for reformulation of the biblical tradition flows immediately from Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity. Nolan says that Jesus's preaching was all about compassion and societal solidarity. Somehow we have lost sight of this crucial fact, Nolan says, but Jesus's original idea was that inclusiveness, even of so-called "sinners," was, is, and always will be the sine qua non of godliness. (I can think of no better definition of true community, by the way.)

If that teaching of Jesus's were more widely appreciated today, I'd say, a restoration of the biblical tradition of individualism in American could never return us to "intolerable discrimination and oppression"!

A Scream Goes Through the House

A Scream Goes Through the House is professor Arnold Weinstein's title for the 2003 book whose subtitle, "What Literature Teaches Us About Life," might more aptly be changed to "What Literature Teaches Us About Life's Connections."

I bought the book a year and a half ago and got bogged down after reading the preface, introduction, and first chapter. The author's premise attracted me: "literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community. . . . Through art we discover that we are not alone." But, according to his approach, the feelings which predominate are pain and suffering. Joy and delight take a back seat. I wasn't ready for that then.

I seem to be ready for it now, though explaining what has changed is a bit difficult. In Jesus before Christianity, another book which I never finished and which I have lately been rereading, Albert Nolan makes the point that Jesus was motivated primarily by compassion for those who suffer — that's point number one. Point number two is the effect Martin Scorsese has had on me as I've immersed myself in his documentary My Voyage to Italy, a retrospective look at the Italian cinema of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

The films of Rossellini, de Sica, Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni, et al. which Scorsese extols were never the type I would, in my younger days, seek out for diversion or grand amusement. But Scorsese now shows me how — if I can just barely manage to identify myself with the wideness of his personal mercy — to draw spiritual sustenance from even those characters and situations the puritan in me finds repellant.

So here's what I'm thinking. All this time as a human being and as a Christian, I've been blind to what Christianity is really all about. I'd like here and now to suggest what I mean by that.


To begin doing so, let me first lay out a few choice quotes from Weinstein's book:

Literature and art provide intercourse of a unique sort. Through art we discover that we are not alone. . . . That picture of connectedness, of a universe that is umbilical and strange — a picture no camera can take — takes the measure of our true lives. (pp. ix-x)

. . . the bloodstream of feeling that carries us into others and others into us . . . . (p. x)

. . . time avails not, and their plaint enters me, through this dream, with sweet and brutal force. A scream goes through the house, one person's pain becomes another's, across time and space; there are no borders separating us. (pp. x-xi)

[Art is] the yearned-for picture that would render our true arrangements in time and space, in body and mind, in heart and soul. . . . a new geography, indeed a new cosmography . . . to represent our actual plenitude and reach. (p. xi)

Art reveals and expresses our real but hidden story: that which lies under the surface, in the realm of feeling, unavailable to the naked eye; that which still resonates, though long past, through memories and fantasies . . . . [Art] quite simply reconceives our place in the world, and thereby redraws our own contours, showing us to be porous and connected. . . . The scream that goes through the house is the heartbeat that makes audible, at last, who we are, how resonant we are, how connected we are. (pp. xi-xii)

Those words from Weinstein's preface should be enough to make it clear that (if we agree with the author) there is a hidden connectedness among us that is most readily seen in the universality of our secret suffering. Art exposes that universality.


Following the book's preface, a James Baldwin quote from his character Creole in the story "Sonny's Blues" expresses the theme of Weinstein's introduction in a nutshell:

Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness. (pp. xx-xxi)

Of "the sheer excitement I see generated in students by the encounter with art," Weinstein goes on to say:

I think of this excitement as a kind of creatural nourishment, on the order of a transcendent meal, even of a blood transfusion, so that reading literature and looking at painting become a life-giving exercise. . . . Art is sustenance. Art is transformation. Such transactions are properly inspiriting, not unlike the project of the cannibals of old: to ingest the body of warriors they revered was to take into themselves the spirit of those warriors. (p. xxxvii)

As a Catholic, I couldn't help thinking of the Eucharist at the Mass, when I read that. We get spiritual sustenance from ingesting the body and blood of Jesus, do we not? At the same time, we imagine that all of us communicants are ourselves members of the One Body, of the mystical corpus of Christ.


