Synopsis
The acclaimed author of "And They Shall Be My People" presents an inspiring look at the endurance of Catholicism in the face of a changing Church and challenged believers.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Paul Wilkes's writing on religious belief and spirituality has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines both in the United States and abroad. He wrote and directed the acclaimed PBS documentary on Thomas Merton, Merton: A Film Biography, and is the author of many books, most recently The Good Enough Catholic.
From the Back Cover
Many Catholics face a dilemma: how can one be faithful to traditions, yet remain open to new discoveries, both about yourself and Catholicism?
In The Good Enough Catholic, Paul Wilkes plumbs the hunger in Catholic souls for a relationship with God and a spiritual life, and boldly confronts the controversial issue of Church authority. After each chapter, there is an invitation to put into practice what has been explored through a rich mixture of doctrine, history, current thinking, and the personal experiences of "good enough" Catholics across America.
With this book, Wilkes beckons us to look to the essence of our religion for the guidance and strength to live lives filled with spiritual transcendence.
From the Inside Flap
cs face a dilemma: how can one be faithful to traditions, yet remain open to new discoveries, both about yourself and Catholicism?
In The Good Enough Catholic, Paul Wilkes plumbs the hunger in Catholic souls for a relationship with God and a spiritual life, and boldly confronts the controversial issue of Church authority. After each chapter, there is an invitation to put into practice what has been explored through a rich mixture of doctrine, history, current thinking, and the personal experiences of "good enough" Catholics across America.
With this book, Wilkes beckons us to look to the essence of our religion for the guidance and strength to live lives filled with spiritual transcendence.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Good Enough Catholic
A Guide for the Perplexed
By Paul WilkesRandom House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1997 Paul Wilkes
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-345-40962-1All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
JESUS CHRIST
Wistfulness, Wishful Thinking, and Reality
Jesus Christ, the central figure of history, is the link between the historic covenant made by God with the wandering people of Israel, and another covenant, made by a God who chose to be physically present on earth in order to proclaim a message of timeless reconciliation between humankind and its loving creator. While certainly distinct, both covenants had the same object: to show God’s nature to his people, and to reveal a plan for people to live in relationship with him and in harmony with their neighbors. God chose to be known in, and through, these covenants.
In essence, both covenants were unique points of contact between God and the beings he had made, beings whose very nature summoned them to transcend their earthly limitations and seek the divine.
To introduce a divine presence and make known a divine plan was a major order at both of these moments in history, 4,000 and 2,000 years ago. When God vowed to be the God of Israel and the Jews agreed in turn to be his people, the world was largely a chaotic, pagan place. Human sacrifice was widely practiced; the strong ruled, while the vast majority of humanity lived in constant fear and wretched poverty. There was no concept of the dignity and destiny of each person. In this setting, a tiny tribe of Israelites sought an alternative, vowing to live by a code of laws that sanctified daily actions and regarded all people as equal before their creator.
In what Catholics call the Old Testament, God spoke directly to and through the prophets, forming the people of Israel with both laws and direct intercession. The Jewish people were at times rescued and sustained, at other times punished and admonished, as they observed or ignored the way he had ordained for them.
With the birth of Jesus Christ, God stepped beyond using intermediaries to bring his message, and, Christians believe, came to earth to live as a human being. Jesus’ message was clear and revolutionary to a world that, while certainly more advanced than the world of the early Hebrews, still had little regard for the worth of every individual. The message was this: No longer was the tribe or nation into which you were born a measure of your humanity. Whether you were highborn or low, man or woman, Greek or Jew, slave or free, made no difference. All people were children of God, loved equally by a creator in heaven. The social, economic, ethnic, sexual, and religious distinctions so tenaciously held and harshly imposed could no longer be used to elevate the few and denigrate the masses. Compassion and justice were the hallmarks of God’s nature.
