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Thomas Merton: The Global Future and Parish Priorities

It is rare, I believe, for one theologian to be able to give us general priorities for congregational life. Most theological authors are specialists: one interprets the scriptural foundations for preaching and teaching, another explains how to “manage” ministry, and others confine themselves to some particular subsection of parish life -- liturgy, youth work, pastoral care.



In the works of Thomas Merton, however, we find a clear statement of the three most fundamental needs of the human race -- and therefore of the church -- on the edge of the 21st century: the balancing of our spirituality through contemplation; the task of peacemaking, holistically understood; and the encounter in transforming depth of the great faith traditions. From his placing of these concerns critical to our human future before the whole church, I would argue that they should also be priorities for the local church.

To begin, then, here are three related items from my life and work as a suburban pastor.

1. Two streets away from our church is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Down the hill, a Hare Krishna community carries on its daily life. Just beyond the parish boundary, Ismaili Muslims are building their jamatkhana (prayer-house), the largest in North America. On our own street, a Sikh family lives a quiet life of industry and respect for God and neighbor.

2. Some world events highlighted in the media in recent months were Grenada, the Geneva arms talks, the Lebanon debacle, the Iran-Iraq war, Central America, the KAL airliner and, on the other side of the ledger, the hopeful work of the New Ireland Forum.

3. Two young people tell me that they have come back to the church because they fear “what’s happening in our society” (no mention of the attraction of Jesus Christ). A family life authority writes that our personal lives are becoming more and more quantified as we count up our sexual acts and our guaranteed days off. (I read this while rushing off to take a time-management course.)

I offer these selections from my life because they are so very ordinary. How intensely such realities impinge varies, of course, between urban and rural areas and in other ways. Among us, also, there are different levels of awareness of the global nature of the realities which these items point to. All of us are aware of threats to peace, threats that go up or down in psychological throw-weight, but which are always present in the back of our minds. Many are keenly aware of social stress and fragmentation; we know that our communities and personal lives are not what they were, and feel little confidence in regard to a quick return to quieter times.

Probably fewer are aware of the extent of the entry into the “Christian” West of members of the other ancient faiths. (I remember as a child contributing pennies during Lent for the work of our mission in Amritsar, India -- work that I understood as the conversion of all the people there into Anglicans like myself. When I met our Sikh neighbors, I learned that they were from Amritsar. They were the very people my pennies had gone to convert.) Yet the image of members of other traditions as living across the sea is still the dominant one.



All of these realities were major concerns of Thomas Merton, monk, poet, spiritual theologian, Christian contemplative. Born in Europe, he lived most of his life in North America and died in Asia. His American mother and New Zealander father were artists, and Thomas, their first son, was born in France.

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born [The Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt Brace, 1948), p. 31.

The death of his mother when he was six and of his father when he was 16 pushed Merton into an intense experience of the vulnerability felt by so many between the wars, and led to a cosmic sense of loss and nearly to a breakdown, both physical and mental -- a vulnerability he described as “living on the doorsill of the Apocalypse” (ibid.). Revulsion at that world, together with his desire to live out a newfound Christian faith in a deep way, took him in 1941 to the Cistercian abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, where he stayed for 27 years. In 1968 he went on a spiritual journey to Asia, and it was at a conference of Asian Christian monastic leaders in Bangkok that he died in a freak accident on December 10.

Even this brief a biographical outline shows connections between the concerns of this article and significant points in Merton’s life. The concern for wholeness arises from his situation as an orphan, an agnostic adolescent, and a functionally stateless adult. The interest in Asian religion so manifest in the 1960s can be traced back to his time at Columbia University in the 30s, where he discussed oriental scriptures with a Hindu monk, Mahabarata Bramachari, who also urged him to read Christian mystical literature, such as the Confessions and the Imitation of Christ. His feeling for peace was probably first aroused unconsciously by his parents’ anxieties as they fled France in 1915, and reached its early culmination in the letter of noncooperation that he wrote to his draft board in late 1941, just before Pearl Harbor.

None of these concerns, however, would have been oriented dynamically toward the future of the human race had it not been for two critical experiences at Gethsemani. The first of these was a 16-month period of psychophysical upheaval during 1949 and 1950, precipitated by two factors: ordination to the priesthood (last of the institutional goals prescribed for him in the order), and the writing of The Seven Storey Mountain. a psychic self-emptying which made him vulnerable to what happened next.

When the summer of my ordination ended, I found myself face to face with a mystery that was beginning to manifest itself in the depths of my soul and to move me with terror. . .

It was a sort of slow submarine earthquake which produced strange commotions on the . . .

surface of my life, I was summoned to battle with joy and with fear [The Sign of Jonas (Doubleday. 1956), p. 226].

Thus sickness took him into contemplative solitude, where he discovered compassion for himself and others. And solitude restored him to health, to

a peace and a happiness that I had never known before and which subsisted in the face of

nameless, interior terror, as time went on, the peace grew and the terror vanished. It was the peace that was real, and the terror that was an illusion [ibid., p. 226].

But another step remained: he needed to find again his place in the larger world, but without leaving Gethsemani. He records the epiphanic moment (in 1957 or 1958) when this step suddenly was accomplished:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . This sense of liberation could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others” [Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, (Doubleday, 1968), pp. 156-57].

Before these experiences, his response to the three concerns of this article had been individualistic, perhaps even self-serving. Although he had found a way of life that was leading to his own wholeness, he still found it necessary to negate other faiths in order to affirm his own (cf. his reference to “the void of nirvana . . . the feeble intellectual light of Platonic idealism [and] the sensual dreams of the Sufis” in Seeds of Contemplation [New Directions, March 1949], p. 49 -- omitted in the December 1949 revision). As far as violence was concerned, it belonged to “the world” he had abandoned in favor of monastic peace.

But after those critical moments reported above, Merton returned with a thump to the 20th century. In 1941 he had turned his face toward God and his back to the world. Now he faced the world, admitted he was part of it, and saw God at work in it. Earlier, his interest was focused in the past; now he was chiefly concerned for the future: of his community, his fellow Christians, other faith communities, and humankind as a whole.



In fleshing out from Merton’s unsystematic corpus his vision of the human future, I begin with personal wholeness. It took no particular originality for him to identify technologism, mass culture, materialism and unchecked urbanization as the chief instruments of our stresses and our dehumanization. It concerned him deeply that the church offered no clear response to these forces, and that Christian communal life was so seriously affected by them.

Merton’s own response was contemplation. He emphasized that it is not a spiritual commodity, not an achievement, not a technique. It is, ultimately, indefinable, and yet it inspires continued attempts at definition: “The highest expression of [our] intellectual and spiritual life . . . that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware . . . a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source . . . an awakening to the Real within all that is real” (New Seeds of Contemplation [New Directions, 1962], pp. 1 and 3).

Through contemplation one arrives not only at personal wholeness, but also, through the activation of the image of God within, at transcultural maturity, so that one can take humankind as the community in which one’s membership matters most. Contemplation, according to Merton, is a universally available way for believers to dispose themselves toward these goals of personal and transcultural maturity.

With regard to interfaith encounter, Merton gives us, once again, not a systematic discussion but a sketch of the kind of person able to take part in such encounter with the necessary quality of engagement. Anyone, he says,

who is to communicate on the level that interests us must be . . . a living example of traditional and inferior realization. He must be wide open to life and to new experience because he has fully utilized his own tradition and gone beyond it. This will permit him to meet a [disciple] of another, apparently remote and alien tradition, and find a common ground of verbal understanding. . . . This I would call “communion” [The Asian Journal, edited by Naomi Burton et al. (New Directions, 1973), p. 315].

Merton has vividly recorded just such an encounter between himself and Chatral Rimpoche; a Tibetan hermit living in the Himalayas:

Chatral looked like a vigorous old peasant. . . .We started talking about dzogchen [inner discovery of transcendent awareness] . . . and “direct realization” and soon saw that we agreed very well. We must have talked for two hours or more, . . . mostly around the idea of dzogchen, but also taking in some points of Christian doctrine compared with Buddhist. . . . He said he had meditated in solitude for 30 years or more and had not attained to perfect emptiness and I said I hadn’t either.

The unspoken or half-spoken message . . . was our complete understanding of each other as people who were somehow on the edge of great realization. . . I was profoundly moved, because he is so obviously a great man . . . marked by complete simplicity and freedom. He was surprised at getting on so well with a Christian [ibid., pp. 143-144].



By filtering this conversation through the criteria that Merton listed (in the sketch quoted above), we recognize its integrity.

1. “A living example of traditional and interior realization.” Merton was steeped in personal and common prayer; Chatral had been meditating in solitude for 30 years.

2. “Wide open to life and to new experience because he has fully utilized his own tradition and gone beyond it.” This statement is entirely applicable to Merton, perhaps less so to Chatral, who nonetheless was open to Merton’s Christian experience.

3. “A common ground of verbal understanding.” Merton’s comments that “we agreed very well” and “taking in some points of Christian doctrine compared with Buddhist” attest to the “common ground,” as does Chatral’s comment that he was surprised at “getting on so well with a Christian.”

4. “Communion” (i.e., something beyond dialogue). This was shown by their “complete understanding of each other as people who were somehow on the edge of great realization.”

Whether or not Merton and Chatral were permanently changed by this brief meeting, Merton’s account of it presents a beautiful icon of interfaith encounter (I think of the images of Peter and Paul embracing, or Francis and Dominic). Here we have a Buddhist and a Christian embracing, both deeply moved, and each continuing in his own tradition. (Chatral was still living in 1980; how fascinating it would be, if he is alive today, for someone to take down his memory of that meeting.)

Finally, the task of peacemaking. Merton’s witness to the possibility of personal wholeness through contemplation and to inter-religious encounter in depth is inseparable from his espousal of the peace witness. To have become a contemplative, he asserts, is to have touched the center of peace with the discovery that God is one’s other and true Self. Interestingly, he uses the word “nonviolent” to describe mature contemplative prayer in New Seeds of Contemplation (p. 249). Freed from egoism, the contemplative can approach the disciple of another way with peacefulness instead of disguised aggression.

On the social level the contemplative easily intuits the roots of war: fear of self and others that springs from inability to trust God; the unrecognized self-hatred that we project onto others; the illusory view that our political ideals are purer than our opponents’, and the accompanying moral paralysis that stems from an exaggerated sense of guilt about holding this illusion.

In response, Merton calls for a spirituality of loving resistance, emphasizing that a quiet (miscalled meek) disposition is no guarantee of success either as a contemplative or as a peacemaker. Rather, being meek in the beatitudinal sense means having an eschatological consciousness about violence, believing deeply that God has acted/is acting/will act in vindication of his beloved ones -- who are, of course, the members of the human race in its entirety (cf. John 3:16). (Space limitations prevent a fuller development of Merton’s views on peace, but I must affirm that his teaching is not naïve.)

I hope I am innocent of uncritical adulation, but I do believe that Merton is a prime candidate for multiple-ticket sainthood in the emerging global community. Each faith has its own saints, but would we not benefit from a galaxy of holy ones with -- so to speak -- dual or triple citizenship? (Gandhi is another obvious candidate.) With Thomas Berry, I believe that we need spiritual leaders who will assume the global human heritage as [their] own individual heritage,” who through contact with other traditions will come to know their own traditions very deeply, and through whose “own self-integration a healing comes to all [humankind] . . . and the human community is brought into the divine presence.” (“Contemporary Spirituality: The Journey of the Human Community,” Cross Currents 24 [1974], pp. 172, 183).

As one such person, Merton -- through his life as a Christian even more than through his writings -- calls into question the way in which we spend time, energy and money in our parishes. On the basis of his priorities, it can be argued that every local Christian congregation should be actively nourishing personal wholeness through contemplation, preparing people for transforming encounter with members of other faiths, and training them in nonviolent spiritual resistance to the forces of destruction in our nuclear age. Although little is being done in these areas now, that fact does not mean that these priorities are not realistic or achievable. Nor does it mean that what ministers are already doing to enable their parishioners to live lives of loving neighborliness is not important, nor that we must renounce evangelism.

But what difference might it make to our society if Merton’s priorities were to become operative in the world’s vast network of Christian congregations? And what difference might it make if persons with mature competencies in these areas of concern were coming forth from our parishes in noticeable numbers? Simultaneously on the edge of a 21st century of unimaginable potential for good and on the edge of unimaginable self-destruction at any moment, do we know a better way for our parishes to travel into the future?

Merton was himself a man who lived on the edge: the edge of great realization and great compassion, the edge of the future that was also the edge of his own growth -- a growth directed toward ever-increasing personal and global apprehension of the depths of God. His great concerns offer us and our churches a very useful litmus test or checklist by which to sort out all the possibilities that come at us in parish life. Never himself a member of a parish, Merton paradoxically offers us a clear way ahead toward the contemporary edge of mission.

Why the Inclusive Language Lectionary?

The initial reactions to An Inclusive Language Lectionary: Readings for Year A. published in October 1983, have run the gamut from great joy to bitter hostility. All of us who worked on it expected both. We knew that countless men and women across this country would welcome a version of Scripture readings for worship in the church that were not sexist but inclusive of the whole congregation. We also knew that many fundamentalists, antifeminists and the more conservative Christian groups would respond negatively. But two other reactions were less expected: first, the enormous interest in the Lectionary on the part of the “secular” press -- its general appreciation of the complex issues involved in the Lectionary’s preparation and its generally fair and balanced early assessment of the Lectionary’s significance (on the day following publication more than 90 newspapers gave the Lectionary front-page coverage) second, the extent of negative reaction coming from “liberal” religious journals and from “liberal’’ Christians.

The acrimonious rhetoric emanating from nonconservative quarters has shown that the Lectionary touched a raw nerve. Deep-seated fears that cut across the theological spectrum have been exposed. Much more is at stake than the elimination of some pronouns and the loss of some cherished appellations. The anxiety and the virulent clamor are caused, I have no doubt, by the recognition that the Lectionary has put the theological foundations of the status quo under siege, and that traditional perceptions of God, and of the power arrangements of men and women that are sanctioned and confirmed by those perceptions, have been threatened. A quiet revolution is under way all around us, the Lectionary is lending it strong support in the church, and Christians of all stripes are perplexed about what tactics to use to prevent its further advance.

Even before the Lectionary’s publication, and before its contents were known, it was mocked and attempts were made to discredit it. Since then it has been ridiculed as a misguided piece of fluff, easily to be blown away by the “scholarly community.” Another occasion has been provided to attack the National Council of Churches, and some have even suggested that in light of the totally “disastrous” Lectionary for Year A, any further work on Years B and C surely ought to be abandoned.

From the very beginning, the lectionary committee made it known that it welcomes constructive responses and will take them all seriously in its future work. A number of people have made very helpful critiques, and the committee hopes that they will be joined by many others in our common task. I write at this juncture not to defend why particular judgments we have made in the Lectionary for Year A, but rather to talk about what I believe to be an absolute necessity for the church -- namely, that Christians hear their Scriptures in language that includes them all equally.

There are, of course, many different reasons for reading the Bible. A biblical scholar, professional or otherwise, will read or study it only in the languages in which it was written, and will not make a judgment about the meaning of a text on the basis of any English translation, no matter how good it is purported to be. Any translation is always one giant step away from what was written, as one who has read Shakespeare in German or French will readily testify.

