Pope Francis on Hope and History: "the time in which we seek God"

Pope Francis poses for a photo with teenagers
on pilgrimage to the Vatican

Pope Francis' extraordinary recent interview with Antonio Spadaro has understandably provoked a whirlwind of commentary from Catholics and others as to what his words mean for the future of the Church under his guidance. Will he be pushing the Church to the "left" or the "right", and on which issues?

For myself the interview has mainly kindled new hope. This man seems too serious about the Gospel, about the radical immediacy of its call, to be bothered with convenient boxes like "conservative" or "liberal". Especially powerful for me (and helpful given my own historical obsessions) are the Pope's words on God's presence in history and in our contemporary, despair-inducing present.

Francis speaks of our projected notions of past or future history and how a focus on these may mislead us to mistake the more "concrete" truth of the present. He speaks of discernment and how it relates to uncertainty--the uncertainty we must always acknowledge if we are to keep ourselves from self-serving delusions. As I understand him, he is stressing discernment and movement as a corrective to (the more comfortable) knowledge and stasis. As he reminds us, gesturing to the biblical accounts, "God is always a surprise".

Below I quote some paragraphs from the interview, as narrated by Spadaro.

E.M.

Francis on Hope and History

At the World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, Pope Francis repeatedly declared: “God is real. He manifests himself today. God is everywhere.” These are phrases that echo the Ignatian expression “to seek and find God in all things.” So I ask the pope: “How do you seek and find God in all things?”

“What I said in Rio referred to the time in which we seek God,” he answers. “In fact, there is a temptation to seek God in the past or in a possible future. God is certainly in the past because we can see the footprints. And God is also in the future as a promise. But the ‘concrete’ God, so to speak, is today. For this reason, complaining never helps us find God. The complaints of today about how ‘barbaric’ the world is – these complaints sometimes end up giving birth within the church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defence. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today.

“God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallises them. God is in history, in the processes.

“We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting.

“Finding God in all things is not an ‘empirical eureka.’ When we desire to encounter God, we would like to verify him immediately by an empirical method. But you cannot meet God this way. God is found in the gentle breeze perceived by Elijah. The senses that find God are the ones St. Ignatius called spiritual senses. Ignatius asks us to open our spiritual sensitivity to encounter God beyond a purely empirical approach. A contemplative attitude is necessary: it is the feeling that you are moving along the good path of understanding and affection toward things and situations. Profound peace, spiritual consolation, love of God and love of all things in God – this is the sign that you are on this right path.”

I ask, “So if the encounter with God is not an ‘empirical eureka,’ and if it is a journey that sees with the eyes of history, then we can also make mistakes?”

The pope replies: “Yes, in this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions – that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble. Uncertainty is in every true discernment that is open to finding confirmation in spiritual consolation.

“The risk in seeking and finding God in all things, then, is the willingness to explain too much, to say with human certainty and arrogance: ‘God is here.’ We will find only a god that fits our measure. The correct attitude is that of St. Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever. Often we seek as if we were blind, as one often reads in the Bible. And this is the experience of the great fathers of the faith, who are our models. We have to re-read the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11. Abraham leaves his home without knowing where he was going, by faith. All of our ancestors in the faith died seeing the good that was promised, but from a distance.... Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing.... We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us.

“Because God is first; God is always first and makes the first move. God is a bit like the almond flower of your Sicily, Antonio, which always blooms first. We read it in the Prophets. God is encountered walking, along the path. At this juncture, someone might say that this is relativism. Is it relativism? Yes, if it is misunderstood as a kind of indistinct pantheism. It is not relativism if it is understood in the biblical sense, that God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. You are not setting the time and place of the encounter with him. You must, therefore, discern the encounter. Discernment is essential.

“If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists – they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.”

The pope’s words remind me of some of his past reflections, in which as a cardinal he wrote that God is already living in the city, in the midst of all and united to each. It is another way, in my opinion, to say what St. Ignatius wrote in the Spiritual Exercises, that God “labours and works” in our world. So I ask: “Do we have to be optimistic? What are the signs of hope in today’s world? How can I be optimistic in a world in crisis?”

“I do not like to use the word optimism because that is about a psychological attitude,” the pope says. “I like to use the word hope instead, according to what we read in the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11, that I mentioned before. The fathers of the faith kept walking, facing difficulties. And hope does not disappoint, as we read in the Letter to the Romans. Think instead of the first riddle of Puccini’s opera ‘Turandot,’” the pope suggests.

At that moment I recalled more or less by heart the verses of the riddle of the princess in that opera, to which the solution is hope: “In the gloomy night flies an iridescent ghost./ It rises and opens its wings/ on the infinite black humanity./ The whole world invokes it/ and the whole world implores it./ But the ghost disappears with the dawn/ to be reborn in the heart./ And every night it is born/ and every day it dies!”

“See,” says Pope Francis, “Christian hope is not a ghost and it does not deceive. It is a theological virtue and therefore, ultimately, a gift from God that cannot be reduced to optimism, which is only human. God does not mislead hope; God cannot deny himself. God is all promise.”

Read the interview in full.

