Posts in month: February, 2009

“How satisfying it would be to call so-and-so on the carpet for their wicked ways. Whether it’s the crazy sister-in-law, the negative co-worker or the selfish spouse, there’s nothing like the dysfunctions of others to bring out the beast in us.”

You know it’s bad when you start practicing the speeches.

You know, the little speeches you rehearse in your head for the grand and glorious moment when you finally get to tell so-and-so what you really think about them.

Your monologue gets more brilliant each day as you practice it over and over again in you car or shower, clarifying your thoughts, honing your points, preparing for that big day when you finally let them have it.

The stunning clarity and accuracy with which you deliver your soliloquy will be amazing. It’s fantasy you can practically taste, that beautiful moment when you finally take the filters off and confront them with the truth.

The truth about their selfishness and dysfunctions.

Or the way they misrepresent facts and manipulate others into taking their side.

Or how they blame everyone else for their problems and refuse to take responsibility for their own self-created mess.

Or the way they conveniently rewrite history to suit their story and get away with it because nobody is willing to call them on their lies.

Or how they hurt people and don’t even seem to care.

Oh, it will be a moment alright. Because once you finally speak the truth, there can be no more denials; because, as everyone knows, there is no defense against the truth – the real truth that is.

In fact, they will probably be rendered absolutely speechless, because they’ve finally been outed.

No more manipulating, no more game playing, no more falsehoods, and no more lies.

Now, thanks to you, they have been exposed and the whole world knows who and what they really are.

We’ve all been there.

Scheming and dreaming about how satisfying it would be to call so-and-so on the carpet for their wicked ways.

Whether it’s the crazy sister-in-law, the negative co-worker or the selfish spouse, there’s nothing like the dysfunctions of others to bring out the beast in us.

And what makes us even crazier is the way everybody else lets them get away with it. It’s almost like no one but us is willing to see the truth.

So we rehearse the speeches, savoring the righteousness of our words as we turn them over and over again in our mind, dreaming of the day when we can expose the evil one. So that God and everybody else will finally know the true nature of their wrongs.

Well, guess what? God already knows.

God knows all about their silly little games. Just like God knows all about your silly little games, and my silly little games, and all the other ways that we human beings make each other nuts.

But God – and feel free to apply that term as literally, conceptually, specifically or vaguely as you like – has decided to love them anyway. Because the mind of God is large enough to hold a person’s negative behavior and their positive attributes, at the same time.

And therein lies the problem. We human beings think in terms of either/or, but God created a world of AND.

As in we’re selfish and we’re selfless; we’re kind and we’re mean; we’re judgmental and forgiving, each and every one of us.

Nobody is all good or all bad, and alerting the world to the flaws of others never changes things at all.

So the next time you start practicing your speech, you might want to ask yourself what little speech might someone be preparing for you?

Lisa Earle McLeod is an author, keynote speaker, nationally syndicated columnist, business consultant, and media personality. Lisa Earle McLeod’s comments can be read at <www.forgetperfect.com>.

“Brotherhood Week”: Is there still such an observance? I Googled, and came up with scores of versions, sung and printed, of Tom Lehrer’s delightfully cynical or cynically delightful song of satire about the prejudices and hatreds that were disguised and covered that one week of the year. While Lehrer’s song is a chastening dose of realism, one has to observe that some good things are going on; serious people are working away at improving inter-religious relations; and many more are acting in programs and in ways that advance the minimize the potential of lethal actions, group against group.

Someone who tackles the religion beat has plenty of choices on what to cover, as I did last week. The Pope and the Jews. How the religious line up pro- and con- on Charles Darwin. Whether Abraham Lincoln, our most religiously profound president, has anything to say to us today. New Catholic and Evangelical resolves to fight on the anti-abortion front. But few of these stories do justice to the way religious forces and energies are put to work close to the ground. I look at my logbook and find numbers of these in a week not named “Brotherhood.” Some examples:

First, an afternoon with a religion reporter who is helping her profession make its way in, between, and among print and electronic media. There is no way she can keep up with religion stories, so abundant are they. Yet she reports that recent college graduates, now in journalism schools, tend to have little interest (yet!) in religion, and don’t foresee how they are going to have to make sense of it in the years ahead. Why the generation gap in understanding of the role of religion, with its healing and killing power?