But most people who read the Bible are not adept at Hebrew or Greek and, in this country, they will read it in an English translation. Of course, the King James Version may well be read primarily for its literary beauty and its significance in the history of the English language, quite aside from the fact that it is a translation. That translation has its own inherent value. Nevertheless, English translations are read mostly out of necessity, by those wanting to find out something about the history of Israel, or about the historical Jesus or about the theology of Paul. In order to facilitate all such investigations by both Christians and non-Christians, translations as accurate as it is possible to make them must be provided. For such purposes the Revised Standard Version is an excellent tool.



The Bible is also read in the church, by believers and to believers, as the medium through which the Word of God may be heard. When we say “Word of God” we do not mean English words and sentences into which the Bible, or parts of it, has been translated more than 100 times already in this century alone. We do not even mean Hebrew and Greek words from which the English has been rendered. If such words were the “Word of God.” then one could burn it or tear it to shreds. No, the Word of God, as the Prologue to the Gospel of John says, “became flesh.” It is that Word, made flesh in Jesus Christ, that was God’s communication of God’s self to humanity. But subsequent to the crucifixion of the historical person Jesus, the church believed from the very beginning that Jesus was still present, as Kyrios, as the Spirit, as the Paraclete. as Jesus’ words. Those words of Jesus were incorporated into the apostolic preaching of the church -- the preaching of the church’s first witnesses to Christ, recorded in the New Testament. It is that preaching, that witness, that became for the church the Word of God.” the vehicle by and through which God addresses those who believe. The Bible is the Word of God to those believers who hear it as Word of God, and only to them.

When the Bible is read and heard as the Word of God, it is not read or heard primarily for either literary or historical reasons, but in order that it may be appropriated. However, impediments may inhibit or destroy the possibility of hearing the Word -- for example, great physical pain on the part of the hearer, or the pain of recognizing that one is not being addressed by the words one is hearing, or the pain of realizing that one’s beloved is not being addressed. In order to hear the Word of God, one must understand oneself to be addressed by that Word, and one must also feel that the whole community is being addressed equally. This is not required when the Bible is studied for historical or literary reasons.

If the Word of God is not hearable by those who do not understand themselves to be addressed by the biblical language through which that Word is communicated, does it follow that the Word of God cannot any longer be heard by women who feel excluded by patriarchal language, or by men who feel themselves excluded by language that does not include women on an equal basis with them? Is the patriarchalism of the biblical languages. and of biblical faith as originally formulated. inherent in that faith? That is the fundamental question with which the church must wrestle in our day.

From the time of the earliest versions of biblical writings the church has believed that the Bible in translation, and not simply the original Hebrew and Greek texts, is hearable as the Word of God. But if, in translating, one translates patriarchalism out, do we still have the Bible? Or is Scripture so distorted by the deletion of patriarchalism that it can no longer function as the vehicle for hearing and receiving the Word of God? Or, to put it another way, is it true that the God revealed in Jesus Christ and worshiped in the Christian church addresses humanity only in patriarchal language and with patriarchal assumptions about both the deity and the human race?

I am not willing to concede that humanity’s understanding of itself has now outgrown and left behind the Bible’s capacity to function as the vehicle for hearing the Word of God. If I am right, then it appears that what the Lectionary attempts to do is, in principle, justified.



Some argue that what I identify as “humanity’s understanding of itself” pertains only to a small minority of men and women in this country and in Europe who represent a feminist ideology that, with time, will go the way of all ideologies. It is further argued that in any case, the church cannot let itself he influenced by ideologies. But I am convinced that the feminist movement represents a broad- based revolution in our culture which is slowly gathering momentum from many quarters and whose tide will not be turned back.

The lectionary committee has been chastised for producing a distortion of Scripture that is simply propaganda for a particular ideology, and that opens the door for all kinds of special-interest groups to make changes in the biblical text to support their points of view. It has been suggested, for example, that a group representing Alcoholics Anonymous would be justified in changing a well-known text to read, “Use a little orange juice for your stomach’s sake.” It seems to me, however, that this fear has no foundation, for the simple reason that interest in the equality of male and female members of the human race can hardly be said to represent a particular ideology or a special-interest group. Rather, the insistence that women are the full equals of men and must he valued as men are in their personhood represents nothing less than a cry for human equality and human justice. An inclusive-language version of the Bible in no way opens the door for every particular special-interest group to change the biblical text to suit its own concerns.

In sum, then, it seems clear that the church must provide its members with a version of its Scriptures that opens the way for congregations of women and men at worship to hear and appropriate the Word of God.

The Bible is the church’s book. The church has always read the Old Testament from the point of view of the gospel, and the New Testament and the church have been in a dialectical relationship with each other. The church both produced the kerygma and was brought into being by it. The New Testament was created by and for the church, so that we may say that in some sense the Bible brought the church into being, and in some sense the church brought the Bible into being. The relationship between them was and remains reciprocal.

It was the whole church, however, and not ecclesiastical authorities that established the unquestioned. authoritative role the Bible plays in its life. As Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott has said: ‘‘The written Rule of Christendom must rest finally on the general confession of the Church, and not on the independent opinions of its members. . . . The extent of the Canon . . . was settled by common usage, and thus the testimony of Christians becomes the testimony of the church” (A General Survey of the history of the Canon of the New Testament [Macmillan, 1881]. pp. 12, 13).



The Canon belongs to the whole church; and although for most of the church’s history the male portion of its membership has usurped the responsibility for translating and interpreting that canon, the time is long past due for the whole church, including its female members, to assert the right to its translation and interpretation. Patriarchal assumptions not only pervade the various writings of the Bible, but they have also controlled and determined both the form those writings take when rendered in another language and the way in which that rendering is to be interpreted. The argument one hears now presented with some vehemence--that the Bible is an unalterable given to which the church is to be subservient, because it is unambiguously antecedent to the church in chronology and precedent to the church in authority -- clearly has the effect of stifling all opposition to the patriarchal status quo. What has always been is to take precedence -- and what has been most of the time is universal patriarchalism. The Bible just as it is, and just as it has been traditionally translated and interpreted, is appealed to with great sanctimoniousness; but the early church certainly never understood itself to be servile to biblical writings, and the church today is no less justified in appealing to its dialectical relation to Scripture, and in reading and hearing that Scripture in such a way as to allow the whole congregation to hear itself addressed equally.

We might note in passing that while the patriarchalism staunchly defended in our day has been decisive throughout the history of the church, it is also true that the struggle against it is likewise as old as the church -- a fact documented by much recent research.

We must now address the change that accompanies alterations of one’s self-perception -- namely, the change in ones perception of God. That there is a relation between one’s perception of God and one’s perception of oneself hardly needs demonstration. The same correlation exists even in individual Christians’ perceptions of the historical Jesus, about whom we know many details. To a Marxist, Jesus looks Marxist; to a pacifist, he seems a pacifist, and so on. And what is true in the case of perceptions of the historical person Jesus is certainly true in the case of one’s perception of God. A patriarchal society will think about God in ways influenced by and compatible with patriarchy. This is not to imply that one’s understanding of God is entirely subjective; it is simply to affirm that one’s understanding of God is dialectical, that what one believes about God and what one believes about oneself influence each other.

Many voices, however, affirm that God is a given, no way contingent on who one perceives God to be. This view is very congenial to defenders of the status quo, who announce to those of a feminist perspective that who God is is a matter of record -- a record written, transmitted,  translated and interpreted by patriarchal communities. To Interpret revelation as the communication of information about God which is transmitted from one generation to another is, of course, to sew up patriarchy. So we are told that God is what “he revealed himself to be,” and that is male.

It has also been argued that although God is “beyond sex, he revealed himself to be male.” But which revelation of God is referred to? God’s self-revelation in the Old Testament? (But are the images of God always male in the Old Testament?) Or God’s self-revelation in Jesus? (Then it must be assumed that Jesus’ maleness was a substantive aspect of God’s self-revelation in “the Word made flesh.” Is this, however, an indisputable theological fact?) Or is it the fact that Jesus called God “Father”? Then those who say that God transcends sex but that God reveals God’s self to be male would have to argue that when Jesus called God “Father,” he was not addressing God but only what God revealed God’s self to be. What profundity! One becomes engulfed in such sophistry when one assumes that biblical language is propositional and that theology is basically informational.

If the statement “God is Father” is a proposition, then, of course, God cannot be “Mother.” But if “God is Father” is a metaphor, then one may also say “God is Mother” without being contradictory. For metaphors do not exhaust meaning, and a single metaphor does not make all others superfluous. Thus I can say, ‘‘Life is a dream,’’ and I can also say, “Life is a bed of roses,” and one who reads both statements as metaphors and not as propositions will not think that they disagree. Likewise, God may be called “Rock” as well as “Father,” and Jesus may be spoken of as “Lion” as well as “Lamb.” All such appellations are metaphors. Of course God is not a mother, any more than God is a father; and Jesus is neither a lion nor a lamb. But just as surely as Jesus may be spoken of as a “Lion” and a “Lamb,” God may be addressed as “Father” and “Mother,” without any damage being done to the brain. Why, then, the strong resistance to speaking of God as “Mother”? Because of many people’s deep-rooted conviction that the God they worship is male -- even though they will also proffer the opinion that God transcends sex.

It has been said that in the Lectionarys’ the word “Father” takes on a sexual connotation it does not have “in the Bible.” I find that statement curious, and possibly (depending on its presuppositions) very naïve. What is most notable about it, however, is its utterly patriarchal assumption that such images and metaphors as “Father” and “King,” as well as the pronouns ‘‘he, “‘his’’ and ‘‘him,” have no sexual connotation whatever and are, therefore, completely compatible with the belief that God transcends sex -- but that such metaphors as “Mother” and “Queen” and the pronouns “she” and “her” are, on the contrary, sexual terms which, when used in the same contexts as their “nonsexual” counterparts, do give them sexual connotations. So the Lectionary is accused of “imposing sexuality” on God. This is a very good illustration of the dictum that “Words mean what I say they mean,” and not what the community has always understood them to mean.

The Lectionary takes seriously the view that indeed God does transcend sex -- that God is neither male nor female -- but it also assumes that words like “father” and “king” have the same male connotations in the Bible that they have elsewhere, as do the pronouns ‘‘he,” ‘‘his” and “him.” So when it is insisted that only masculine pronouns be used for God, and that it is good to address God as Father but pagan and baalistic to address God as Mother, one begins to suspect that God is not believed to transcend sexuality at all but that, on the contrary, God is being used to legitimize patriarchalism. There is in the church an enormous vested interest in assuring that no one seriously tamper with the perception that God is the great Protector and Preserver of Patriarchy.

An inclusive Language Lectionary is a serious attempt to meet a deeply felt need in the Christian community. While many of the specifics decided on for Year A are open to continuing thought and discussion, inclusive-language renderings of Scripture are needed and are here to stay. This lectionary is not, of course, the first attempt to render Scripture in inclusive language, but it is the most conspicuous attempt, and could not be ignored. No amount of belittling or abuse will dissuade uncounted numbers of women and men in the church from pursuing their course of working for mutuality and justice in the body of Christ. They will continue to bear testimony to the God to whom they believe the Bible bears witness: God who anointed Christ to let the oppressed go free.

Recognizing the Abused Child

“But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear” [Matt. 13:16].



Establishment of a counseling center focusing on work with sexually abused children and adults was not our original goal. But, beginning as a small community outreach program for families in need two years ago, our project quickly evolved into a counseling center skilled in treating the victims of sexual abuse.

Sexual abuse is an uncommonly common thing. It knows no cultural, economic, social or religious barriers. It rears its ugly head in the best of families. Although there is no “typical” victim, those who have suffered this kind of abuse certainly share many behaviors and feelings. Staff members at Brea United Methodist Counseling Center (BUMCC) soon discovered that certain questions seemed to elicit quite similar responses from many of our clients. These people appeared to have one thing in common: they had been sexually molested or abused. We soon found that a profile was emerging.

Not all or even most of the problems we deal with at the counseling center involve sexual abuse. Many clients seek help in developing more effective coping or parenting skills. Others want to become more assertive or more decisive with family, friends and/or co-workers. Still others acknowledge difficulties in relating to their spouses, or are experiencing “minor” problems with noncompliance from their children. However, a fair share of incest victims and sexually abused children have been referred to us by other agencies since we have established a reputation for working successfully with this population.

Most, though not all, of our clients regularly attend church -- be it Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Mormon, Pentecostal or Catholic. Some attend nontraditional or nondenominational churches. All appear to have some degree of awareness of Christian doctrines and concepts. There seems to be no correlation between a person’s religious affiliation or religious practices and sexual abuse. Victims and/or perpetrators come from all backgrounds. All are in pain and are seeking relief from that pain.

Our clients have intelligence levels ranging from average to superior; they are neither ignorant nor illiterate. They watch television and read newspapers and magazines. They know about sexual abuse and molestation both through these media and through firsthand experience. What other similarities characterize this group?

Low self-esteem and low self-worth rank first in a victim’s profile. Feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, together with an inability to trust and a sense of being immobilized, all vie for second place. Victims often have great difficulty in living up to their potential, which may be quite high. Their lack of assertiveness leads to passive acceptance of abusive behaviors from others. Dependency becomes an issue for them. Interpersonal problems with co-workers, family and/or friends are common, as is sexual dysfunction, especially within marriage. Unsatisfactory ‘‘affairs” and/or blatant promiscuity tend to increase the victim’s sense of shame and guilt. Drug and alcohol abuse may lead to suicidal thoughts and/or suicide attempts or other self-destructive behaviors. This in turn reinforces the already low sense of self.

Only a few of the adults who were abused as children realize that their present-day problems are connected with their earlier victimization. Why, we wondered, are they so unaware of the impact that sexual abuse has had and continues to have on their lives?

In order to answer that crucial question, we will follow experiences of “Jeff,’’ an idealistic young graduate student who joined our staff. Because Jeff wanted to gain some practical experience in working with sexually abused children, he asked if he could do an internship at BUMCC. We knew that he was an active Christian who especially enjoyed working with youth groups. We all agreed that working with young victims could be a valuable learning experience for a person who hoped one day to have his own church and congregation.

Prior to accepting Jeff as a counseling intern, our staff gave him specialized training in dealing with sexually abused children. We are very much aware that a degree in counseling or psychology does not adequately prepare people for working with the sexually abused. An intellectual awareness of the dynamics of such abuse is not enough. The emotional impact is always at a gut-level!

We explained to Jeff the need to spot and identify ‘‘red flag” signals. For example, a child may exhibit sexual behaviors which are developmentally inappropriate. Such behaviors may be as blatant as simulating a sexual act with a doll or another child, or they may be more subtle, such as walking or talking in seductively adultlike ways.

Fourteen-year-old and younger children who have been or are being sexually abused often exhibit many behavioral cues. Their play is quite aggressive. They may obsessively need to keep things going, and their play may be excessively sexual, reflecting more knowledge than is normal for their age group. They often tend to be withdrawn and to relate inadequately to their peers; family fantasies are common. Such children may either be very guarded about their bodies, or they may display highly provocative sexual behavior. They may be nervous and fearful. The majority are compliant, shy and uncommunicative.