On the photo above, see The Telegraph

America's One-Party System

A Facebook post I put up August 31 along with the comment thread:

Many complain about America's two-party system, the limited choice it offers. I think they're getting it wrong. Our politics makes more sense when one recognizes it as a one-party system. Where some see a Democratic Party and a Republican Party, I just see two versions of the Republican Party. One the one hand there's the Republican Party that wants to outlaw abortion, on the other the Republican Party that wants to legalize gay marriage. This is what Americans get to choose from.

CJL: So what would you choose? I'd choose gay marriage if I were an American citizen.

DA: So, oligarchy or plutocracy.

Eric: Exactly, DA.

PR: Better dead than red, Eric Mader.

Eric: As I've said before, PR: They will pry my Che Guevara action figure from my dead frozen fingers.

K: Eric, I think your assessment is accurate, but overly granular. I think there is more value in moving up the so-called zeitgeist totem pole. Even the choices in terms of plutocracy versus oligarchy are actually archaic notions if you ask me. I do understand that my preferred word is not even a word, and is probably already overused too. It is corporatocracy. Spell check never finds this word, so that's how I guess it isn't a word. But, if you look closely at what is wrong with all things "structural" in our times, there is no "one" to blame. Everything is run either by a corporation or other grouped-together, 3rd-party-controlled mechanism (a corporation is run by shareholders) wherein no individual is actually responsible for the corporation's actions. If a corporation knowingly sells a deadly object/chemical/device and it actually kills dozens, or hundreds, or let's just say, millions... there is no one who is actually responsible. No one hangs. Sure you can sue, and force corporations to pay up, but there is no moral responsibility that is imbued into the corporate soul. If a human being were to commit the many sorts of acts that corporations do, they would suffer other than in the wallet. The human version of "personhood" has enormous cultural, and individual, and real expectations. To the contrary, corporations are only legally bound, with the threat of job loss or jail to the CEO, of return on capital to the shareholders. If a company attempts to do long-term thinking, or even provide notional constructions that one might call "moral fortitude" to any decision, the CEO can be fired or jailed. What complicates matters is that our culture is so deeply specialized and individuated that the experts in any given field are the only ones who are qualified to work in government as a watchdog. But if you live long enough in our system, you find out that the price to pay for being a watchdog in your career/profession is much higher to you as an individual. However, the rewards are vast if you are not a watchdog but instead support your professional colleagues' endeavors. In this context, any "political" party is nothing but a bobber on the corporate current. It has no real power, except around the edges. So, I do agree that the USA has a single party, one that provides choices around certain issues, that generates pretend differences, which are, however, of little impact on the actual direction of the consumption and distribution of resources. Gay marriage and abortion are merely issues that generate lots of emotive energy, but change nothing in terms of: Is there too much radiation in the Pacific Ocean? Should we burn all the coal on Earth if we finish burning all the oil? How much insecticide should a corn plant actually ooze from its pores before it is not safe to eat? At what point is the price of war too high when it comes to human deaths? Since these sorts of questions require rethinks on the direction our humanity goes, it's better to argue about unborn humans, and what genitals are suitable for legal contracts to be state recognized. Why are those more suitable issues? Because it is always better to inject the question of what the Invisible Man in the sky, who sees all, knows all, and loves all (except for the millions of specific little situations where he hates and needs to destroy you for all eternity), thinks about these matters. And as we know, only the ballot box can discern the almighty's actual feelings on such matters.

Eric: K: Yes, I agree with some of your points. In fact I would argue that THE main problem the world now faces is the centrality of the profit motive as combined with the nearly total irresponsibility that corporate structure allows for. Corporations privatize profits and (given their almost hand-in-glove collaboration with states) both socialize losses and leave all environmental fallout to the future to swallow as it will. To the degree the corporate model continues to dominate, to the degree our governments continue to dance as its paid puppets, it seems obvious to me that we are headed for extinction or something similar. Our own government has been more or less overthrown by a corporate coup, democracy for us is increasingly window dressing, and there is little chance, given the technologies of control now employed, that our population will be able to right this situation. Yes, I think America is VERY different from what it was through most of the post-war period. Ten more years of drift in the current direction and we will be justified in talking of "soft totalitarianism" Or perhaps not so soft. / I understand why you insist terms like oligarchy aren't really applicable here, but I still think the term has its use. After all, those who benefit from the central place of corporate structure in our society are largely that top 5 percent. And it is largely the needs of corporations that our government is responsive to: again ensuring that top 5 percent always ends up at the top, no matter how their card houses may topple. / The question of the day of course is how the left might begin the work of transforming this Doomsday machine we're riding. I say the left because I think it's only from the left that solutions are going to come--the right is still too busy applauding itself for the fall of the Soviet Union. / In terms of this discussion, the following deserves a careful read. In any case, Ackerman's article addresses the issues that need be addressed if there's any hope capitalism can be transformed before it takes us over the cliff it's heading to. But what kind of social upheaval would be necessary to enforce the kind of reforms he suggests? Is such a coordinated political platform even possible beyond its presence here in article form?

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/

The article is largely on economics. Ackerman argues that the triumphalism of mainstream economics is unjustified given the evidence. For one, the maintenance of a laissez-faire environment is not as relevant to an economy's performance as is often assumed.

And here the discussion ended.