Of course, I need hastily to add, theologically we are to do more than simply imagine these things. They are as real as real can be.

The question is, how can we make this "fact" more than theologically true? How can we make it (to use a word Weinstein adores) existentially true? How can we experience it?

I experience it when I read in Nolan's book that the spirit of God, as revealed in Jesus, is one preeminently of compassion with all who suffer and whose suffering is spat upon.

I experience it when I hear Scorsese talk lovingly about wayward movie characters who are so "lost," they would never be welcomed (and would never appear) at a church social.

I experience it when I read in Weinstein's book of Shakespeare's Hamlet and William Faulkner's Quentin Compson and many other characters who are "fatally incapacitated" (p. xxxv), and I realize that I am, too, in my likeness to them, one of the "sinners" or "little ones" whom Jesus forgave.

Our "Voyages to Italy"

"She's moved by all these lives that have come and gone before her. It's no longer a matter of history or relics, but of real people who enjoyed life, and who suffered — just as she suffered, just as everyone does."

—Martin Scorsese, My Voyage to Italy

Roberto Rossellini's 1953 Voyage to Italy is one of those nearly forgotten mid-20th-century masterpieces of Italian cinema resurrected by Martin Scorsese in his like-titled 1999 documentary, My Voyage to Italy, available on DVD.

In it, Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders star as an emotionally inert British couple who travel to Naples in southern Italy to sell a deceased relative's house. Katherine and Alex Joyce's marriage is on the rocks, though they don't know it yet. Katherine (Bergman) thinks they just need the opportunity afforded by the trip to be alone with each other. Alex (Sanders) vaguely fears it will bore him stiff for that to happen, but he won't admit it, either to her or to himself.

The strangeness of their new surroundings doesn't rekindle romance as Katherine hoped ... just mental discomfort and anxiety. All the street singing, laughing, talking, and fighting that drifts through their hotel window pains her in particular, for she is slightly more aware than Alex of the dead zone at the center of their lives. It is as if all the sensuality and sheer vitality of southern Italy threatens to poke holes in the bubble they have built around their senses and their emotions.

Out of her need for revitalization, though, is born a hesitant, tenuous reawakening of her spirit. Clueless, numb, defensive Alex is nearly brain- and heart-dead, as he shows over and over. He hangs back as Katherine begins stoking her personal rebirth by visiting museums and ancient historic sites, getting in touch with the life and the death that are woven through the tapestry of a culture that has existed from time out of mind.

Skulls in an ossuary, Voyage to Italy

This life/death duality is betokened by Katherine's seeing from her taxicab all the women on the street in Naples who either have children in tow or are pregnant — Katherine is childless. Later, when she visits an ossuary (right), Scorsese narrates the words I borrow as an epigraph to this post.

As Scorsese makes clear, Katherine is finally beginning to come to terms with what he has already described as a "presence," one that has been subliminally gnawing at her since her arrival: "Italy and its ancient past ... This past is everywhere, and it's not something out of a book. It's very much alive. Katherine opens her eyes to Italy, its statues, its ruins. ... At times, she's not prepared for Italy's effect on her. It gets to her, suddenly, and without any warning."

Scorsese continues, "Rossellini said this about Voyage to Italy: 'Death doesn't exist here, because it's a living thing in Italy. It's a different kind of civilization. There's a different meaning to things here'." That contrasts with the extreme individualism which historically arose in northern Europe in the Middle Ages and (I assume) is not as strong in southern Italy.

Katherine and Alex, amid the Italians, are notably northern in appearance and attitude. It's as if their extreme individualism is the basis for their emotional disconnect, their lack of passion and compassion. Notably, Katherine is accompanied in the scene at the ossuary by a dark, Italian woman who confides to her that she prays there for her brother who died and was buried in Greece during the war. She solemnly prays also that she might have a child.