Sexually abused children do not understand their feelings and seldom realize that their ways of behaving are abnormal and/or inappropriate. How the many different kinds of behaviors resulting from incest and sexual abuse manifest themselves often depends on the personalities of individual children and the kinds of experiences that took place. The more traumatized the child is, the more bizarre his or her behavior will be -- and the more extreme the reaction to social interactions.

Because Jeff wanted a more comprehensive list of warning signals, we cited the following: (1) extreme reclusiveness, fearfulness, or nonresponsiveness to peer interactions; (2) physical and/or emotional difficulties or complaints (nightmares, phobias, stomach pains, venereal infections, etc.); (3) violent or highly aggressive behaviors; (4) low self-esteem and low self-image; (5) vacillation between being pseudo-adult and ultra-immature; (6) regressive behaviors (thumb-sucking, clinging, infantile postures, baby talk); (7) bedwetting which is not an organic or developmental problem. We stressed that although any one of these symptoms may not, in itself, indicate sexual abuse, all do show that the child is experiencing some kind of physical, emotional or psychological discomfort, and should be checked out.

Sexual abuse, whether it occurs ‘‘only once or twice” or many times, usually has a critical impact on personality development. Self-esteem suffers immediately, and this is quickly followed by guilt, feelings of helplessness, depression and repressed emotionality.

Academic problems are common among abused children, as are difficulties with concentration and social interactions. Extreme passivity or aggressiveness may be manifested. Their attitudes are often quite punitive and self-destructive. They have experienced a betrayal and a personal violation which should not be, but often is, ignored or discounted in some way.

The victimized child adjusts and copes with the situation by assuming responsibility for what has happened. Feelings of shame and self-incrimination have a profound affect on all of his or her future relationships. Trusting becomes a lifelong problem.

We believe that it is important for counselors to provide structure and consistency when dealing with their young clients. Additionally, we recommend that they give the children explicit permission to be honest in expressing their feelings, and that the counselors in turn be open and accepting of all that is shared with them.

When Jeff completed his first year of internship with BUMCC, he said something which none of us will ever forget: “My eyes have been opened and I can never again not see. I will be unable to ignore the warning signs of children who are hurting. I have heard their cries and will never again be deaf to their silent pleas for help.”

We at the counseling center believe that it is important that counselors, parents and religious leaders alike learn how to identify the various indicators of sexual abuse. We have a Christian responsibility to do everything within our power to stop such abuse and exploitation. Without some form of intervention, the children’s risk of future victimization is greatly increased. Where do we begin?

The term “sexual abuse” covers a wide range of behaviors. Some, like an obscene phone call or exhibitionism, are shocking and annoying. Others -- incest, rape, child pornography or child prostitution -- are more tragic and traumatizing.

The children we work with generally have suffered the latter kind of abuse. Their experiences vary from a single or a few isolated incidences to chronic abuse, often beginning in infancy and continuing until its discovery or disclosure years later. Anger and hostile feelings may not surface immediately. In fact, anger is often repressed, sometimes for many years. Unfortunately, victims are seldom able similarly to repress or deny their feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy.

Chronic or ongoing sexual abuse by someone close to the family (a relative, friend or neighbor) can disrupt a child’s psychosocial developmental tasks. Victimized children often develop poor social skills with peers, though they may camouflage this lack by becoming overly gregarious. They are often unable to form anything but very superficial relationships. These children find it extremely difficult to trust people, and are confused as to their sexual roles and identities. Suicide, drugs and alcohol may become avenues of escape for them.

Many parents mistakenly believe that their children would never fall for molesters’ advances or ploys. But child molesters are highly skilled manipulators and usually mislead adults as well as children. National statistics indicate that sexual abuse occurs in one out of six families; one child in every four is victimized.

We have all told our children, “Don’t talk to strangers!” But molesters are often not strangers, but relatives, neighbors, family friends or church acquaintances. We need to remember that the sexual abuser is usually known or familiar to the child. A child who is molested by a stranger will probably tell someone about it shortly after it has happened. This child will usually be believed and protected from further abuse. But the victims of ongoing abuse are not so lucky.

Children are taught compliance at an early age. They are instructed to do what an adult or authority figure demands. Most children are awed or intimidated by adults. If they can’t say No when they are told to “be a good girl (or boy) and give Uncle Bob a kiss,” how can they be expected to say No when Uncle Bob makes improper advances?

Perpetrators often convince children that what is going to occur is something very special. Most children do not know that it is wrong or abnormal behavior. They may feel uncomfortable or sense that what is happening is not OK, but they will usually believe the abuser and discount their own feelings. Once the abuse has begun, the child is hooked into secrecy.

The brighter children are, the more stressful the experience will be for them when they realize that they have been duped. They will feel guilt, shame, helplessness and anger. A statement we often hear from such children is, “I should have known better.” Yet how can we expect our children to “know” unless we teach them the skills needed to protect themselves from sexual abuse, just as we teach them other forms of safety?

We need to recognize the signs of abuse and to be willing, as concerned Christians and parents, to become advocates for children who are hurting. We need to listen to our children and to talk to them about sexual abuse. We need to protect them without unduly alarming or scaring them. Parents are not the only ones who find it difficult to talk to children about such abuse. Counselors, educators, clergy and other clinicians often shy away from asking children -- and adults -- questions about it.

Research indicates that we should be wary of the motives of adults who show an acute interest in our children, and who want to spend a lot of time alone with them. Churches must carefully screen those who work with children. Another precaution is to have co-leaders for youth work. At least one of them should be selected by the congregation, since molesters tend to choose other molesters as their assistants. In addition, we can educate congregations, Sunday school teachers and other youth personnel about sexual abuse. Children can be taught the difference between “good touch and bad touch,” what “private’’ areas are, and what ‘‘lures’’ child molesters may use. They can learn how to resist getting hooked into something bad that sounds so good!

Sexual abuse is not a pleasant topic. It is not a pleasant experience. Guilt, shame, shattered spirits and self-destructive behaviors are its legacy. There are no winners in this scenario; there are only victims.

Abused children can be found in every city, in every neighborhood, in every congregation. To deny this or to ignore the warning signs is to help perpetuate the cycle of abuse. Our eyes must be opened and our ears must be trained to hear the silent pleas of the hurting children among us.

Protestants, Jews and the Law



The topic of Protestant-Jewish relations has previously been broached in these pages. Carl Evans’s “The Church’s False Witness Against Jews,” which appeared May 5, 1982, inspired us to write this article.

Evans attempted to enhance Protestantism’s respect for Judaism by showing that the elder tradition, as represented by certain rabbinic parables, is, like Christianity, a religion of grace and not the legalistic morass that Protestants often think it is. While the sentiment that Protestants might think better (and more accurately) of Judaism is certainly to be affirmed, one must nevertheless beware of ethnocentric biases common to Christianity’s attempts to appreciate other traditions. Evans’s argument can be summarized, somewhat uncharitably: “Judaism is a lot like Christianity, so it’s not so bad after all.’’ Christianity remains the standard for comparison. One winds up appreciating a distortion of Judaism which seeks to make it conform to preconceived notions of authentic religion.

Our concern here is to open some avenues for an appreciation of Judaism as it actually exists. Accordingly, we will accentuate the differences between Judaism and Protestant Christianity in an effort to reveal those which are most basic and significant. While we will focus on Protestant characterizations and misunderstandings of Judaism, it is worth noting that misperceptions occur on both sides; all ought to be examined. It seems best to begin with the socially dominant group, since its perceptions are more likely to produce serious consequences.

Protestant understandings of Judaism tend to be filtered through three conceptual commitments central to the Protestant enterprise. First, there is the law-grace (works-faith) distinction, which originally served to distinguish Protestantism from Roman Catholicism (in the Protestant view) but also had immediate implications for the Reformation’s perception of Jews. Martin Luther, for example, notes in his Lectures on Galatians (1535). “The papists . . . are our Jews.” A second and related commitment is Protestantism’s preference for subjective religion: internal states are seen as the essence of true religion, and rituals as mere trappings. Third, there is Protestantism’s historical assumption that religion is preeminently about individual salvation, understood particularly as the triumph over death. This ultimate end of religion can be received only as a gift, as a result of God’s grace, his forgiving and transforming love to the unworthy person of faith.

Projecting its own concerns onto Judaism, Protestantism has assumed that salvation holds an identical place in the Jewish faith, and that the essential difference between it and Christianity (and the Jewish mistake) lies in the path to that end. Jews, so Protestants say, in their alienation from God’s grace in Christ seek to earn their salvation through good works. Jewish law is taken as though it measured merit, setting the standards which allow one to procure the desired reward. In this view, law is a way of salvation, a kind of ladder to heaven for those capable of climbing it.

The problem, as Protestants see it, is that the ladder is unclimbable (or rather that all climbers are incapable). No one can merit salvation by measuring up to God’s demands. In short, justification is by faith, not works. Law, in this view, has a negative and heuristic function. While the Law can provide some order for human society and help direct the action of sinful people into nondestructive paths, its ultimate theological purpose, as Luther argues, is to bring one to despair -- to “crush that brute which is called the presumption of righteousness’’ (Lectures on Galatians). Law reveals the depth and pervasiveness of human sinfulness, confronts one with the terrifying, righteous and impossible demands of God and imposes the sentence of God’s judgment -- namely, death. Properly understood, this bleak scenario serves as a softening process, producing, in Luther’s words, “a thirst for Christ” by exposing one to the reality of one’s status before God. “When the conscience has been terrified by the Law,” Luther said, ‘‘there is place for the doctrine of the Gospel of grace.”



Accordingly, Jews have been understood to live in a devilish quandary. Their “misuse” of the Law constitutes arrogance -- storming the gates of heaven with self-righteousness as a battering ram, they thereby violate God’s sovereignty. The very effort to attain righteousness under the Law, according to Rudolf Bultmann, “is already sin” (all quotations from The Theology of the New Testament [Scribner’s, 1955]). Furthermore, it leads to shallow and inferior religiosity. For Bultmann, Jews appear interested only in “minutely fulfilling the law’s stipulation,” with fulfilling the “letter of the law” without “asking the reason, the meaning of the demand.” This orientation concerns itself only with externals. The Law is obeyed only for the sake of reward. Jewish obedience is always “purely formal,” a kind of grudging compliance to an external demand which is inevitably described as a “burden.”

Jewish obedience is also episodic, lasting only as long as one’s confrontation with the burdensome commandment endures. Or as Bultmann puts it, “obedience, obedience again and again in the concrete case.” In contrast, Protestantism is presented as the superior religion of internal transformation, which replaces intermittent compliance to external demands with ‘‘radical obedience,’’ a surrender of ‘‘the whole will’’ to the sovereignty of God. For Protestants, then, Judaism is legalistic, and consequently arrogant, deludedly self-righteous, shallow and hopelessly trapped under the burden of trivial externals.

Some of these judgments result from sheer misunderstanding, others from radically different fundamental assumptions about the human relationship with God. The negative Protestant assessment of Judaism has the virtue of accurately perceiving the centrality of law in classical Judaism. Conciliatory approaches which ignore this and present Judaism as a religion of Protestant-style grace are at worst, praising a fictional religion, or, at best, selecting pieces of Judaism without regard for the whole. Better to acknowledge the reality -- that Judaism is indeed a religion of law. The logos of John 1:1 could very well be rendered torah (God’s “Way” or “Law”). Thus one could plausibly make the case that in Christianity ‘‘the Law is made flesh,” so central is law to Judaism. The misperceptions have more to do with the function of law than with its centrality.

First, the assumption that the Law is a means to earn salvation: just as in Christianity, in which Christ is not a mere means to salvation but salvation itself, for Judaism, Torah is the very presence of salvation here and now. When the Torah is read publicly in the synagogue, the blessing chanted over the scrolls states, “Blessed are You O Lord our God . . . who in giving us a Torah of truth has planted everlasting life within us.” Jewish tradition has long viewed the Sabbath as a taste of eternity: once a week Jews live in the mode of heavenly existence. More generally, since God is the creator of the universe, living according to his law allows one to live in balance with the whole of creation -- to live well. Halakhah (Jewish Law), both ritual and moral, is taken to be in accord with the laws of the universe itself.

For a Jew, violation of the laws of Halakhah is akin to violation of the laws of nature: disobedience produces dissonance within the universe, while obedience allows one to live in harmony with the totality of God’s creation. In the Jewish view, there is a ritual nature to all things. There is a sense here in which the Law is an end in itself. While Judaism has claimed that God rewards obedience and punishes disobedience, one is not to obey the Law in order to get the reward. One obeys because one loves God, who in creating, redeeming and giving revelation to his people has taken the first step. The Law is viewed as a magnificent gift bestowed by God on the Jewish people. It represents an act of love on God’s part which creates a living connection between him and them.

Evaluation of one’s ability to keep the law marks one more profound distinction between Christianity and Judaism. Christianity’s focus on the individual’s-inability to perform all the details of the Law is almost absent in Jewish discussions. The time of the year when Jews engage in sustained introspection regarding their failure to achieve the ideal, the Ten Days of penitence from Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur, is not a tune of despair but rather a time for extended examination of their moral and spiritual lives; it is a time set aside to commit themselves to doing teshuvah (repentance) and to change their lives in the coming year. At the end of the Yom Kippur service Jews feel a sense of purification, of having cleansed themselves of their sins and of being ready to try again.

In Judaism there is a fundamental belief that the Law is “do-able.” There is no particular mitzvah (commandment) that is seen as especially difficult. However, whether one is able to do all mitzvot is not an issue of great concern to Jewish thinkers. As human beings we strive to do the best we can; when we fail, we simply try to get back on the right path (teshuvah). The authentic act of repentance which repairs one’s relationship both with God and with one’s fellow human beings is completely effective. Once that action has been taken, there is no residue from the earlier sin.



The backdrop of these differences is a fundamental disagreement on the status of human beings before God. For most of its existence, Christianity has viewed humankind as marred by original sin. Our very being is deformed and is consequently blind to, alienated from or guilty before God. Here Christianity tends to display an all-or-nothing approach -- one is saved or damned, saint or sinner -- and this despite voices like Luther’s, who named the church a “church of sinners,” and its members simultaneously “sinful and justified.” But even these tend to be totalistic states: one is at once wholly a sinner and wholly justified. We might reasonably say that for Christianity, sins tend to be symbolic -- evidence of a deeper and ‘‘more real’’ corruption.

In Judaism, while people do sin, they are not thereby sinners. In the daily prayers one affirms, “O my God, the soul with which You have endowed me is pure, You created and fashioned it. You breathed it into me and You preserve it within me.” In rejecting the idea of original sin, Judaism also rejects the totalistic approach. In the liturgy for the High Holy Days, one finds images of God weighing sins and good deeds against each other -- a view suggesting that human beings combine both good and evil inclinations. In Judaism one is not so much simultaneously sinful and justified as partially good and partially evil. Both evil and good are real, and are really our attributes. Our righteousness, little as it may be, is not, and need not be, impugned. In Protestantism the struggle of faith is to submit, to let God do it all. In Judaism the struggle is with the help of Torah to exercise control over ones evil tendencies and nurture one’s goodness. Sins in Judaism thus are not symbolic, but concrete and particular.