Throughout his life, by his example and by his words—both in the allegorical stories of the parables and by his direct exhortations—Jesus taught a moral code, a way of life ordained by God. In the words of St. Cyprian, “The commands of the gospel are nothing else than God’s lessons, the foundations on which to build up hope, the supports for strengthening faith, the food that nourishes the heart. They are the rudder for keeping us on the right course.… ”
As we begin to consider what it is to be a Good Enough Catholic, we need first to understand, as best we can, who it is that founded our faith. Who are we following? What kind of man was Jesus Christ in his lifetime—and what kind of presence can he be in our lifetime?
SHROUDED AND REVEALED
The person of Jesus Christ is enormously complex, at once vividly and poetically detailed in Holy Scripture, shrouded in history, and wrapped—often smothered—in layers of doctrinal gauze.
The nearest we have to contemporary portrayals of the life of Jesus comes, of course, from the New Testament gospels, each of which told the story of his life from a slightly different perspective. These accounts, written one or two generations after the death of Jesus,’ may or may not have been the work of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; most are certainly compilations of various texts. The Catholic Church acknowledges that there are three stages of tradition within the Gospels that must be considered: first, the actual life of Jesus Christ, his actions and his words; second, the oral handing-down of the story of his life and ministry; and finally, the actual written word, which forms the basis of the New Testament as we know it today. So, each stage possesses its own reality—some of which we know, much of which we do not.
In his life, Jesus seemed to play many (often seemingly contradictory) roles. He was at once an obedient and divine Son to a heavenly Father, and a normal mortal pleading for an alternative to the bitter cup of death by crucifixion. He preached peace, yet angrily overturned the tables in the temple. He allowed the tax collector to continue his rounds, but demanded that the rich young man sell everything. Jesus is alternately teacher, ruler, judge, king, holy man, mystic, liberator, brother, apocalyptic prophet, social revolutionary, and healer. He is both peacemaker and the disrupter of peace. We see him today as a man who responded differently in different situations, sometimes surprisingly so.
Confronting such a multifaceted individual, it is little wonder that the church attempted, over the centuries, to interpret the words of Scripture so that the faithful not be led astray. Many Catholics can remember the days when simply reading the Bible was discouraged, on the belief that the ordinary faithful did not possess the knowledge or erudition to understand the reality of the man upon whose life their own religious life was based. Instead, we were served up tiny dollops of Scripture each Sunday and immediately told exactly what they meant.
Much debate throughout church history has centered on questions concerning, on the one hand, the “person” of Jesus Christ, and, on the other, the “work” he performed. In other words, this debate sought somehow to distinguish between what about Jesus was human and what was divine. The early church struggled to construct a body of teachings about Jesus that stressed his divine nature, and overlooked, if not ignored, his human side, as well as the historical era in which he lived. By the Middle Ages, culminating in the work of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the distinctions became even more marked; Jesus Christ the human being was deemed too immediate, too lowly, for inclusion in teachings about Jesus Christ the Son of the Most High.
With the dawning of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, as political upheavals, philosophical skepticism, and scientific discoveries challenged what had become the church’s unquestioned religious authority, new approaches to understanding Jesus Christ were born. These ideas were opposed bitterly by the church for over a century, which maintained that it alone—not human reason, historical research, or scientific fact—could plumb the depths of the mystery of Jesus Christ.
It was not until the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that Jesus Christ was “released” from the shrouds of mystery and doctrinal exactitude imposed by centuries of church intervention, and a new appreciation—indeed, a reintegration—of the historical and divine man begun. Even so, many Catholics alive today—myself among them—were taught to set Jesus Christ apart from and above them, convinced that it was nothing short of sacrilegious to bid him come down from a tabernacle on an altar, or a throne in heaven, and into our lives.