So the "different meaning to things" in Italy has to do with allowing oneself to reverberate to the unseen-yet-felt "presence" that is all around one: to be woven emotionally into the neverending tapestry of human life, delight, suffering, procreating ... and, of course, dying. This is what no compassionless individual, married or not, can do. Without compassion there is no passion. Without passion, no compassion.


Compassion was what Jesus was all about, says Albert Nolan in Jesus before Christianity. Everything he taught flowed from his umbrage at the sufferings of the "little ones": the vast majority in his society who had no status, no money, no health, and no hope.

Nolan makes clear that what has been called Jesus's "preferential option for the poor" is not just for the impecunious. It's not just for the ill or the spat upon. It's universal love for all of his brothers and sisters, all of humanity.

Even the scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus railed at incessantly because their hard-heartedness and short-sightedness were ruining others' lives — not to mention their own — were linked into Jesus's circle of solidarity. As was the Roman centurion and the Canaanite woman at the well; though Jesus tried for strategic reasons to limit his message of change to his fellow Jews, he was unable to deny Gentiles' faith as well.

Jesus knew it: everyone suffers. Everyone is an apt vessel for compassion.


A passage from a book about what art and literature teach us — mainly, that "there are no borders separating us" — exemplifies what Katherine and later, mercifully, Alex absorb from visits to ancient ossuaries and the like during their voyage to Italy. The book is Arnold Weinstein's A Scream Goes Through the House. The passage is from his preface, pp. x-xi, in which he illustrates the purpose of his book by recounting a dream of his:

July 25, 2001. Brittany, France. My wife and I have been here a week. My daughter, her husband, and their two children — seven-year-old Anna and two-year-old Gustav — arrived today. We allow Anna a special treat: to sleep in the trundle bed in our bedroom. All are asleep and I dream. I am in Memphis, where I grew up, and my mother and father are speaking, in low but urgent tones, in the bedroom next to me. Their voices grow louder, more insistent, moving from what seems a lament to what I can only call a wail. My father, who is depressed and dying, expresses his misery over and over to my mother, but she too utters her pain and anguish. In waves, in a singsong, systolic and diastolic, like a dirge, these sounds of my parents' hurt traverse the wall and invade our room. And, sure enough, Anna, now awake, says to me, "They're making noise." "Yes," I reply. "Yes."

I awake. All is quiet. Anna sleeps in her trundle bed, and my wife sleeps next to me. A minute later, I hear, from the third bedroom, Gustav wake up and cry, and I hear my daughter go into his room to comfort him. He goes back to sleep. But I am awed by the cogency and reach of this dream. My father has been dead for twenty years, and my mother now lies, stroke-ridden, in a nursing home in Memphis. Yet, time avails not, and their plaint enters me, through this dream, with sweet and brutal force. A scream goes through the house, one person's pain becomes another's, across time and space; there are no borders separating us. Life is a shadow play, and we are mummers all, visited and doubled by the ghosts of the past, invested with their pain, living a continuous drama that does not know closure. Brittany is Memphis, my children and grandchildren are my parents, the dead still live, the voices are not stilled.

This, I imagine, is precisely what the skulls in the ossuary whisper to Katherine in Voyage to Italy: that life is "a continuous drama that does not know closure," and that we participate in it fully only when we have compassion for all who have ever experienced its "sweet and brutal force."


What exactly is compassion? A story of a trip to the vicinity of another Naples, that in Florida, gives a clue.