The view of human beings as mixtures of good and evil is closely connected to the Jewish understanding of why God gave the Law. Rabbinic literature often warns against searching for reasons for the commandments, yet itself engages in the process -- with the understanding that those who seek reasons find them, but that one neither looks for nor finds the reason. There are two aspects to the question: First, why did God give the Law in general? Second, what are the reasons for each of the particular laws?

In regard to the first, which for our purposes is the significant question, the most common and widely accepted response is leisaref et ha-bri’ oth, “to purify God’s creatures.” The concept here implies the idea of betterment, the improvement of human beings. Law functions in this metallurgical metaphor as a means of expunging the inappropriate, counterproductive, anti-moral aspects of the human soul. This picture of the human being is one of a creature who is in need of purification, whose life is a process of improvement, who is continually striving to gain power over the negative or evil aspects of his or her being but who knows that the battle is never over. While Law here is seen as a means to an end, the Jew is to remember that the act of observing the Law has its own meaning. Observing the Law is doing the will of God. Each time one does a mitzvah, one enters the realm of the divine, and one’s own life is sanctified through it.

Two observations should be made here, one about the question of original sin, the other about the notion of human partnership with God. In Judaism, human beings do not necessarily bear the entire burden for the existence of evil. Jewish interpretations of the story of the Fall in Genesis tend not to stress human pride or arrogance (trying to ‘‘be God”), as do their Christian counterparts. Instead the focus is likely to be on a much more innocent experimentation with the possibilities of human existence (“Let’s see what this is all about”). God consequently has the greater share of responsibility for whatever evil exists, since his creation is incomplete. Yet this “deficiency” gives human beings a significant role to play: they may become co-workers with God in the process of “refining” the creation.

The Jewish view here is somewhat closer to the Roman Catholic perspective (in which the sacramental action of the church makes one a co-worker) than to traditional Protestantism (according to which there is little for human beings to do). Jews, by contrast, see themselves as constantly “building up” holiness through their actions in the world. Accusations of reluctant, formal, episodic obedience (“again and again in the concrete case”) are mistaken on a number of counts. The reward for fulfilling a commandment, according to The Ethics of the Fathers, is another commandment -- in short, an ongoing life resonating with God’s created order. Constantly reappearing throughout all Jewish liturgies is the affirmation that God’s commandments are blessings. So much for burdens and reluctant obedience.



It is also important to notice that Judaism, unlike Christianity, does not equate internal states with actual deeds. Judaism has little sympathy with Christianity in its equation of anger with murder, or of lust with adultery. Jews credit most heavily the perspective of the potential victim, for whom there is indeed a rather large difference. Of course, it is possible to take an instrumental approach to the Law (to gain honor or reward, to make parents happy), but the distinction between motivation and results prevents hasty rejection in the name of internal purity. In classic Jewish terms, whatever the problems of motivation might be, the act itself takes priority, and its religious value is not dependent on pure motivation. To use academic jargon, we might attribute some “sociological sophistication” to Judaism, meaning that it recognizes that human beings live “from the outside in” as well as “from the inside out.” Seen in this light, even purely formal obedience to the Law (action which is yotze yedey hovah, self-consciously fulfilling one’s obligation) can become a self-creative or self-transforming activity undertaken with the faith that as we do, so shall we become.

The fundamental axiom in this whole discussion is that God cares about how human beings behave. Our actions, from what appear to be the most important to the most insignificant, are of concern to God. We know what he wants us to do by consulting Halakhah (the entire corpus of Jewish Law). Therefore, the actual behavior of Jews throughout their lives takes on ultimate significance. One strives to live one’s life in conformity with God’s will. If God has provided instruction as to how we are to live our lives (in Halakhah), then we are obliged to follow those instructions. Doing something out of a sense of fulfilling the Law has a greater value than simply deciding that such and such an action would be good or beneficial. Religious Jews feel the divine command in all their actions and therefore look to Halakhah for guidance in deciding which action to take. Once again, however, this sense of obligation is experienced not as an impossibly heavy burden but rather as evidence of the great love and concern that God has shown the Jewish people in providing guidance to them on how to lead a holy life.

Throughout this discussion we have focused our attention on the individual person’s relationship to law and Torah. An adequate understanding of Judaism, however, requires that one recognize that Jews performing their individual responsibilities under the Law are affirming their membership in the Jewish people and their collective responsibility to God. This collective responsibility finds its expression in the concept of covenant (berit).

In the traditional Jewish view, God has freely entered into a covenant relationship with the Jewish people which is binding on all parties and which stipulates certain kinds of behavior to be exhibited by the covenanted nation. Its performance of these acts constitutes the fulfillment of its obligation as a covenant partner. The prophetic denunciation of the people is not that they are “merely” performing the required actions without the appropriate inner attitudes, but rather that they are performing only a part of their obligations and not all of them. God wants acts of loving-kindness, righteousness and justice, not just punctilious ritual behavior. The covenant obligations must be fulfilled in their entirety, not selectively.

It is through the laws given by God in the Torah, later interpreted and extended in the Oral Torah and Halakhah, that the Jew establishes and fulfills his or her relationship to God through the covenant. Thus it is true that Jews see their relation to God (as well as God’s relationship to them) in legal terms. This sense of being a legally constituted partner in the enterprise of human history is an essential ingredient in the Jewish self-concept. That partnership, however, while in a certain sense contracted with each individual Jew, is ultimately mediated through the Jewish community. The individual’s fulfillment of obligations (mitzvot) contributes to the fulfillment of the covenant responsibilities of the people. Each Jew, as a member of the covenant people, shares in the responsibilities and the obligations but does not view his or her goal as personal salvation or redemption -- rather, the concepts of salvation and redemption are reserved, for the most part, for the covenant partner, the People of Israel. Concepts like life after death and resurrection, while present throughout Judaism, are finally peripheral because of their close connection with ideas of individual salvation and personal continuity. Overwhelmingly, the real hope is one of the continuity and salvation of the people.

We hope that we have successfully demonstrated that while law is indeed central to Judaism, its actual operation is significantly different than Protestants have assumed. Protestant critiques of Jewish law have been setting up straw men and knocking them down, with little attempt to engage the Jewish community as a true interlocutor. A compassionate understanding of Judaism (the prerequisite for any real partnership in conversation) certainly requires the revision of Protestant views of Jewish law, and may entail the rethinking of the religious role of law, or of concrete religious action in general. Consequently, implications for Protestant understandings of Roman Catholicism (and the ‘‘concreteness’’ of its ritual life) may also emerge. Protestantism’s resources for such rethinking are probably to be found within its liturgical and sacramental traditions, which stress historical continuity and the tangibility and gentle guidance of ritual forms.

Because we believe that our conclusions point beyond the issues at hand to implications and agendas for the future, we suggest that the richness of Judaism’s ‘‘sacramental” sensibilities, its wealth of ritual practices and its appreciation of religious action, may offer Protestantism some insights for resisting the divergent tendencies of American culture to encapsulate religion in feelings and inwardness on the one hand, or to package religion as for telemarketing (rationalizing even the inner life) on the other. But these are matters for further essays. Protestant Christology may profit from thinking through the implications of seeing Jesus as ‘‘Law made Flesh.’’ Contemporary re-evaluations of St. Paul, particularly those of Krister Stendahl (Paul Among Jews and Gentiles) and E. P. Sanders (Paul and Palestinian Judaism and Paul, the Law and the Jewish People), are valuable resources. We are convinced that correcting our ingrained preconceptions will allow Jews and Christians not only to talk to each other, but to understand what is said.

You Know ‘Women Can’t Be Preachers!’

I received a negative response the first time I verbalized my call to ministry. Although it was 30 years ago, the memory is still vivid. I was 15 years old. One day, helping my mother put a clean bedspread on the bed, tucking the pillows into place, I looked across at her and said, “Mom, I am going to be a preacher.” She was obviously startled. She came back with, “You know women can’t be preachers!”

I didn’t know what to do with the feeling inside. I was a new Christian. Through the pages of the New Testament and in my experiences, God was calling me to some kind of ministry, to give my life in loving the world for which He had died. The only image I had of serving God was that of a preacher. In those mountains of southwest Virginia, the preacher worked in the coal mines during the week and preached on Sundays or held revivals in the evenings. I had never heard of a minister of education, campus minister or chaplain.

In the past 30 years I have tried to better understand that calling and to live it out in the world. It has been a difficult journey, but a rewarding one. There have been many disappointments that have tempted me to give up the struggle. I have served in many part-time or interim positions at low pay. Just having a job was sometimes a high point; at times I had to hang on with no hope of a job at all.

During one of those long nights of the soul, a friend said to me, “You need a place.” I drove away from her home that day thinking how great it would be to have “a place.” But then I realized that I had no promise of that place in the sense of having a position, a title or a fair salary. Freedom and peace came to me when I realized that my place was in the calling itself -- a call that mandates pilgrimage. As I look at history, I see that I am in pretty good company: Abraham was asked to leave his place and go on a pilgrimage; the Son of Man had “no place” to lay his head.

At least three times in the past ten years, I have thought that a more permanent place of ministry was working out -- but it never did. I once said to a friend, “At the rate I’m going, at my retirement dinner I’ll be saying. Thanks for the best two years of my life.”’ The friend replied, “That would be funny if it weren’t so sad.”

Let me tell you why I haven’t given up. First of all, I love being in the ministry. The joy and fulfillment I have experienced have come in doing what I would have paid to do. I identify with the little boy who was learning to mow lawns. He could hardly wait for the grass to come up that spring; it was to be his first time to cut it all by himself. He made his own lawn look wonderful, then looked across the fence at the tall grass there. The neighbor noticed the little boy’s yearning eyes. He walked to the fence and said, “Would you like to mow my lawn?”

“Oh, yes!’’ said the boy. “How about three dollars?” the man asked. The boy turned and walked away with his head down. The man was puzzled: “What’s wrong?” he said. The little boy replied, “I have only two dollars.”

I love to minister and would pay for the privilege; often have.

When I was a little girl, a fascinating storyteller named Gaines Kilgore often visited us. When I saw him coming toward our house, I could hardly wait until we had had dinner and could gather around the fire for hours of storytelling. Gaines trained racehorses and often told stories about the track. He said that once a horse has been trained to race, it is always ready to run when the bugle sounds. If a horse is injured or for some reason cannot run, it will nevertheless prance in the stall when it hears the bugle.

At the sound of need in ministry, how often I have pranced in the stall -- eager to take my place and run. I have been unable to run in what this world might consider the “big” races, but I have been free to run on the back side of the track as much as I wanted. This journey has taken me to minister in vacation Bible schools in Appalachia, to black migrant camps in South Carolina and to patients suffering in mental hospitals. I have found God there. Out of God’s affirmation in these places of ministry has come the feeling of “place,” and the courage to press on.

When I was serving as a chaplain at University Hospital in Louisville, my assignment was the female surgical ward. More than 40 beds lined each side of a large open room. On arriving one day, I could hear a woman groaning in pain. I followed the sound. At the back corner of the room three doctors were cutting on the woman’s foot, trying to remove an infection. A nurse was holding a pan to catch the blood, which was flowing freely. Obviously the doctors had not been able to get the foot completely numbed. I realized that the woman was probably a diabetic and that they were trying to stop the infection without taking her to surgery.

As I drew closer I could see three pillows stacked on the woman’s stomach to prevent her from seeing what was happening. She was an aging black woman, totally alone with her intense pain. I rested my elbow on the table between us and said, “Would you like a hand?”

She took my hand and gripped it. Finally both hands clasped mine and squeezed as the pain became more intense. For several minutes we didn’t exchange a word. I must have appeared to be straining, bending over the table to be near her. Her eyes scanned my badge, which identified me as a chaplain. She said, “Reverend, I hope that is not hurting your back.” It was the first time I had ever been called “Reverend.” I had been out of seminary 15 years and I was 42 years old. It was worth waiting for.

There, in the midst of ministry, I experienced a kind of ordination. Out there on the back side of the track, God laid hands of affirmation on me through the grip of a suffering black woman.

I have also received my mother’s blessing -- at least in words she can agree with. My mother is now 85 years old. A few months ago we went to see her. My brother-in-law Charles brought up the fact that they were calling a new preacher at his church. My mother, as she often does. quoted Scripture: “How can he preach except he be sent?” Charles noticed the emphasis that she placed on the he, so he asked her, “So you think only a man can be a preacher?”

“Oh yes, only a man,” she insisted. “How about your daughter there?” he said. My mother replied, “Now, there are many gifts. She could be an enlightener.”

My heart leaped within me. I said to myself, “I will take it. I will take it as my blessing!”

The more I thought about it, the more I liked my blessing --  “one who enlightens.” I have endured teachers who made things more confused, and observed ministers who brought no light to the darkness. One who enlightens. I will take it!

In Christ there is neither male nor female. Therefore, we -- both male and female -- can serve in any ministry to which God calls us. And in whatever role we give our lives, I hope we will be enlighteners. For the Christ who loved us, called us and gave himself for us said, “I am the light of the world.”

Malnutrition in Third World Countries

There is enough food to feed everybody in the world now; in the year 2000 there will still be enough food for everyone. And yet 500 million people are malnourished. The realities linking these statements are a relatively inconsequential part of our lives here in the United States, but in Third World countries these realities are part of the shape of living. It is primarily in the third World that protein energy malnutrition (PEM) affects 500 million people and kills 10 million every year.

At the Sixth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver, the problems of hunger and malnutrition that deeply divide the Third World from the First and Second Worlds were seen to extend into the body of Christ. Peoples in the Third World struggle every hour with the effects of hunger and malnutrition while the main concern of peoples of the First and Second Worlds is the possibility of nuclear war. The difference evident in these priorities is a reflection of a difference in attitudes, which is, in turn, a reflection of differences in culture and experience.

Another gap is that, though churches and church-affiliated groups in the US. are the largest private givers of overseas food aid, the problem is not a world shortage of food. Thus, what we hope to accomplish with our aid -- to keep people from starving -- is not being achieved. The problem of malnutrition in the Third World is a complex one that most Americans have no experience with and thus do not understand well. But only through better understanding lies any hope for a solution and for more effective use of the money and energy devoted to overseas food aid.

Last fall Michael Latham, director of the Program in International Nutrition at Cornell University, delivered a series of lectures at Washington State University in Pullman. Washington. The material in this article is based on those lectures and on a subsequent interview.

Born and raised in Tanzania, Dr. Latham attended an English boarding school in South Africa and went on to university and medical school studies in Dublin. Then he returned to serve in the town where he had been born. Over the years most of his work has been in the Third World.

Early in his career, Dr. Latham dealt with the case of a child suffering from kwashiorkhor, a form of malnutrition caused by a lack of both protein and energy-giving food in the diet. The child’s parents insisted that he was getting enough food, largely consisting of cassava. a root vegetable high in bulk but low in protein. The swelling of the body due to edema from the kwashiorkhor hid his malnourishment and it was difficult for the parents to understand that his diet was inadequate. When the condition did not improve, the family brought the child to the clinic again. The third time that Dr. Latham saw him he was better, probably because, being older, he was more aggressive at the table.