The past twenty-five years have dramatically changed how we regard Jesus Christ. As the theologian David Tracy notes, more has been written about Jesus in that comparatively short period than had been written in the 1,975 years preceding them.2 Archaeological discoveries in the cities and villages where Jesus preached and lived, interpreted by a new generation of biblical scholars, have given us a much clearer understanding of this man—placing him not only in a historical and cultural context, but in an even more accurate religious one. Where once this field of “Jesus studies” was the domain of a small group of academics and theologians, many of today’s Catholic seekers, struggling with their own religious beliefs, are hungry to understand who Jesus really was in hopes of making him an integral and active part of their lives. Marcus J. Borg, a leading Jesus scholar, observes of these seekers, “For them, their childhood understanding of Jesus and the Bible at some point stopped working, but their religious interest remains.”
We Good Enough Catholic lay people are not alone on the path of discovering who Jesus was and is. The majority of Catholic priests and nuns were themselves schooled in the same limited view. “I love that experience of these different parts of Jesus that seem strange to me for long periods, and then all of a sudden become familiar,” says Father William Kenneally,4 the pastor of St. Gertrude’s, one of Chicago’s most vibrant parishes.
JESUS CHRIST
Wistfulness, Wishful Thinking, and Reality
Jesus Christ, the central figure of history, is the link between the historic covenant made by God with the wandering people of Israel, and another covenant, made by a God who chose to be physically present on earth in order to proclaim a message of timeless reconciliation between humankind and its loving creator. While certainly distinct, both covenants had the same object: to show God’s nature to his people, and to reveal a plan for people to live in relationship with him and in harmony with their neighbors. God chose to be known in, and through, these covenants.
In essence, both covenants were unique points of contact between God and the beings he had made, beings whose very nature summoned them to transcend their earthly limitations and seek the divine.
To introduce a divine presence and make known a divine plan was a major order at both of these moments in history, 4,000 and 2,000 years ago. When God vowed to be the God of Israel and the Jews agreed in turn to be his people, the world was largely a chaotic, pagan place. Human sacrifice was widely practiced; the strong ruled, while the vast majority of humanity lived in constant fear and wretched poverty. There was no concept of the dignity and destiny of each person. In this setting, a tiny tribe of Israelites sought an alternative, vowing to live by a code of laws that sanctified daily actions and regarded all people as equal before their creator.
In what Catholics call the Old Testament, God spoke directly to and through the prophets, forming the people of Israel with both laws and direct intercession. The Jewish people were at times rescued and sustained, at other times punished and admonished, as they observed or ignored the way he had ordained for them.
With the birth of Jesus Christ, God stepped beyond using intermediaries to bring his message, and, Christians believe, came to earth to live as a human being. Jesus’ message was clear and revolutionary to a world that, while certainly more advanced than the world of the early Hebrews, still had little regard for the worth of every individual. The message was this: No longer was the tribe or nation into which you were born a measure of your humanity. Whether you were highborn or low, man or woman, Greek or Jew, slave or free, made no difference. All people were children of God, loved equally by a creator in heaven. The social, economic, ethnic, sexual, and religious distinctions so tenaciously held and harshly imposed could no longer be used to elevate the few and denigrate the masses. Compassion and justice were the hallmarks of God’s nature.
Throughout his life, by his example and by his words—both in the allegorical stories of the parables and by his direct exhortations—Jesus taught a moral code, a way of life ordained by God. In the words of St. Cyprian, “The commands of the gospel are nothing else than God’s lessons, the foundations on which to build up hope, the supports for strengthening faith, the food that nourishes the heart. They are the rudder for keeping us on the right course.… ”
As we begin to consider what it is to be a Good Enough Catholic, we need first to understand, as best we can, who it is that founded our faith. Who are we following? What kind of man was Jesus Christ in his lifetime—and what kind of presence can he be in our lifetime?
SHROUDED AND REVEALED
The person of Jesus Christ is enormously complex, at once vividly and poetically detailed in Holy Scripture, shrouded in history, and wrapped—often smothered—in layers of doctrinal gauze.