Some younger people do have an understanding and are doing something about it. As this Sightings column is making its way to screens like yours this morning, I am breakfasting and chatting with leadership of the Interfaith Youth Core. Founder and leader Eboo Patel looked around at lectures, forums, and action groups dealing with religion(s) in public life and saw mainly gray-haired seniors. Older people know how important their topics are. Patel reasoned that it is the young who have longest to live with interfaith conflict, and who most need hope of reconciliations. He founded this group, now national and more, to attract the under-thirty set, and attract them it has. There is nothing wishy or washy about the conversations or activities among these young people of all faiths who are changing their part of the world.

At dinner this weekend with friends, my wife and I enjoyed the company of people, most of whom we had never met, who deal with what gets called “faith-based” on every level, from the global to the ghetto-school. Entrepreneurial, full of spirit and Spirit, tireless, they put faith to work. How much does the world we call “secular” know of the buzz of activities, the energies, the thinking of such, when “The New Atheism” more readily attracts attention?

Then there is an e-mail from Rabbi Michael Lerner, announcing his lung cancer, praying for prayers, and pitching for so many causes associated with Tikkun magazine and his Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP). The NSP is not everyone’s cup of tea, but Lerner has added the voice and action of “spiritual progressives” to the media mix long dominated by “spiritual regressives”. Here’s to his health and to faith-based life of many sorts where the promotion of health in public life gets fostered. Tom Lehrer had his place and time, but now a dispirited culture needs new songs. We’ll listen.

References:

Listen to a sound file of Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week” at http://www.getalyric.com/mp3/lyrics/songs/tom_lehrer-4565/that_was_the_year_that_was-14721/national_brotherhood_week-78507/.

Learn more about Interfaith Youth Core at http://www.ifyc.org/.

Learn more about Tikkun, the magazine and the movement, at http://www.tikkun.org/.

Martin E. Marty’s biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

The announcement in church bulletins and on Web sites has been greeted with enthusiasm by some and wariness by others. But mainly, it has gone over the heads of a vast generation of Roman Catholics who have no idea what it means: “Bishop Announces Plenary Indulgences.”

In recent months, dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago — the indulgence, a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife — and reminding them of the church’s clout in mitigating the wages of sin.

The fact that many Catholics under 50 have never sought one, and never heard of indulgences except in high school European history (Martin Luther denounced the selling of them in 1517 while igniting the Protestant Reformation), simply makes their reintroduction more urgent among church leaders bent on restoring fading traditions of penance in what they see as a self-satisfied world.

“Why are we bringing it back?” asked Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn, who has embraced the move. “Because there is sin in the world.”

Like the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the indulgence was one of the traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of simplicity and informality for the church. Its revival has been viewed as part of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the council’s reforms.

The indulgence is among the less noticed and less disputed traditions to be restored. But with a thousand-year history and volumes of church law devoted to its intricacies, it is one of the most complicated to explain.

According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face punishment after death, in Purgatory, before they can enter heaven. In exchange for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with no formal ceremony or sacrament.

There are partial indulgences, which reduce purgatorial time by a certain number of days or years, and plenary indulgences, which eliminate all of it, until another sin is committed. You can get one for yourself, or for someone who is dead. You cannot buy one — the church outlawed the sale of indulgences in 1567 — but charitable contributions, combined with other acts, can help you earn one. There is a limit of one plenary indulgence per sinner per day.

It has no currency in the bad place.

“It’s what?” asked Marta de Alvarado, 34, when told that indulgences were available this year at several churches in New York City. “I just don’t know anything about it,” she said, leaving St. Patrick’s Cathedral at lunchtime. “I’m going to look into it, though.”

The return of indulgences began with Pope John Paul II, who authorized bishops to offer them in 2000 as part of the celebration of the church’s third millennium. But the offers have increased markedly under his successor, Pope Benedict, who has made plenary indulgences part of church anniversary celebrations nine times in the last three years. The current offer is tied to the yearlong celebration of St. Paul, which continues through June.