Many incidents similar to this underscored for Dr. Latham the value of the preventive, public-health approach to medical problems, rather than the traditional curative approach. Several years after this incident, the importance and influence of nutrition in preventing disease became clear.

Today, as Dr. Latham points out, death and disease in developing countries are often primarily a result of malnutrition. The so-called “big four” are: protein-energy malnutrition (PEM), with 500 million people affected and 10 million dying every year; vitamin A deficiency, causing xerophthalmia and blindness, which affect 6 million people a year and kill 750,000; endemic goiter, caused by iodine deficiency and affecting 150 million people a year; and nutritional anemia, affecting 350 million people a year.

One of the most important adverse effects of malnutrition is that the body becomes unable to defend itself. People with kwashiorkhor are unable to produce antibodies after being given various vaccines, including typhoid and diphtheria. The formation of the white blood cells, essential in fighting infection, is reduced in severe PEM, and the ability of white blood cells to engulf and consume bacteria is decreased.

Infectious organisms are also more likely to enter the body. Inadequate amounts of vitamin C cause small vessels in the body which bring nutrients to the skin to become fragile; the skin then breaks down more easily, facilitating the entry of infectious organisms. A deficiency of niacin, or vitamin 83, causes pellagra, with its associated skin breakdown.

Kwashiorkhor leads to fatty changes in the liver and swelling of the body due to excess fluid in the tissues. There is also a decrease in intellectual development.



For people in developing countries, the effects of malnutrition are drastically compounded by infection and by the decline of breast feeding. Dr. Latham’s lectures focused on both of these factors.

The adverse effects of malnutrition increase the body’s exposure to infection while at the same time decreasing its ability to fight the infection. When infection is present, loss of appetite occurs. The resulting decrease in food intake is compounded by traditional methods of treatment, such as “starving a fever.” The body loses increasing amounts of nitrogen into the urine, usually as a result of the breakdown of protein in muscle tissue. On recovery, more protein is needed to replace the lost amino acids.

In Third World countries, children suffer from many different infections, often having some kind of infection for 200 days of the year. With each infection, as protein is broken down and nitrogen lost, the nitrogen deficit grows, making it more and more difficult for the body to rebuild the amino acids needed for new protein formation. A slowing of the children’s growth rate and normal development is one result.

The nature of the relationship between malnutrition and infection is found in the fact that their interaction within the body is synergistic; that is, the effect of the presence of both of them at once is greater than the sum of the effects of malnutrition plus the effects of infection. Dr. Latham used the examples of diarrhea, measles and parasitic infestations to outline this synergistic relationship.

The most common cause of death in young children in developing countries is diarrhea (also a major fatal disease in New York at the turn of the century). In Indonesia it kills one out of ten children per year. The infections start after the time of weaning, from eating contaminated foods and from lack of hygiene. The cause of death is not the infection itself, but dehydration from the resultant water loss.

Some parasitic infestations are a direct cause of nutritional deficiencies. One-quarter of the world’s people are infested with roundworms. Hookworms, also prevalent in Third World countries, suck blood from the lining of the gut, thereby causing iron deficiency anemia. Another worm, the fish tapeworm, causes a vitamin B12 deficiency. It is common to have multiple infestations as well. In some parts of Kenya, 90 per cent of the children have hookworm, so it is not surprising that, in some of the country’s primary schools, 50 percent of the pupils were found to be anemic.

Measles, now considered a mild childhood infection in this country, has a death rate in Mexico 180 times higher than in the United States. In some African countries the death rate from measles is 400 times that of the U.S. In England, one person in 10,000 dies from measles; in West Africa, the figure is one in 20. The differences in these rates are attributable to the nutritional states of the people who contract measles. The disease severely affects those whose immune systems have already been eroded by malnutrition. Complicating the problem is the poorer response to vaccination in malnourished children.

Dr. Latham also reported on some solutions that have been found in dealing with these three infections. For diarrhea, oral rehydration has replaced the use of intravenous fluids. In what an English medical journal, the Lancet, has called one of the most important scientific findings in the past 20 to 30 years, the addition of glucose to the standard oral rehydration fluid of salt and water greatly increases the body’s ability to absorb needed water. Mothers can be taught to make oral rehydration fluids and to make sure that the child eats regularly during the illness. Further, within the next ten to 20 years. a vaccine against rotaviruses that cause diarrhea is expected to be developed.

Because some parasitic infestations are so common, Dr. Latham suggests regular, routine deworming projects until a community’s sanitation is improved sufficiently to eliminate the worm. With measles, studies have shown that the use of dietary supplements decreases both the death rate and the severity of infection.

Dr. Latham concludes that a community’s nutrition problems must be dealt with in conjunction with health care, sanitation and immunizations. Such a holistic approach has been shown to be the most effective. Just as the problems are synergistic, so are the solutions.



If a poor mother in a developing country chooses to bottle feed rather than to breast feed her infant, she thereby chooses greater chances of sickness and death for the baby. Four different influences can turn bottle feeding into a tragedy: economic, hygienic, nutritive and immunologic. The effects of these influences are threefold. First, the infants literally starve. Second, they are more exposed to infection. Third, they do not have the immunological protection that comes in breast milk. What follows is based on Dr. Latham’s analysis.

Formula is relatively expensive: for a three-month-old child, it can cost 50 to 60 per cent of the minimum wage in some developing countries, plus the price of the equipment. Because of the high cost there is a tendency to stretch the formula by overdiluting it. This practice leads to nutritional marasmus, a condition resulting from severe protein and calorie deprivation.

Breast feeding is cheaper and always nutritious; the only added cost is for the mother’s extra nutritive needs. Although the components of breast milk will vary depending on the woman’s health, even an undernourished mother is a remarkably efficient producer of nutritious human milk.

Contamination of the formula, the bottle or other equipment leads to infectious diarrhea. Breast milk comes sterile from the breast. And anti-infective properties cannot be put into formula, nor is there any indication that such a process will be possible in the near future. Conversely, at least a dozen anti-infective factors are found in breast milk, including antibodies, lysozyme, lactoferrin and interferon. Among the functions performed by antibodies are preventing bacterial invasion of the intestines, neutralizing toxins and killing viruses. Splitting the cell walls of certain bacteria is one function of lysozyme; this enzyme also aids the effectiveness of one of the antibodies. Lactoferrin binds iron that is essential for bacterial growth, and interferon provides early help in the body’s defense against viruses.

Another contribution of breast feeding is the decrease in fertility of a nursing mother, often adding nine to 12 months to the spacing between births. In India, breast feeding is more effective for birth control than contraception.

In light of the clear superiority of human milk for babies, it is very disturbing to note the decline of breast feeding in Third World countries. In Chile in 1960, 90 per cent of women were breast feeding their children after the first year: by 1968, that figure had dropped to less than 10 per cent. In the 20 years between 1950 and 1970, the percentages of Singapore women who breast fed beyond the first year dropped from 80 to eight or ten.

Dr. Latham attributes this decline largely to a desire to be chic or modern. Reversing the trend involves the difficult task of changing attitudes. A place to start this task is in the medical community. Instruction and texts in medical schools have emphasized formula feeding and de-emphasized breast feeding. Physicians in the Third World, often trained in Western schools. convey this emphasis in their patient care, and breast feeding appears to be second-best. Medical students need to learn more about nutrition, and in particular the role of breast feeding in infant nutrition.

Another approach to the problem lies in changing trade policies. Third World countries could import less formula, and advertising practices could be more closely regulated.

The root cause of malnutrition is inadequate distribution of the available food, for the world produced enough grain last year to provide 3,000 calories per person per day. However, we are not able to get the food to the people who need it most. This statement refers not to food handouts but to policies that influence purchasing power, food prices and distribution practices.

Economic gains measured by gross national product or industrial output are not reflected in improvements in the lives of the majority of people; their purchasing power does not increase. The peasant farmer in Kenya, Tanzania or any of the developing countries is having to work harder in 1984 than in 1954 or ‘64 to earn enough money to buy a hoe or a gallon of kerosene. And the people are inadequately paid for their agricultural products and minerals. Compare these prices in upstate New York: imported bananas cost 35 cents per pound, while a pound of locally grown apples costs 48 cents.

The inequity in such a system is reflected in the occurrence of malnutrition. Protein-energy malnutrition, anemia and blindness from vitamin A deficiency are very closely associated with poverty, only rarely occurring in the affluent population -- even in developing countries.

Food distribution -- the use of the food produced -- is linked to national policies. The United States raises 2,000 pounds of cereal grain per person per year; of that total, 150 pounds is used for human consumption, while 1,850 pounds is fed to animals to produce meat, eggs and dairy products. The U.S.S.R. imports grain to use as animal feed. In contrast, China produces 450 pounds of cereal grain per person per year; 350 pounds goes for human consumption and 100 pounds to feed animals. The Philippines exports calories in the form of sugar and coconut oil every day, while half of the country’s children are malnourished. India is self-sufficient in food production.

Dr. Latham concludes that the lack of food and micronutrients is due not to acts of nature but to acts of people. What is needed is change to improve the quality of life, not change to get people to be more like ourselves. If this change is to happen, better understanding between people and revolutionary shifts in attitudes and policies must prevail.

There is an urgent and immediate need for several improvements: more voice for the people in the national policies which directly affect them: withdrawal of U.S. support for undemocratic governments; and more adequate pay for people who live in developing countries.

A huge impact could be made right now on the death and disease attributable to the synergism between infection and malnutrition -- but not with fancy hospitals, such as those found in capital cities in many developing countries, or with elaborate manufactured foods or expensive infant formulas or over-trained doctors or advanced food technologies. Rather, the means could be relatively simple if the affluent nations resolved that the reduction of deprivation is an important goal, and if the governments of developing nations made it an important priority.

Dr. Latham’s sensitivity to the poor pervades all his comments. When asked how he had developed this sensitivity, he said that he had been shown a tremendous amount of loving-kindness and generosity by poor people. One particular incident that stands out in his memory occurred when the Rufiji River in southeastern Tanzania had flooded. Dr. Latham was flown in to give care to victims stranded by the floodwaters. During the following 36 hours, people approached him continuously to offer him whatever bits and scraps of food they had, even though their own need was much greater than his.

The loving-kindness shown in such giving reminds us that “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy,” And their merciful acts are only dim images of God’s kindness and compassion. As the Holy Spirit leads us to consider the devastating, complex problem of malnutrition, let us do it prayerfully, asking that our hearts be prepared to bring forth the fruits of the Spirit: love and kindness.

Moral Ambiguities and the Crime Novels of P.D. James

The writer P. D. James is now receiving recognition for her contribution to the transformation of the traditional English detective story. James herself prefers to call the genre the “crime novel,” for she is concerned with much more than the writing of escapist thrillers. In an interview several years ago she discussed the conventions of the detective story in which “the good triumph and the bad are punished. . . .This is one reason why, for some people, the detective story -- however good it is -- will always be classified as a subliterary form: because of the contrivances, and because, in the past, psychological truth was too often sacrificed to the demands of plot” (Times Literary Supplement. June 5, 1981). For James, the genres of the novel and the detective story have merged: “The modern detective story has moved away from the earlier crudities and simplicities. Crime writers are as concerned as are other novelists with psychological truth and the moral ambiguities of human action.”

Readers of the old-fashioned detective story usually approached it as an intellectual puzzle -- a “whodunit.” P. D. James admits that one of the reasons she began to write mysteries was the importance of the plot, saying that she chose a detective theme for her first book because she enjoyed reading detective stories for relaxation. “I think I was very much influenced by Dorothy L. Sayers in my girlhood -- and I was fascinated by the idea of constructing a plot,” she told the Times interviewer. A plot which is a suspenseful puzzle requires the kind of inexorable internal logic that Aristotle saw in Oedipus the King, in which the intellectual puzzle is acted out by the hero. The search for the identity of his parents drives Oedipus relentlessly toward his doom.

For Aristotle, the plot is also the story of human action from which moral and ethical issues cannot be separated. Oedipus thinks he can manage his own destiny through the power of his intelligence and his impulsive action, when in fact these very qualities lead to his downfall. Part of the power of a great story derives from the unexpected and sudden reversal and recognition near the end. In the peripeteia (reversal) and anagnorisis (recognition) the protagonist experiences a downfall and discovery of truth which inspire terror and pity in us. We identify with the hero or heroine whose inner being and existential predicament are like our own.

The reversal must result in poetic justice; an evil protagonist cannot be rewarded by the achievement of power and prestige. Nevertheless, in the greatest stories moral ambiguity is ever-present; good on a large scale triumphs, but the central figure is not totally wicked. The protagonist suffers because of a hamartia, a flaw in character or a mistake in judgment. The tragic hero or heroine embodies our own conflicting motivations and feelings. The ironies and complexities of life place the individual in a situation where a single choice can be all-important.

The classic detective story cannot exist apart from the principles of the existence of good and evil and of poetic justice. The crime is usually a murder; with the discovery of the identity of the murderer, the criminal experiences a kind of Aristotelian reversal. The reader closes the book knowing that justice will be carried out. Some literary critics have trouble with the conventionality of the principle of good and evil in the detective story; its focal point has been the cleverness of the investigator of the crime, not the psychology of the characters caught up in the drama of the crime.

In an article in Crime Writers, edited by H. R. F. Keating (1978), P. D. James defended Dorothy Sayers against that charge, pointing out that Sayers had begun to include the details of ordinary life in the detective story, placing events in a real world. Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, too, “are novelists, not merely fabricators of ingenious puzzles. Both seek, not always successfully, to reconcile the conventions of the classical detective story with the novel of social realism.’’

On more fundamental grounds. James defends the crime novel in the hands of these writers because they never trivialize crime:

A genre which rests on the fundamental belief that willful killing is wrong and that every human being, no matter how unpleasant, inconvenient or worthless his life may be, has a right to live it to the last natural moment, needs no particular apology in an age in which gratuitous violence and arbitrary death have become common.

These comments reflect many of the qualities of James’s own novels. In her fictional world there is a vivid sense of place and of personality. The crimes she constructs occur in a closed community with its limited number of suspects and a set of distorted relationships where the family no longer exists as a cohesive unit. Crime is often the result of the ignorance and despair of ordinary people.

James began her writing career with the publication of Cover Her Face in 1962. Then in her early 40s, she was a hospital administrative assistant in London. After marrying C. B. White, a physician, in 1941, James had become the sole support of her family (she has two daughters) when her husband returned from the war mentally ill (he died in 1964). She continued her career as a civil servant, serving in the criminal department of the Home Office from 1968 to 1979, when she decided to give writing her full attention. Several of her nine novels have received awards from the British Crime Writers Association and the Mystery Writers of America.

Adam Dalgleish, a Scotland Yard inspector, is the principle figure of continuity in James’s first four novels. Almost without exception, the murder victims in these books are thoroughly unpleasant or rigid and unsympathetic. Like Dante, James seems to choose a punishment suitable to the sin of each of her victims; they themselves are a clue as to why they are murdered. Indirectly, they bring about their own doom. Dalgleish builds up a strange relationship with the dead, for the victim is “central to the mystery of his own death.”