The incident is written of by Jonathan Franzen in "My Bird Problem," a lengthy reflection printed in The New Yorker of August 8 & 15, 2005. Mr. Franzen brings off a guided tour of the history of his interior life, all 44-plus years of it, while at the same time telling us why he loves the pursuit outsiders call birdwatching and insiders call "birding." Here is a snatch of his prose, which I take the liberty of reparagraphing:

In Florida, at the Estero Lagoon at Fort Myers Beach, where, according to my guidebook, I was likely to find "hundreds" of red knots and Wilson's plovers, I instead found a Jimmy Buffett song playing on the Holiday Inn beachfront sound system and a flock of gulls loitering on the white sand behind the hotel. It was happy hour. As I was scanning the flock, making sure that it consisted entirely of ring-billed gulls and laughing gulls, a tourist came over to take pictures. She kept moving closer, absorbed in her snapshots, and the flock amoebically distanced itself from her, some of the gulls hopping a little in their haste, the group murmuring uneasily and finally breaking into alarm cries as the woman bore down with her pocket digital camera.

How, I wondered, could she not see that the gulls only wanted to be left alone? Then again, the gulls didn't seem to mind the Jimmy Buffett. The animal who most clearly wanted to be left alone was me.

Farther down the beach, still looking for the promised throngs of red knots and Wilson's plovers, I came upon a particularly charmless stretch of muddy sand on which there was a handful of more common shorebirds, dunlins and semi-palmated plovers and least sandpipers, in their brownish-gray winter plumage. Camped out amid high-rise condos and hotels, surveying the beach in postures of sleepy disgruntlement, with their heads scrunched down and their eyes half shut, they looked like a little band of misfits. Like a premonition of a future in which all birds will either collaborate with modernity or go off to die someplace quietly.

What I felt from them was beyond love. I felt outright identitication. The well-adjusted throngs of collaborator birds in South Florida, both the trash pigeons and the trash grackles and the more stately but equally tame pelicans and cormorants, all struck me now as traitors. It was this motley band of modest peeps and plovers on the beach that reminded me of the human beings I loved best — the ones who didn't fit in.

These birds may or may not have been capable of emotion, but the way they looked, beleagured there, few in number, my outcast friends, was how I felt. I'd been told that it was bad to anthropomorphize, but I could no longer remember why. It was, in any case, anthropomorphic only to see yourself in other species, not to see them in yourself. To be hungry all the time, to be mad for sex, to not believe in global warming, to be shortsighted, to live without thought of your grandchildren, to spend half your life on personal grooming, to be perpetually on guard, to be compulsive, to be habit-bound, to be avid, to be unimpressed with humanity, to prefer your own kind: these were ways of being like a bird.

Later in the evening, in posh, necropolitan Naples, on a sidewalk outside a hotel whose elevator doors were decorated with huge blowups of cute children and the monosyllabic injunction "SMILE," I spotted two disaffected teen-agers, two little chicks, in full Goth plumage, and I wished that I could introduce them to the brownish-gray misfits on the beach.

Outright identification, beyond love, with the misfit and beleaguered. The only major differences I can spot between Jonathan Franzen's description of his feelings about the endangered shore birds and Goth teens of Florida and Albert Nolan's description of how Jesus felt about his "little ones" are that the latter were all human and that there were considerably more of them in first-century Palestine. The downtrodden and alienated whom Jesus championed were anything but "few in number."

So, I feel, that is the essence of compassion: outright identification, beyond love, with all who suffer, who are threatened, or who feel unwanted — which includes all of us humans, at least some of the time, if we'd only just admit it.


Outright identification with those, human or animal, who are not us seems then to be the principal spiritual grace. This is the milk of human kindness that flowed through Jesus's veins at all times, and which flows through the veins of each of us some of the time — when, that is, we can manage not to be hungry, or mad for sex, or unable to believe in the danger of global warming, or shortsighted, or heedless of our own born or unborn grandchildren's lives.

When we are not focused like a laser beam on our personal appearance and grooming, when we are not perpetually on guard, or compulsive, or habit-bound, or avid, or unimpressed with humanity, we are truly capable of compassion. Especially when we step outside the customary preference we exhibit for our own kind, we truly have a potential for solidarity.

And that, if Albert Nolan is to be believed — and I for one think he is — may be the principle teaching Jesus meant to leave with us. We are to make of each of our lives a continuously compassion-resurrecting "voyage to Italy," as it were.