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Marianists at
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A Reflection on Marianist Formation on the Eve of a Post-Tradition Christopher M. Duncan, Ph.D.
Before I begin I need to explain the provocative title of this reflection. I stole the initial phrase from the young women living in the Faith, Vocation and Leadership house in UD’s student neighborhood. One night while having dinner with these outstanding students, I noticed that on their wall was the challenge they had set for themselves, namely to do what it took to “die to self” and live out their true Christian calling. Father Bernie Lee opens his book Habits for the Journey by saying that “Marinaist travelers keep Christian stories in one hand and a newspaper in the other.” Although it may seem a bit unorthodox, that is what this eclectic reflection is intended to model. It is an oddly dark reflection that is at its core meant to be both hopeful and challenging. If it misses the mark, I hope you will forgive me. There are six basic questions in the world: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How? The MEA mission statement answers four of those questions quiet well. However, it is notably vague on the last two—Why and How? It is those two questions, and especially the last one, which I believe must occupy us as a community in the future. In accepting the Marinaist’s invitation to join with them in their work we not only accepted their well known hospitality, but also agreed to participate in their tradition. We became partners and fellow-travelers in a set of conversations that have been taking place for a little over two hundred years in one sense and over two thousand years in another. Most of us, it seems safe to say, still have a lot to learn. But, we are not Gnostics. All living traditions are marked not simply, or even primarily, by what the participants know as much as they are by what the participants do—their practices and habits, if you will. While I will begin the first stage of the reflection by looking at the question of why MEAs, I want to end the reflection by pushing each of us to take as our task in the coming years the how of MEAs. What are the practices and habits that will define us as members of the Marianist family in the way that the adage “they will know we are Christians by our love” both “defines” and challenges the members of the wider faith? In a very dark and deeply troubling novel The Road, Cormac McCarthy paints a picture of a post-apocalyptic world in which human life has been reduced to its most basic and often base elements. The story revolves around the arduous journey of the Man and the Boy through the treacherous wasteland that has become the world. The Man’s only mission in life is to safeguard the Boy of whom he says “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” Shortly into the novel McCarthy describes this bleak world: “It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where barren woodland fell away on every side. Its snowing, the Boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire like the last host of Christendom.” As I re-read those words, I wondered whether there was in the heart of Chaminade a similar feeling as he looked around before beginning his travels? McCarthy goes on later and writes of this new world and loss: “Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drowning down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.” Though not on my knowing of him given to the same melancholy that haunts McCarthy’s work, it seemed to me that there is more than a whiff of this sentiment in the work of Bernie Lee and at the foundation of this new Marianist experiment we are part of. Lee puts it this way: “Because symbols gain their power from their intelligibility within a worldview, when that worldview changes greatly the symbols no longer work well. When those symbols which helped us understand God have lost their frame of reference in a worldview, we do not say to ourselves, ‘Our symbolic structure is ineffective.’ We say, rather, ‘Where is God?’ ‘What does it mean to be Catholic?’. . . . ‘Which Marinaists get it?’ Lee goes on: ‘Some of our feelings of helplessness are because we have lost many of our symbolic moorings. Nor is it within our power just to create their replacements, even less to resurrect the former ones with staying power. Symbols well up in our collective soul ‘when it is time.’ The best we can do is help create the conditions that favor their nurture.” To accomplish this we must of course read the signs of the times in light of our tradition, but we must, as Lee continues, “. . . be there for the world with all that we have at our disposal from Marianist life, and God will do with us as God wills. ‘Being there’ is within our power.’ So, here we are. Showing up is at least half the battle. But, it is not in and of itself enough. Once we are where we should be, we still must decide how we will be while we are where we are. As MEAs we are called upon to extend the conversation and to continue the tradition as we shape it by our participation in it. Both we and the Marianists we are joining must renew and extend our commitment in a manner that allows us to engage in the ever present becoming marked by the following call to Marianist practice: “To be formed by Mary leads to an openness to be influenced by such a communal context and to act in ways to create such an environment.” But, this is easier said than done for so many reasons. To unpack this idea a little I want to simultaneously make it more concrete and analogical at the same time. At a minimum there are three groups who will participate in this particular communal context who must each find an appropriate way to respond to this new world if this is going to work. There are the Marianists themselves who are recognized as such by everyone as Marianists. There is the larger UD community itself made up of many different types of people with varying levels of attachment to and participation in the tradition and its practices. And there are the MEAs who are on some level seeking to be recognized as full participants and carriers of the tradition by both the recognized Marianists and the larger community itself. In other words, we are on some ontological level trying to become real Marianists. The catch is that that designation is only partially under our control. To be recognized is to be recognized by an Other. And it is here that I want to turn to a recent movie—Lars and the Real Girl— to amplify the difficulties and the opportunities embedded in this moment in time. Lars is a very sad but sweet man living in the garage of his brother and his wife. Lars’ mother died in child birth and he has never gotten over that loss. This has manifested itself in his unwillingness to enter into any deep human relationships. Indeed, even the touch of another human being makes his skin feel as though it is on fire. Hence love and pain are so intimately connected that he cannot dare to feel and so he is alone and sad. However, because human beings are not made to be alone, Lars must find another person to be with. To accomplish this he orders a life-like blow up doll off the internet named Bianca. To Lars she is in fact a real girl. Introducing her to his brother and his wife, Lars explains that she has problems with her legs and so must sit in a wheelchair. Furthermore, the airline has lost her luggage so she must borrow some clothes to wear. Finally, he asks if Bianca can stay in the spare bedroom because she and Lars are both “religious” and it would not be right for them to stay together in the garage without being married. After a vigorous argument with his wife, the brother grudgingly agrees to play along. After a visit to the local Dr. who explains that Lars must need this relationship to become whole in some way, the entire community agrees to go along with the supposed fiction. Bianca is invited to parties. She has dinner with the family. She goes to church and is welcomed openly and warmly by the pastor and the congregation. Indeed, the community so embraces her because of their love for Lars that it becomes impossible to tell that they no longer believe that she is not real. At one critical moment in the movie, an older woman from town picks Bianca up for a school board meeting that Lars is not going to attend. Sensing his frustration at Bianca’s leaving the women exclaims to Lars—“Listen Mr. she has a life of her own!” Later that night when Bianca returns, Lars confronts her in her bedroom. As the brother and wife listen outside as Lars raises his voice to Bianca the wife is troubled and says to her husband “but they never fight!” The moment when you realize that the transformation is complete comes when the brother who has been incredulously going along for the whole film looks in on Bianca to make sure she is o.k. before he turns out the bedroom light for the night. She has in effect become real. They care about her and they recognize her, hence blurring the line almost completely between the natural and the artificial, the real and the unreal. I would like to suggest on some level that the MEAs are much like Bianca. We have been brought to life by the Marianists because there is a need for us. However, as symbols we have not as of yet “welled up in the collective soul” of the university. And here, unlike Bianca we must do more than simply be loved by the Marianists. We must begin to be recognized by others as real. This will not happen because of some title, but rather by our collective practices. They will only know we are Marianists by what we do and how we do it. And here I would take my lead from the theologian Stanley Hauerwas who explains: “The Gospels are not just the depiction of man, but they are manuals for the training necessary to be part of the new community. To be a disciple means to share Christ’s story to participate in the reality of God’s rule.” What do those “manuals” teach us in terms of practices? What Hauerwas says of Jesus I will say of Mary. “She holds nothing in reserve for some other role.” The controlling Gospel story for me here comes from the Acts of the Apostles and it is the story of Ananias and Sapphira. This couple, you will remember, sold property with the intention of donating the proceeds to the Apostles. But, they conspired to hold back in reserve a certain amount. When Ananias approached Peter his deceit was discovered and he dropped dead on the spot. Later when Sapphira came to Peter, her complicity was also made clear and she too dropped dead on the spot. The simple lesson is not to hold anything back from God and his work. Standing on our “road” at the start of our journey we as MEAs we must not hold anything in reserve either; we must “suck it up and die to self.” Only in this way can we claim our place in the tradition to come. Only in this way can we hope to be real Marinaists. It is not something I am particularly good at, but I am working on it and need all the help I can get from this community. My guess is that I am not alone in needing the support and challenges of my community. Thank you and may God bless each of you in this critical work and mission we have undertaken together.
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