Sally Jupp, the victim in Cover Her Face, is a manipulator and exploiter. The setting for the murder is Martingale, the country house of the Maxie family. Beginning with this first novel. James creates atmosphere by an attentive and accurate description of architecture and locale. The physical isolation of her chosen environments allows us to see a microcosm of society. In this book we observe the stresses at work in a small family for which decorum is one of the unspoken values; anyone is capable of violence when the threat to one’s values is great enough.

The setting of A Mind to Murder (1963) is the Steen Clinic, an upper-middle-class psychiatric center located in a Georgian town house in London. Enid Bolam, the victim, is a rigid, inflexible administrator who is generally disliked. The events in the third novel, Unnatural Causes (1967), take place at Monksmere Head, a point of land on the Suffolk coast where several writers live. Shortly after Dalgleish’s arrival on a personal visit, a body with its hands severed is found in a dinghy near the desolate shore. The victim had been a self-centered writer of mysteries, and the discovery of his corpse ironically parallels the opening incident of a story suggested to him by one of his neighbors.

Shroud for a Nightingale (1971) is situated at Nightingale House, a nurses training school, where two students and an instructor are murdered. Heather Pearce, a student playing the role of a patient during a demonstration of tube feeding, dies a ghastly death when disinfectant is mixed with the warm milk used in the feeding. She was not, however, the intended victim, and we discover that the key to the tangled web of relationships lies again with a thoroughly unpleasant person who has used information to threaten people.



Adam Dalgleish, the investigator in this first group of novels, is relentless, clever and intuitive, but he is no stereotype. A cool professional, he is also painfully aware of the dilemmas of his work and the fallibility of human nature. The writer of two books of poetry, he suffers because his self-knowledge permits him truly to understand the motives of the characters of each murder drama. When he questions a striking and intelligent woman about her past and her relationship with a very ordinary, but safe, friend and confidante, he is told that he could never understand. “But he did understand,” writes James. “There had been a boy in his prep school like that, so ordinary, so safe, that he was a kind of talisman against death and disaster.”

Adam is strangely detached and uncommitted. He has suffered the tragedy of the deaths of his wife and infant son. Although the threads of a romance are introduced in the early novels, Dalgleish does not remarry. In A Mind to Murder, he visits a Catholic church to light a candle on the 14th anniversary of his wife’s death, but he is not a believer. “He thought of this most private action in his detached and secretive life, not as superstition or piety, but as a habit which he could not break even if he wished.”

Dalgleish is perhaps a modern Everyman; aware of the great existential issues of life, he takes no stand on them. Although he is the son of an Anglican clergyman, he is alone and self-sufficient in a world of ambiguity and violence where love often is a possessive passion which is easily transformed into hate. In Shroud, Adam passes through the outpatient department of the hospital and is reminded of his own mortality. It is not that he fears death. “But he did grievously fear old age, mortal illness and disablement. He dreaded the loss of independence, the indignities of senility. . . . He was not arrogant enough to suppose himself secure from the lot of other men. But in the meantime, he preferred not to be reminded.”

Adam refuses to discuss the motivation to murder in terms of sin or wickedness. He agrees with Dr. Etherege in A Mind to Murder when asked about the unknown murderer: “Wicked? I’m not competent to discuss this in theological terms.” There are no clear-cut theological answers which explain the moral ambiguities of human action. James has commented:

Dalgleish’s failing as a human being . . . is that he is very careful to avoid commitment; detecting is in a sense an ideal job for him, because although he is constantly interfering with other people, finding things out about them and coming into their lives in a very dramatic way, he must remain detached -- he’d be an unsatisfactory policeman otherwise.

With her fifth novel, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), James creates a central character who is quite different from the detached Adam Dalgleish. Cordelia Gray is a young private detective who inherited a small agency from her partner Bernie after he committed suicide. Like Adam, she is alone; her father was a vagabond Marxist who left Cordelia to foster care -- she was mistakenly sent by the authorities to a Roman Catholic convent school. In this first big case, Cordelia becomes involved with the people she encounters, making herself vulnerable. Mark Callendar, a student who had mysteriously dropped out of Cambridge to work as a gardener, has committed suicide; his father, Sir Ronald, asks Cordelia to investigate the circumstances. Cordelia is cool, intelligent and well trained, but she decides to live in the cottage which Mark had been using and gradually identifies with his integrity; he is James’s first truly innocent victim. Although Cordelia is warned by the owner of the cottage that “it’s unwise to become too personally involved with another human being,” her rare inner strength and courage permit her to persevere and survive danger. When she encounters Dalgleish near the end of the novel, Cordelia is able to bend the letter of the law to be merciful in a way that Adam cannot.

Theological and moral concerns have more apparent in James’s more recent fiction. In The Black Tower (1975) a convalescent Dalgleish has gone to the Dorset coast to visit Father Baddeley, an old friend of his father. When Adam arrives, he discovers that the priest has died suddenly and been buried hastily. His suspicions aroused, Dalgleish is drawn into the investigation of a series of murders and other evil actions at Toynton Grange, a home for the disabled run on religious principles by Wilfred Anstay. The black tower embodies the evil and death which pervade this small, grotesque world. Dennis Lerner, a staff member, says of the tower:

I like the black tower, particularly in summer when the headland is peaceful and golden and the sun glints on the black stone. It’s a symbol, really, isn’t it? It looks magical, unreal, a folly built to amuse a child. And underneath there’s horror, pain, madness and death.

Dennis had repeated this to Father Baddeley once, but the priest had disagreed: “‘Oh, no, my son. Underneath there’s the love of God.”’ Julius Court, a key figure in the novel, will have none of this theological talk. “I don’t need a phallic symbol erected by a Victorian eccentric to remind me of the skull under the skin. Like any reasonable man I prepare my own defences.” What are they? “Money and the solace it can buy. Leisure, friends, beauty, travel. And when they fail. . . and Dennis’s four horses of the apocalypse take over, three bullets in a Luger.”

The realities of evil and death are inescapable for James’s characters. When Cordelia Gray encounters her first murderer, she bursts out, ‘‘I can’t believe that a human being could be so evil.” Then she continues, “What is the use of making the world more beautiful if the people who live in it can’t love one another?” The gentle are destroyed by those, like Julius Court, who ruthlessly pursue beauty and luxury as the supreme momentary consolations which can stave off mortality. How we live our lives is a sign of how we handle death, that unavoidable reminder of our human condition. Death of an Expert Witness (1977) is the most complex work to that point and marks James’s mastery of the crime novel as a genre. The action occurs in a forensic laboratory in East Anglia and in the nearby town of Chevisham and its fens. The first of the two murders is not premeditated, and both crimes result from despairing passion. In this book, Dalgleish moves closer to involvement with the murder drama than at any other point in his career. As the investigation begins, Sergeant Massingham, his assistant, wonders what could move Dalgleish to spontaneous pity.” When the solution to the murders emerges, Adam suffers because he understands the desperation of the murderer who now faces the loss of family, which Adam himself has experienced through death. The criminal comments: “A murderer sets himself aside from the whole of humanity forever. It’s a kind of death. I’m like a dying man now. . . . I forfeited so many things when I killed . . . , even the right to feel pain.”

Of Innocent Blood (1980) James has said, “I wanted to write about the search for identity, revenge, redemption, . . . and therefore I decided this had better be a novel that wasn’t a straightforward detective story and wouldn’t feature Dalgleish.” This book constitutes a sophisticated transformation of the intellectual puzzle of the mystery; like Oedipus, Philippa Rose Palfrey, the adopted daughter of a nonbelieving social scientist who is also a television personality, decides to seek out the identity of her natural parents. Philippa’s journey out of her privileged, selfish and false existence as a young woman bound for Cambridge leads her to self-knowledge and the choice of love and forgiveness versus vengeance and expiation.

Philippa discovers that her mother, May Ducton, is about to be released from prison; the two tentatively begin to approach one another as they move into a shabby apartment in London. In the gripping story that follows, Philippa’s illusions about her parents are shattered. Maurice, her adoptive father, reveals the truth about her past and Philippa, like Oedipus, learns the limits of self-reliance. “It’s odd that over something so important you never once used your intelligence, you who have always relied on intelligence, have had such respect for your own mind.” With May’s death, Philippa’s real journey begins as she learns the meaning of sorrow and love, searching for the happiness symbolized by the rose of her name and the roses which constitute a motif of the novel.

At the end, having published a successful book, Philip-pa reappears when she is leaving Evensong at Cambridge; she meets Norman Scase, a figure from her past, who asks for her forgiveness. Philippa hurts Scase, but she exhibits the degree of her growth in her apology: “I’m sorry. I’m not a kind person. I try to be sometimes, but I’m not very good at it yet.” To Scase’s revelation of his own selfish motives, she inwardly acknowledges: “I used my mother to avenge myself on my adoptive father. We all use each other. Why should you expect to be less corrupt than the rest of us?” Philippa has learned the lesson of the moral ambiguities of her own actions; she is still on a journey toward the discovery of her own identity in reaching out to love another human being.

The rare moments of peace and happiness that occur in James’s fiction are sometimes connected with the quiet beauty of ritual, especially Evensong. There are reminders of joy and of traditional values in the references to authors such as Shakespeare, Austen or Blake. But beauty is only a reminder of grace, and lames sets the issue of self-knowledge in opposition to self-indulgence, the warship of beauty, and personal hypocrisy. Increasingly, her fiction reminds us that we need to accept our need of belief; belief itself is a gift. Even as a nonbeliever, Philippa finds in the Anglican mass a reminder of her unrecognized need to believe: “It was, after all, no hardship to listen to Cranmer’s prose, or as much of it as the revisers had left unmutilated. From these sonorous, antiphonal cadences Jane Austen, on her deathbed, receiving the sacrament from her brother’s hands, had taken comfort. That fact alone was enough to silence irreverence.

Philippa experiences one precious moment of delight before her world comes crashing down around her. One day, while her mother is preparing tea, Philippa is suddenly transfixed -- surprised by joy -- as she looks at a simple geranium on the window sill.

Some words of William Blake fell into her mind, familiar but new. “Everything that lives is holy. Life delights in life.” . . . Everything living was part of one great wholeness. To breathe was to take in delight. She wished she knew how to pray, that there was someone to whom she could say: “Thank you for this moment of happiness. Help me to make her happy.” And then she thought of other words, familiar but untraceable to their source: “In whom we live and move and have our being.”

The themes of the fragility of life and love and the reality of violent death and evil coalesce in The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) in which Cordelia Gray reappears as the protagonist. The title, a phrase previously used in The Black Tower, is drawn from T. S. Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality” and refers to the dramatist John Webster. Cordelia is asked to protect an actress named Clarissa Lisle, who has been receiving death threats in the form of quotations, usually from Shakespeare. Clarissa is to play the leading role in The Duchess of Malfi in an amateur production on Courcy Island, owned by Ambrose Gorringe, an old aquaintance. Cordelia accompanies the actress to the island, but cannot prevent her murder; two other deaths follow, and Cordelia herself barely survives.

The manipulative Clarissa was tortured by a vivid fear of death almost all her life, so the threats she has received are especially cruel. She says, “I don’t remember when it began, but I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn’t see the skull beneath the skin.” Later, when Cordelia confronts Clarissa’s attacker, she hears a secular philosophy like that of Julius Court:

A man should have the courage to live by his beliefs. If you accept, as I do absolutely, that this life is all that we have, that we die as animals, that everything about us is finally lost irrevocably, that we go into the night without hope, then that belief must influence how you live your life.

Clarissa and her attacker demean both life and death.

Cordelia has no ready theological answer to such problems; her response is intuitive. Yet, at key points in the novel, she recalls the values of her convent education. For her, evil is a reality from which unexpected moments of grace and providence protect her. In James’s world of distorted relationships, of crimes of despair and self-interest, a few figures stand out here and there. They have inner strength and knowledge; some believe, and all have the capacity and hunger to believe. Cordelia is one of these figures, and James seems to call us all to her inner honesty.

Homosexuality and the Vatican

The initial response to Educational Guidance in Human  Love, published on December 1, 1983, by the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education, has been largely positive. Father James Burtchaell calls the new document ‘dull but not damning’ (National Catholic Reporter, December 16, 1983). Comparing it with the 1975 Vatican Declaration on Certain Questions concerning Sexual Ethics, which he describes as “one long peeve.” Burtchaell praises the new Roman venture in sexual education as “positively congenial” He also notes an interesting comparison between the Vatican sex statement and the writings of the German moralist Herbert Doms. who was condemned by the Holy Office under Pius XII in 1944.

But Thomas Blackburn, another NCR columnist, describes the attempt as “another useless document on sex certain which deals with Latinate abstraction rather than with real people” (January 13). Blackburn also points to at least one example of Educational Guidance’s reluctance to speak in direct. forceful language when it talks about “manifestations of a sexual kind which of themselves tend to complete encounter.”

The document generally, however, is carefully worded, since it is addressed to the whole church rather than to one particular country or culture. As with most church statements, it is left to the competent authorities in each setting to clarify, interpret and apply the document’s insights and principles for the local situation. Many U.S. Catholic readers will be tempted to agree with Blackburn when he says. “I think I know what all that is supposed to mean. But it doesn’t say what it’s intended to say.” Fewer will join him in adding, ‘It doesn’t say much of anything.’ What seems to concern more American Catholics is the increasing gap between what official church statements say and what people are experiencing in their own lives. Blackburn describes this as a ‘digression’ between paper and reality.”

Sexuality remains one of the more obvious and sensitive areas of tension between Rome and U.S. Catholicism. Pope John Paul II’s talks to the American bishops on their visits in 1983 seemed to confirm this observation. The stir that Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco created when he spoke to the 1981 World Synod of Bishops on the witness of American Catholics in the practice of contraception is another example of the explosive nature of issues involving sexuality and church doctrine.

Of all the sexual questions under discussion in the United States, the one which best serves to illustrate the growing difference in approaches is the controversial issue of homosexuality. No one expected Cardinal William Baum’s committee to bestow the church’s blessing on homosexuality. The best that one could hope for was that the discussion of homosexuality would at least acknowledge some of the recent data from the social sciences. Many readers will judge that the document failed to heed its own sound admonitions to give due consideration to the empirical sciences.

The fundamental distinction between sexual orientation, and sexual behavior, for example, seems to have been lost or disregarded by the authors of Educational Guidance. This is a strange reversal, in light of the fact that in Chicago John Paul himself repeated and confirmed this distinction as part of official Catholic teaching when he quoted to the American bishops with apparent approval their own 1976 pastoral letter. To Live in Christ Jesus. The distinction has not gone unchallenged in both its theoretical and practical implications. But it has, at least, proved somewhat helpful in clarifying some of the complexities involved in any rational discussion of homosexuality. Its omission, therefore, is a definite setback to the progress that has been made both pastorally and theologically in the struggle with an emotional question -- one which affects the lives of 5 million Catholics in the United States alone, or one out of every four Catholic families.