Dioceses in the United States have responded with varying degrees of enthusiasm. This year’s offer has been energetically promoted in places like Washington, Pittsburgh, Portland, Ore., and Tulsa, Okla. It appeared prominently on the Web site of the Diocese of Brooklyn, which announced that any Catholic could receive an indulgence at any of six churches on any day, or at dozens more on specific days, by fulfilling the basic requirements: going to confession, receiving holy communion, saying a prayer for the pope and achieving “complete detachment from any inclination to sin.”

But in the adjacent Archdiocese of New York, indulgences are available at only one church, and the archdiocesan Web site makes no mention of them. (Cardinal Edward M. Egan “encourages all people to receive the blessings of indulgences,” said his spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, who said he was unaware that the offer was not on the Web site, but would soon have it posted.)

The indulgences, experts said, tend to be advertised more openly in dioceses where the bishop is more traditionalist, or in places with fewer tensions between liberal and conservative Catholics.

“In our diocese, folks are just glad for any opportunity to do something Catholic,” said Mary Woodward, director of evangelization for the Diocese of Jackson, Miss., where only 3 percent of the population is Catholic.

Even some priests admit that the rules are hard to grasp.

“It’s not that easy to explain to people who have never heard of it,” said the Rev. Gilbert Martinez, pastor of St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan, the designated site in the New York Archdiocese for obtaining indulgences. “But it was interesting: I had a number of people come in and say, ‘Father, I haven’t been to confession in 20 years, but this’ ” — the availability of an indulgence — “ ‘made me think maybe it wasn’t too late.’ ”

Getting Catholics back into confession, in fact, was one of the motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.

“Confessions have been down for years and the church is very worried about it,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit and former editor of the Catholic magazine America. In a secularized culture of pop psychology and self-help, he said, “the church wants the idea of personal sin back in the equation. Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance.”

“The good news is we’re not selling them anymore,” he added.

To remain in good standing, Catholics are required to confess their sins at least once a year. But in a survey last year by a research group at Georgetown University, three-quarters of Catholics said they went to confession less often or not at all.

Under the rules in the “Manual of Indulgences,” published by the Vatican, confession is a prerequisite for getting an indulgence.

Among liberal Catholic theologians, the return of the indulgence seems to be more of a curiosity than a cause for alarm. “Personally, I think we’re beyond the time when indulgences mean very much,” said the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame who supports the ordination of women and the right of priests to marry. “It’s like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube of original thought. Most Catholics in this country, if you tell them they can get a plenary indulgence, will shrug their shoulders.”

One recent afternoon outside Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Forest Hills, Queens, two church volunteers disagreed on the relevance of indulgences for modern Catholics.

Octavia Andrade, 64, laughed as she recalled a time when children would race through the rosary repeatedly to get as many indulgences as they could — usually in increments of 5 or 10 years — “as if we needed them, then.”

Still, she supports their reintroduction. “Anything old coming back, I’m in favor of it,” she said. “More fervor is a good thing.”

Karen Nassauer, 61, said she was baffled by the return to a practice she never quite understood to begin with.

“I mean, I’m not saying it is necessarily wrong,” she said. “What does it mean to get time off in Purgatory? What is five years in terms of eternity?”

The latest offers de-emphasize the years-in-Purgatory formulations of old in favor of a less specific accounting, with more focus on ways in which people can help themselves — and one another — come to terms with sin.

“It’s more about praying for the benefit of others, doing good deeds, acts of charity,” said the Rev. Kieran Harrington, spokesman for the Brooklyn diocese.

After Catholics, the people most expert on the topic are probably Lutherans, whose church was born from the schism over indulgences and whose leaders have met regularly with Vatican officials since the 1960s in an effort to mend their differences.

“It has been something of a mystery to us as to why now,” said the Rev. Dr. Michael Root, dean of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, S.C., who has participated in those meetings. The renewal of indulgences, he said, has “not advanced” the dialogue.

“Our main problem has always been the question of quantifying God’s blessing,” Dr. Root said. Lutherans believe that divine forgiveness is a given, but not something people can influence.

But for Catholic leaders, most prominently the pope, the focus in recent years has been less on what Catholics have in common with other religious groups than on what sets them apart — including the half-forgotten mystery of the indulgence.

“It faded away with a lot of things in the church,” said Bishop DiMarzio. “But it was never given up. It was always there. We just want to people to return to the ideas they used to know.”