The nearest we have to contemporary portrayals of the life of Jesus comes, of course, from the New Testament gospels, each of which told the story of his life from a slightly different perspective. These accounts, written one or two generations after the death of Jesus,’ may or may not have been the work of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; most are certainly compilations of various texts. The Catholic Church acknowledges that there are three stages of tradition within the Gospels that must be considered: first, the actual life of Jesus Christ, his actions and his words; second, the oral handing-down of the story of his life and ministry; and finally, the actual written word, which forms the basis of the New Testament as we know it today. So, each stage possesses its own reality—some of which we know, much of which we do not.
In his life, Jesus seemed to play many (often seemingly contradictory) roles. He was at once an obedient and divine Son to a heavenly Father, and a normal mortal pleading for an alternative to the bitter cup of death by crucifixion. He preached peace, yet angrily overturned the tables in the temple. He allowed the tax collector to continue his rounds, but demanded that the rich young man sell everything. Jesus is alternately teacher, ruler, judge, king, holy man, mystic, liberator, brother, apocalyptic prophet, social revolutionary, and healer. He is both peacemaker and the disrupter of peace. We see him today as a man who responded differently in different situations, sometimes surprisingly so.
Confronting such a multifaceted individual, it is little wonder that the church attempted, over the centuries, to interpret the words of Scripture so that the faithful not be led astray. Many Catholics can remember the days when simply reading the Bible was discouraged, on the belief that the ordinary faithful did not possess the knowledge or erudition to understand the reality of the man upon whose life their own religious life was based. Instead, we were served up tiny dollops of Scripture each Sunday and immediately told exactly what they meant.
Much debate throughout church history has centered on questions concerning, on the one hand, the “person” of Jesus Christ, and, on the other, the “work” he performed. In other words, this debate sought somehow to distinguish between what about Jesus was human and what was divine. The early church struggled to construct a body of teachings about Jesus that stressed his divine nature, and overlooked, if not ignored, his human side, as well as the historical era in which he lived. By the Middle Ages, culminating in the work of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the distinctions became even more marked; Jesus Christ the human being was deemed too immediate, too lowly, for inclusion in teachings about Jesus Christ the Son of the Most High.
With the dawning of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, as political upheavals, philosophical skepticism, and scientific discoveries challenged what had become the church’s unquestioned religious authority, new approaches to understanding Jesus Christ were born. These ideas were opposed bitterly by the church for over a century, which maintained that it alone—not human reason, historical research, or scientific fact—could plumb the depths of the mystery of Jesus Christ.
It was not until the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that Jesus Christ was “released” from the shrouds of mystery and doctrinal exactitude imposed by centuries of church intervention, and a new appreciation—indeed, a reintegration—of the historical and divine man begun. Even so, many Catholics alive today—myself among them—were taught to set Jesus Christ apart from and above them, convinced that it was nothing short of sacrilegious to bid him come down from a tabernacle on an altar, or a throne in heaven, and into our lives.
The past twenty-five years have dramatically changed how we regard Jesus Christ. As the theologian David Tracy notes, more has been written about Jesus in that comparatively short period than had been written in the 1,975 years preceding them.2 Archaeological discoveries in the cities and villages where Jesus preached and lived, interpreted by a new generation of biblical scholars, have given us a much clearer understanding of this man—placing him not only in a historical and cultural context, but in an even more accurate religious one. Where once this field of “Jesus studies” was the domain of a small group of academics and theologians, many of today’s Catholic seekers, struggling with their own religious beliefs, are hungry to understand who Jesus really was in hopes of making him an integral and active part of their lives. Marcus J. Borg, a leading Jesus scholar, observes of these seekers, “For them, their childhood understanding of Jesus and the Bible at some point stopped working, but their religious interest remains.”
We Good Enough Catholic lay people are not alone on the path of discovering who Jesus was and is. The majority of Catholic priests and nuns were themselves schooled in the same limited view. “I love that experience of these different parts of Jesus that seem strange to me for long periods, and then all of a sudden become familiar,” says Father William Kenneally,4 the pastor of St. Gertrude’s, one of Chicago’s most vibrant parishes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Good Enough Catholic by Paul Wilkes. Copyright © 1997 Paul Wilkes. Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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