Obvious inconsistencies and injustices result when this central distinction is ignored. Blackburn, for instance, says that while the document deals with “categories’’ that used to be taught as “sexual sin,” it is still incongruous to list homosexuality alongside adultery, fornication and masturbation. How does homosexuality, a condition, get in with the acts?’’ he asks, logically. “Why should homosexuality that doesn’t lead to anything be equated with adultery, when heterosexuality that doesn’t lead to adultery isn’t?’’

Educational Guidance discusses homosexuality in three major paragraphs: “Homosexuality” (101), “Cause” (102) and “Necessity of Offering Efficacious Help” (103). These three paragraphs do not afford the reader a thorough, much less a comprehensive, treatment of the subject. In all fairness, however, the document cannot be faulted for not doing what it doesn’t attempt to do -- namely, to give an exhaustive treatment of the topic. It, can be faulted, however, for its failure to be conversant with contemporary data when it makes pronouncements and gives advice to parents and educators about homosexuality. Calling homosexuality a “problem’’ is viewed from several perspectives. The use of the term “disorder,” however, is simply inadequate, either as a general description of homosexuality or of particular gay and lesbian experiences in the United States today, without using some moral or psychological distinctions. The American Catholic bishops expressed much more sensitivity when they described homosexuality as a “complex issue” in their 1978 document A Vision and Strategy: The Plan of Pastoral Action for Family.

Official church statements which insist on using the term “disorder’’ without any distinctions or definitions will fail to receive a serious hearing from some segments of the U.S. Catholic community, including many theologians and those in the therapeutic professions. The rejection of this terminology by gay and lesbian people themselves is already widespread. This rejection has received support from two recent official Catholic statements on homosexuality.

In 1979 the Catholic bishops of England and Wales issued guidelines for the clergy titled An Introduction to the Pastoral Care of Homosexual People. Three kinds of homosexual people are carefully distinguished: (1) those who have personality disorders which lead to criminal offenses; (2) those who have psychological problems such as neuroses and alcoholism; and (3) those who are “well-adjusted, stable people . . . who have come to terms with their homosexuality, who never seek help and who are never in trouble with the law.” The bishops describe this last group as individuals who are psychologically adjusted, sometimes even better than the average heterosexual.’’

A more recent document from the senate of priests of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Ministry and Homosexuality in the Archdiocese of San Francisco (May 1983), comes to the same conclusion about some homosexual people. The contrast between this paper’s approach and that of the new Vatican study is even more apparent. Educational Guidance suggests that homosexuality might be caused by a lack of “normal sexual evolution.” Ministry clearly rejects this explanation, at least as an adequate explanation for all homosexual orientations. ‘‘What is clear, however,” says the San Francisco statement, “is that the homosexual orientation is not simply a matter of . . . truncated sexual development.” Nor do homosexual people “experience their homosexual orientation as sinful, truncated or abnormal.” It should be added that many homosexual people do not judge their responsible homosexual expression in those terms, either.

Educational Guidance encourages both parents and educators to face the issue of homosexuality in “all objectivity” when it arises. Yet it seems to lack some objectivity in its own approach. Paragraph 101, for example, which is basically a repetition of another statement on homosexuality taken directly from the Vatican Declaration of 1975, talks only about the “personal difficulties” of homosexual people and of their social maladaption.” No mention is made of the part that societal and ecclesial attitudes and practices play in these personal and social difficulties. Thus a great opportunity is lost to lend some balance to the understanding of homosexuality by calling the Catholic community to responsibility for its part in the difficulties and problems that homosexual men and women face.

A more balanced and realistic approach is found in another study, titled The Prejudice against Homosexuals and the Ministry of the Church, published by the Washington State Catholic Conference in 1983. Here “the manner in which Church teaching is conveyed” is acknowledged as contributing to the prejudices against gay and lesbian people. Because certain church spokespeople have contributed to the formation of an environment that is prejudicial to homosexual people, declares the WSCC document, “the Church is seriously obliged to work toward the uprooting of such prejudice.’’ If Vatican documents included some mention of these “problems” in future discussions of homosexuality, they would be guaranteed a fairer and more respectful hearing than such pronouncements presently receive from the secular homosexual community and increasingly from the gay and lesbian Catholic community as well.

Educational Guidance, like many other church discussions of homosexuality, seems dominated by a one-sided concern with homosexual behavior. Homosexual acts are described as being. “deprived of their essential and indispensable rule!” The document fails to consider other facets of homosexual people which are of equal or greater moral importance. Here again there is a need for greater balance and the clear recognition that homosexual people should not be reduced to their orientations; nor should the homosexual orientation be reduced to sexual behavior.

The WSCC document offers a sounder model when it says that church teaching is “positive about most activities’’ of gay and lesbian people. Only homosexual activity is disapproved, since “the Church sees these acts as attaining their full significance only in the context of marriage.” The WSCC statement refuses to reduce homosexual people to their genital expression: “Gays and lesbians have just as much right to our approval and acceptance of their overall activity.” No Christian commentator denies the importance of dealing with the morality of same-sex behavior. Likewise, no serious study of homosexuality in a Christian context can ignore this area. But neither can official church statements emanating from the Vatican and other Catholic agencies ignore other equally serious ‘‘moral issues’’ such as prejudice, willful ignorance, hostility, violence (both physical and psychological) and the pastoral neglect that homosexual people face every day. Some bishops are disturbed by what they call ‘‘ambiguity” or “vagueness” in official church teaching on homosexuality. Yet the same leaders remain quite unconcerned about their own ambiguity or vagueness on the moral issue of concrete justice for homosexual people and their need for sensitive and competent pastoral care.

Church leaders are accused of fostering psychological violence against homosexual people by repeating certain myths or ignoring the important issues responsible for many problems that gay and lesbian people experience, both in churches and the wider society. The WSCC is quite clear in pointing out the immorality of such a double standard:

“The prejudice against homosexuals is a greater infringement of the norm of Christian morality than is homosexual orientation or activity.’’

Section 102 of Educational Guidance discusses possible causes, or the “factors which drive toward homosexuality,” as the document calls them. In looking for these causes, family and teachers are urged to take into account “the contributions which various disciplines can offer.” The authors then list a number of theories which seem to indicate a lack of familiarity with current research in the etiology of sexual orientation.

Several of the suggested “causes” are taken directly from those already noted in the 1975 Vatican Declaration. The nature/nurture controversy is alluded to (“physiological or psychological factors”), even though this controversy (at least in an either-or dichotomy) has been largely abandoned by the majority of researchers, who tend to favor theories which combine both genetic and environmental components. The other theories which the document suggest have all been treated in the literature. Many of them have been found to affect few homosexuals in the development of sexual identity. Some of them have very little scientific evidence to substantiate them, and several of these accepted notions have been statistically tested with startling results in Sexual Preference; Its Development in Men and Women, by Alan P. Bell et al. (Indiana University Press, 1981). In listing “social isolation” among the possible causes, Educational Guidance might be confusing true homosexuality with “situational homosexual behavior,” such as occurs in same-sex, isolated social situations like prisons. In the latter case the individual tends to revert to his or her heterosexual pattern once the social isolation is rectified. It would have been both helpful and accurate in dealing with theories like these if the authors had pointed out that there is no one cause for homosexual orientation. There are some homosexual individuals who do not fall under any of the accepted theories. Given the present state of our knowledge about the etiology of homosexual orientation, it is more honest to say that we simply do not know with certainty and specificity what factors are involved in the genesis of one’s sexual identity and corresponding sexual orientation. This is not to say that nothing is known, but simply that caution must be used in talking about a reality which has only recently become the subject of scientific research.

Educational Guidance adds two new and rather novel theories, including “deprivation in dress” and “license in shows and publications.” One is hard-pressed to imagine how nudity or pornography can affect the development of sexual orientation or sexual identity. From what is a distinctly Christian point of view, the document proposes as another possibility for the origin of homosexuality “the consequences of original sin,” and “the loss of the sense of God and of man and woman.’’ A footnote refers the reader to Romans 1:26-28, but there is no indication of scholarly discussion among Scripture experts as to what precisely Paul is saying about the relationship between homosexuality and unbelief.

Paragraph 103, which lists a number of “efficacious helps,” says that parents and teachers will not only seek out the causes for homosexuality, but will understand them as well. This judgment is perhaps a bit too optimistic. We are expecting untrained people to accomplish something that not even the experts in the field have done, at least in those cases in which the homosexual orientation cannot definitely be traced to childhood trauma, fear of the other sex or other family-related problems.

The efficacious helps which the authors suggest are both positive and helpful to homosexual people: they are to be aided in the “process of integral growth,” “welcomed with understanding” and given a “climate of hope.” Educators should encourage the “emancipation of the individual and his or her growth in self-control, promoting an authentic moral force towards conversion to the love of God and neighbor.”

These are noble goals indeed, and few homosexual Christians would disagree with them. They are open to a variety of interpretations, however. The word “emancipation,” for example, is sometimes a continental equivalent for our word “liberation.” Yet it could hardly be argued that the Vatican is expressing support in any way for the gay liberation movement.” In the context of the total document and magisterial teaching on human sexuality, it is quite evident that “self-control” means total sexual abstinence for homosexual Christians.



It is this conclusion that has been met with questioning among some reputable U.S. Catholic moral theologians and among a number of gay and lesbian Catholics in the U.S. Still, there is a growing movement in this country of support groups like Courage for Catholics, which are attempting to adhere to the church’s requirement of celibate chastity. While these groups are undoubtedly a valuable support for many people, there have been some questions raised recently from within the group itself about the underlying premise of Courage that a homosexual orientation is a psychological disorder.

No official Catholic document has ever argued for the possibility of the church’s accepting under any circumstance any kind of homosexual expression. Yet there are still some differences in the way U.S. theologians, pastors and educators approach the issue of homosexuality compared with that of their Roman counterparts. We seem not to be afraid in this country to suggest that there is a need to “rethink’’ our position on homosexuality in light of current biblical and empirical research, or that the church’s absolute and total ban on homosexual expression “might be open to some modification.” In most Roman theological circles, however, even the whispered mention of such a possibility is considered heretical. Yet the Catholic bishops of the state of Washington were able to say that while their recent statement on homosexuality and prejudice represents “an official Church position” on the morality of homosexual expression, it does not attempt to rethink or to develop substantially the Catholic position, “however much such re-thinking and development is needed in this and all other areas of the Church’s teaching.”

Educational Guidance in Human Love says that homosexual people might benefit from “medical-psychological assistance.” Such assistance, it cautions, must also come from “persons attentive to and respectful of the teaching of the Church.”

Catholic psychologists and psychiatrists are divided on the issue of homosexuality. For some of them, at least, the new Vatican statement on sex education will present a conflict in the area of helping homosexual people. The viewpoint of these professionals and the tensions that are generated by the church’s teaching are summed up in the words of a former president of the Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists:

 

Current medical knowledge about homosexuality seems to contradict the attitudes of the Christian churches on the subject. The American Psychiatric Association has said that homosexuality is a normal variant. I might ask then: How can the Church justify its condemning position when homosexuality appears to be a condition deeply imbedded in the individual even prior to his receiving communion Church? . . It would seem that the Church is unwilling to accept the American Psychiatric Association’s perception of homosexuality. . . . I believe that the Catholic Church’s official position concerning homosexuality tends to promote sickness manifested In denial or rationalization, . . The Catholic (or Christian) psychiatrist is easily caught in a bind if he or she tries to adhere to the moral teachings of his or her religion and to apply these teachings when treating patients, for any psychiatrist is also expected to keep abreast of medical knowledge, which now teaches that homosexuality is a deeply ingrained pattern of behavior that is probably established by the age of five years. Perhaps the best treatment and research approach is taken by the therapist who constantly remembers the similarities rather than the differences between heterosexual and homosexual lifestyles [L. Noltimier, “A Clinical Reply.” Bulletin of the National Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists. vol. 24 (1978). pp. 41-42].

In 1981 the National Committee for Human Sexuality of the United States Catholic Conference’s Department of Education, published Education in Human Sexuality for Christians. The guidelines for sexual education were roundly and predictably attacked by Catholics United for the Faith and other rightwing Catholic groups. The USCC’s Thomas Lynch has successfully defended the new American guidelines against an attempt by the conservative front to drive an ideological wedge between the USCC’s work and the work from Cardinal Baum’s group.

What will probably happen is that parents and educators will supplement the Vatican document with its American counterpart, whose language and understanding of human sexuality resonates much more authentically with the experience of U.S. Catholics. The American document will serve to broaden and deepen the Roman approach; the Roman document will provide official sanctions for establishing sound sexual education programs which embody and articulate some of the fundamental principles of Roman Catholic sexual morality. Used in conjunction with each other, both documents will enable educators and others to move fearlessly and creatively into the whole area of human sexuality in a Christian context.

As for the treatment of homosexuality, it would seem that Burtchaell’s wistful hope that “maybe the folks over there are understanding things a little better now’’ must remain, at least for the present, just a hope.

Welfare, Charity and Ministry: Postures in the Helping Relationship

Running a soup kitchen and a food pantry has turned out to be a pretty tough job -- for surprising reasons. Donations of food and money are sufficient. There is a core group of volunteers, each of whom gives ten to 20 hours every week to keep things running. They are backed up by 150 volunteers who cook the soup, clean the kitchen, buy the foodstuffs, and tend to a thousand other jobs. And the 150 to 300 people who come to us for food on any given day are great. They are, for the most part, polite and gracious. We laugh with them, cry with them, sometimes argue, sometimes yell with them. So, all things considered, the daily operations run pretty smoothly.

What makes running a soup kitchen and food pantry such a tough job is that so many others want us to do it differently. Some of our sister churches want us to “save their souls before we warm their bellies.” Some of our contributors want us to help the hungry, but to “keep them in their place” while we do it. A local state legislator wants us to screen people according to income and possessions before we feed them. And the local neighborhood historic district committee wants us simply to close down or move our operation out of the neighborhood because its members don’t like the way we attract “those people” to our church building; it’s bad for property values.

All in all, one of the hardest parts of running a food program is trying to remember who we are: a local church in an urban setting that has extended its active ministry to address the issue of hunger as it manifests itself on the streets of our own city. What posture are we going to assume in our relationship with the hungry? Experience over the past two years has taught us that different people (and different institutions) choose different postures from which they offer help.

As a matter of fact, one of the gifts and challenges the food ministry has given us is the opportunity to learn about the various helping postures that institutions adopt toward groups of people with substantial needs. We have learned the differences between “welfare” “charity” and “ministry.” We have come to understand some of these postures more clearly, to fight openly against others, and to struggle to achieve the one we cherish most. Perhaps a description of these positions would help in explaining our struggle.



Welfare: This is the institutionalized stance that many community agencies and helping groups take toward poor people in our society. It is backed by local, state and federal financial support and a bureaucratic organization. Welfare is clearly a major element in the helping relationships in our nation. It has a history that includes governmental participation under the New Deal and the Great Society. That history also includes substantial religious and secular participation by the local community through United Way and local crisis and support centers.

But there is an underlying factor in the posture characterizing welfare: the question of eligibility. The essential question asked from the posture of welfare is: “Who deserves to be helped?” Clearly, this question is asked because the helping agency needs and wants to be equitable. Nonetheless, the person turning to the agency or institution for help discovers that if one doesn’t meet the eligibility requirement, one doesn’t get helped. Working along with our local food bank, an outgrowth of the national Second Harvest net-work, we have been given recommendations (not requirements) that recipients of our food ministry have incomes under 125 per cent of national poverty guidelines ($6,075 for a family of one or $8,175 for a family of two. etc.) and that we inquire about any government assistance they might be receiving before we offer help.

We understand the need for such questions and can support the effort to be just and equitable. Limited resources in the face of growing local and national need for help require that ways be found to use resources to their best advantage; this is a matter of stewardship, a fundamental Christian principle. But in our own situation we fight quietly against two basic assumptions underlying the welfare system. The first is that someone other than the recipient can always determine that person’s need. At times others can perceive our real needs better than we can. But the fallacy of the assumption at the heart of welfare is that this determination can be made statistically for all people and defined in eligibility guidelines: “If you don’t have a need defined by our guidelines, you don’t have a need.”

Our food ministry experience has turned up many exceptions to that rule. For example, one man who eats at our soup kitchen sleeps outside under a local bridge for protection. The unemployment check he receives pays for a tiny apartment for his wife and children. But his marriage is failing and he can no longer live in harmony with his wife; however, he cannot provide for both himself and his family. According to the guidelines, he receives his fair share. But a man who sleeps under a bridge in winter without wanting to does have a need.

The second assumption we fight a against is that the institution and the workers who provide welfare are somehow “better than” the people coming for assistance. Accompanying this attitude is a technological approach analogous to the nation’s pervasive medical model. Like the cardiologist who treats the patient’s heart without ever listening to the patient’s concerns about relationships, work problems or diet frustrations; like the orthopedic surgeon who sets broken bones but never hears about the patient’s need for attention from family and friends (making a broken hip a “valuable” possession); so the posture of welfare offers prescribed help without paying attention to the underlying human need. How else can we explain “emergency assistance checks” that take six to eight weeks to reach recipients? How else do we explain FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) funds that can be poured into a community for a 16-week period, and then withdrawn -- as if the need had been satisfied and the help were no longer needed?

Charity: It is with this concept that we have our largest quarrel, for charity, unlike welfare, belongs to us. It is part of our Judeo-Christian history and tradition. Charity is hard to fight because it looks a lot like ministry (which will be described later). But charity has become distasteful to us because its sole foundation seems to be the personal (not institutional or national) assumption, “I am so much better than you that I will help you, even though you don’t deserve it.”

Charity is much more subtle than welfare because it often does help people according to their needs instead of according to prescribed guidelines. But the people helped are never included in the helper’s life, values or understanding. For example, a few volunteers in our soup kitchen work hard to get the soup ready, but tell racist jokes in the presence of a black volunteer who also eats his meals there. A few helpers in our kitchen make the classist assumption that cleaning the pots and wiping up spills on the floor are jobs for the kitchen’s clients who assist with the program, not for the church or community volunteers, who are “above” that kind of labor. The message, over and over, is that by virtue of race, class or status, the helper is better than and apart from the one being helped.

The posture of charity is the hardest for us to deal with, because it excludes awareness that we need the people whom we are trying to help. It considers only their need for us and assumes that although we participate in their salvation, they have neither the resources nor the abilities to participate in ours. For these reasons we must oppose charity forthrightly because it is for our own salvation that we are fighting. Charity is ultimately hardest on the helper, since it permits a false sense of power and independence and so undercuts our awareness of our dependence on God and interdependence with others in the gift of life.



Ministry: In our own church life and involvement we struggle to assume a posture of ministry. We acknowledge that we have come to this posture partially in reaction to the aspects of welfare and charity that most disturb us. We seek a helping relationship instructed by faith and informed by experience.

Ministry establishes no eligibility requirements for being helped. The posture of ministry does not allow room for numerical or statistical judgments of a person’s needs. Insofar as possible, eligibility is mutually determined -- by what we have to offer and what others feel they need. It becomes an issue of responsible “sharing.” People engaged in ministry run the risk of being “taken” or “used” by some who do not need what we offer but who take it nonetheless. We live with examples of this problem, but we continue to put the burden of eligibility on those who come to us. Our willingness to run this risk has kept our programs open to some people who might not meet an eligibility requirement but who come to our church because of personal needs. Eddie, for example, used the soup kitchen to get through a debilitating emotional depression-connected with a job loss; and Hill, though financially stable, is so socially limited that his personal contacts are only with people who share our lunchroom with him.

We try to address the differences we see between helpers and those being helped. without drawing the quick conclusion that the helper is somehow “better.” As we watched people’s hunger needs met by a bowl of soup or a bag of groceries, we have also watched helpers’ needs for self-understanding and self-acceptance met as they learn to live and work with people whose lives differ from their own. It has been a stroke of God’s grace to experience how nervous, self-conscious middle-class people whose identity, happiness and self-worth are tied to job, possessions and community status can be moved by people who continue to be happy and have feelings of worth -- yet have no job, possessions or status. We have come to understand that ministry is the paradox of the gospel: the first shall be last, and the last first. But contained in that paradox is the new awareness that first and last are in fact interdependently connected in a way that often makes it hard to distinguish who is first, who is last and why.

Ministry operates not only in relation to the human needs it seeks to satisfy, but also in relation to the promises and values of one’s own religious faith. According to the Bible, sometimes when one encounters the “stranger” one is, in fact, encountering God. Abraham welcomed passing strangers into his tent and was confronted by God. The two men who walked from Jerusalem to Emmaus, talking with a stranger, discovered to their surprise that their companion was the risen Christ. The parable of the last judgment in Matthew 25 tells us that when we have fed, clothed, visited and cared for the strangers in our midst we have done these things for God.

Ministry is the effort to grow past, to evolve beyond, the limitations of welfare and the indifference of charity. It recognizes that our own relationship with God is not different from our relationship with the people of our own world who may seem most unlike us. It is here that the notion of “hospitality” offered by Henri Nouwen in his book Reaching Out most applies. For ministry is possible when we are able to convert our hostilities (our racism, classism, sexism, ageism) to hospitality which will allow us to convert our enemies (those most unlike us) into our guests (those valued for their differences). Ministry discovers that in seeking to help others who become our guests, we paradoxically experience God’s grace in our own lives.

Is ministry the only posture the religious person should assume in helping others? Clearly, our answer must be No. The welfare model is necessary in American society because it is so difficult to effect an equitable distribution of our large portion of the earth’s resources. Major inequities between groups of people continue to necessitate a large-scale effort to gather resources from some and distribute them to others. Similarly, the posture of charity, as limited and as seductive as it is, has some value. It does permit people to participate directly through acts and indirectly through monetary gifts, in an effort to alleviate the injustice that is part of our world. And it invites people to share from a perspective of faith and from a desire to address need.

But above all, the struggle we are experiencing in our center-city church, its soup kitchen and pantry program is a struggle to recognize and defend the legitimacy of the posture of ministry. We are struggling to maintain a posture of ministry, while understanding stewardship as a process of gathering foodstuffs from a complex network of sources, and of making them available in a hospitable way to people who need them. We struggle to maintain an attitude that invites the stranger to be our guest; in this process we can discover our own relationship with God and the paradoxical truths about ourselves that God would have us know.

Religion’s Place in Public Schools

The relationship of public schools and religion is an ongoing and unresolved problem for this nation. Recently (1984) the Senate defeated a proposed constitutional amendment to allow organized prayer in classrooms; however, it is virtually certain that this issue will be raised again in the next Congress. In the meantime, the debate continues. Here, Donald Drakeman discusses two aspects of the general topic.

Recently I represented the New Jersey Council of Churches in a federal lawsuit challenging New Jersey’s “moment-of-silence” legislation -- a law requiring public-school teachers to provide a minute of silence at the beginning of the school day for students to engage in “contemplation or introspection.”

The American Civil Liberties Union immediately sued to have the law declared unconstitutional on the grounds that it was designed to bring back prayer into the public schools -- something the U. S. Supreme Court had outlawed 20 years ago. There was a great deal of evidence showing that the New Jersey legislators wanted to return prayer to the classroom, but had left the word out of the bill in hopes of avoiding the court’s pronouncements. To the surprise of many, the New Jersey Council of Churches, an interdenominational Christian body, intervened in the case as a “friend of the Court” to oppose the law.

At the same time, religious and civil liberties groups have been in a quandary over what to do about cases involving students who want to meet for religious purposes during non-instructional times at the public schools. Two federal appellate courts have declared such practices unconstitutional, saying that they are not qualitatively different from the school-sponsored prayers held unconstitutional in the 1960s. The issue remains open, however, and it is not clear -- at least to me -- that a mandatory moment of silence (or prayer) is the same thing as permitting students to elect a religious activity in place of the chess club or debating team.

Once again in American history, the public schools are at the intersection of church and state (or, perhaps more accurately, religion and government). This issue of when and where students may pray at school not only raises thorny questions of constitutional interpretation, but also asks us how we should relate our Christian faith to a world that has been called secular, amoral, modern, post-modem and even anti-Christian. Or, as ethicist Paul Ramsey has eloquently put it, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a pluralistic land?”

To try to come to terms with this problem, we will need to look briefly at its legal dimensions, since the Constitution has set the parameters within which we must act, and then to relate the constitutional issues to the role of the Christian in our society.

The language of the Constitution is deceptively simple: The federal government and the states may not make laws “respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In two famous cases in the early ‘60s. the United States Supreme Court declared that school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in the public schools violate the Constitution’s establishment clause. These decisions brought a shower of public wrath upon the court. Many religious leaders feared that a godless, atheistic empire would soon take the place of the Christian republic that has been built on a foundation of faith and Scripture. The governors of every state but New York called for a constitutional amendment reversing the court’s decisions, and the justices soon became the Grinches that stole Christmas from our children’s school pageants.

Subsequently, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in public-school classrooms, and other federal courts have outlawed school-sponsored grace before meals, student-led classroom prayer and mandatory moments of silence. In each case, the courts have tried to follow the Supreme Court’s conclusion that religious activities supported and sponsored by the schools are contrary to the Constitution even if the activities are “nondenominational” and voluntary.

Thus, the primary constitutional issues are (1) is the activity religious, and (2) is it supported and sponsored by the school? Or, as the Supreme Court has expressed it, does the state’s action have a clearly secular purpose? Does it have a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion? And does it avoid excessive government entanglement with religion? Each of these tests must be met for an action of the government to be constitutional.

Three federal courts have already decided that the moment-of-silence laws are unconstitutional. The evidence for these findings is compelling, despite legislative efforts to use neutral language such as “introspection,” “contemplation” or “meditation” to avoid having the bill appear to be clearly religious. In every case, the moment-of-silence bills have evolved within the context of returning prayer to the classroom. Not only is the moment of silence directly within the long tradition of commencing the school day with a prayer (a practice still found in many schools despite Supreme Court pronouncements). but it is also legislatively designed to be a religious activity. In every state that has recently enacted a moment-of-silence law, the floor debate has been almost exclusively devoted to the topic of putting prayer, and religion generally, back into the minds and hearts of our public-school students. Only then, posit our lawmakers, will America return to its former days of glory.

Faced with this evidence of the legislators’ religious intent (which is enough, under Supreme Court precedents, to invalidate the moment-of-silence laws), lawyers defending the laws have created a variety of after-the-fact secular rationales for commencing the school day with a quiet moment. These arguments simply do not work; legislative history cannot so easily be rewritten. But, more important, the public cannot help but see the moment of silence as morning prayer. In many schools, most of the parents and teachers alike must have begun their own school days by saying prayers or reading the Bible. The moment-of-silence laws cannot be evaluated without taking into account this cultural fact that will unavoidably give a religious coloring to an ostensibly neutral law.

Although the moment-of-silence laws run afoul of the establishment clause, does it necessarily follow that we, as Christians, should oppose religion in the schools? After all, many religious groups are calling for a constitutional amendment that would permit teachers and students to lead prayers in public-school classrooms.

The crux of this issue is whether we think the state should have the power to favor one religion (or type of religion) over another. By having a time set aside for prayer during the part of the school day when teachers have virtually total control over their students, the schools are putting their imprimatur on those religions that believe in prayer. Moreover, if we admit that the state, through its schools, may regulate religion by encouraging prayer, we are tacitly giving it the authority to regulate the exercise of our religion by excluding, limiting or defining the kinds of prayer in which we, or our children, may engage.

As our nation becomes increasingly diverse and secular, the likelihood that school-supported religious activities will correspond with the students’ particular beliefs will diminish. Most of those who support school-prayer hope for a return to the “Judeo-Christian” prayers of our educational past. But what if in some schools prayers are addressed instead to Shiva, the Ayatollah Khomeini or Sun Myung Moon? For all of us, believers and nonbelievers alike, the safest course is to keep the schools out of the religion business.

Now that I have taken prayer out of the schools, I would like to put it back in under different auspices. Many public schools, particularly at the junior and senior high school levels, have non-instructional periods during which students are free to choose from among a variety of activities -- sports, service clubs, language societies and the like. In a number of communities, voluntary student religious groups have sought to meet during these activity periods. As I noted earlier, several federal courts have made no distinction between these requests and legislative attempts to bring back school-sponsored prayer. I think they are wrong.

During the instructional portion of the school day, teachers have almost complete control over the students’ activities, Inserting prayer during those parts of the day clearly runs contrary to the mandates of the Constitution. But when students are asked to select from a wide variety of extracurricular activities, the school’s role changes dramatically. No longer the domineering ruler of the students’ every move, it becomes the host for a great number of (theoretically) socially enriching activities. To deny students the opportunity to meet for religious purposes is to say that religion cannot stand as an equal with football, debating, cheerleading and the classics club. It is to single out religion as the one activity always inappropriate within the schools. (Legislation for so-called “equal access’’ is pending in both the Senate -- S. 815, introduced by Oregon Republican Mark Hatfield -- and the House -- HR. 4996.)

Even if we agree that voluntary, student-initiated religious groups may meet during non-instructional periods, will our present Constitution countenance it, or must we join those calling for a constitutional amendment? Fortunately, the Constitution provides ample support for allowing such student groups. While our government may not “establish” religion, it may not prohibit the free exercise of religion or restrict the free speech of its citizens (including students). When the school prescribes prayer, it is establishing religion; when it proscribes prayer, it is prohibiting students from freely exercising their religions.

Although there is some element of religious establishment when a school allows students to meet for religious purposes, the state support of religion is minimal. If the meetings are truly voluntary, the school must only exercise the basic supervision necessary to ensure that the students do not damage themselves or public property. On balance, this degree of “establishment’’ is insignificant compared to the detrimental impact on religious exercise and speech if students are told that they may elect any activity but prayer and discuss any subject but God.

There is no question that the public schools are important purveyors of our culture and its fundamental values. Teachers have control over our children for a vast portion of their formative and impressionable years. Precisely for this reason we must he particularly concerned about the schools’ interaction with our faith and the faith of others. We must urge the schools to let religion compete on an equal footing with secular extracurricular activities. But at the same time, we must be wary of any attempt to make the schools transmitters of religious beliefs and practices. It is the place of churches and families to guide us in the ways of faith. The schools must not be given the power to tell our children when, where, or how to pray.