Maintaining Our Astonishment

A Reflection on Key Teachings from Bernard J. Lee, S.M.

Terry A. Veling

Introduction

Shortly before his death, Rabbi Nahman, the great grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, spoke to his disciples. "Why come to me? I do not know anything." He repeated several times, sincerely, that he did not know anything. Then he began to speak and to teach. "It is forbidden to grow old," he said. "It is necessary to start over, each time." "One must maintain one's astonishment."

In various conversations with Bernard, I have heard him say in his inimitable style, "finitude sucks." Perhaps Rabbi Nahman would agree: "It is forbidden to grow old." Whether we are eight or eighty, it remains "necessary to start over, each time," and to "maintain one's astonishment." One of the delights of knowing Bernard and interacting with his work is that while he is always attentive to the concrete realities and givens of life, he is also mindful that "something else might be the case" (GJ, 1). Indeed, back in the seventies, Bernard was already saying, "the movement of history is a creative advance" (RE, 372). We are not merely beings-toward-death, we are beings-toward-life. It is not decay and growing old that marks our life, but the ever-present possibility of new beginnings, creative advances, and "alternative futures" (to use the title from Bernard's series on worship). It is this commitment to life, and to the God of life, that enables us, along with Bernard, to "maintain our astonishment."

This essay is structured around six key teachings I have learned from Bernard (among others), encapsulated in sayings such as, "it matters" or "presence is what takes hold of me" or "the person of size." Along with excerpts from Bernard's own writings, I have interwoven some of the authors who are significant to Bernard and, through him, also significant to me. Many of Bernard's teachings have stayed with me for a long time. I often find myself passing them on to my own students, such that "generations" are now involved in Bernard's life. As the great Talmudic sage Rashi comments: "When one teaches the Torah to the sons and daughters of our fellow human beings, it is as if one had engendered them oneself. The true descendants are students, those whom one has taught." Bernard's generative influence is indeed "generational."

1. It matters

"It matters. It has consequences."

Bernard has sometimes wished he could take credit for these words, but they come from Alfred North Whitehead, though I suspect they would be lost to history if it were not for Bernard's constant retelling. The story, as Bernard relays it, goes like this. One of Whitehead's students came up to him after class and asked, "Professor Whitehead, how would you characterize reality?" Whitehead put down his books, remaining silent for a few minutes, then replied, "It matters. It has consequences."

This saying appears very early in Bernard's work. In a chapter titled, "The Appetite for God," he writes: "We matter deeply to and in the actuality of God. There is no way not to have a hankering ... for that which matters deeply" (RE, 373). And then, in his dedication to The Future Church of 140 BCE, Bernard writes: "Most of the things/that today I believe/matter most/and have consequences/that are full of grace.

Reality counts. Things matter. Life requires us. And even though we are only here "once" – or maybe because we are only here once – our lives on earth are heavy with consequences that can never be cancelled. "Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be released in heaven" (Matthew 18:18 NRSV). The deeds we perform may seem slight, yet they carry consequences that affect the lives of those around us, and maybe even the lives of those distant to us. According to Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner: "Let nobody in Israel – God forbid! – ask himself: 'What am I, and what can my humble acts achieve in the world?' Let him rather understand this, that he may know it and fix it in his thoughts: not one detail of his acts, of his words and of his thoughts, is ever lost."

Our actions and words are not performed or spoken into a vacuum or a void. They can do good or harm; they can bind or release; they bear responsibility; they carry the weight of life and death, of good and evil. Abraham Heschel perhaps captures this best when he writes: "Significant living is an attempt to adjust to what is expected and required of being human. This sense of requiredness is as essential to being human as the capacity for reasoning ... This sense of requiredness is not an afterthought; it is given with being human, not added to it but rooted in it."

According to Bernard, "the really rare question is: What kind of world do we want to make for ourselves and our children?" (FC, 116; BGW, 151). It is interesting that Bernard calls this a "rare question." Perhaps we aren't asking it often enough; perhaps we aren't addressing it often enough. Perhaps this is the question that really matters.

2. The Person of Size

On many occasions I have heard Bernard refer to "the person of size." This phrase comes from Bernard's early encounter with process philosopher, Bernard Loomer. In at least two of his texts, Bernard includes substantial excerpts from Loomer's work, having to do with "relational power" and "the person of size." In terms of the latter, Loomer writes:

By size I mean the stature of a person's soul, the range and depth of his love, his capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being ... the intensity and variety of outlooks you can entertain ... I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature.

This passage evokes the very spirit of Bernard's life and work: capacity for relationships, depth of love, openness to ever-new learning, encouraging others in their own diversity and uniqueness, largeness of spirit, and enabling others to increase in dignity and stature.

Another word that Bernard evokes that also expresses this spirit. It is the French word, from Gabriel Marcel, disponibilité. It is usually translated as "availability," though as Bernard suggests, it is "more like sitting on the edge of your chair, leaning forward out of readiness and eagerness to be met" (BGW, 144; RE, 378). Marcel says it is "being ready to receive," "making room for the other in myself." (88). It is the act of dedicating oneself to the other. Marcel links disposability ("being at your disposal") with creativity – I give myself to the person or to the production of some work, not for the sake of one's small ego, but for the sake of the enlargement of life and participation in God's creative goodness. Bernard, of course, is a Marianist, and perhaps one of the classic examples of disponibilité is Mary's response to the angel's annunciation: "Here I am, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word" (Luke 1:38). Mary said "yes" at the very beginning, making room for the other in herself; she "formed Christ in her womb and labored to bring him forth into the world" (HJ, xiii).

According to Bernard, a person of size and disponibilité is formed in the ongoing requirement and engagement of conversation. In various texts he outlines a process or a model for conversation (FC, 124-136). This process is about "making friends" with each other – enhancing relationships and making meanings and new worlds together – and it is also about "making friends with our sacred texts" (AF, 157-173). It is a process of receptivity ("availability") and enlargement (becoming people of "size"). Here is what Bernard says about the essence of conversation:

I cannot listen seriously to a different life and come away unchanged ... I risk being required to alter my sense of things, my understandings, my values, my self ... I am not only reconstructing and re-understanding the meaning of my friend (or my sacred text), I am reconstructing the meaning of myself.

Relationship means co-creation of each other's identity. When there is co-creation, no one person has control. Thus a relationship always opens up new possibilities for both lives. The conversation of a relationship makes new things appear out in front of both participants. Something is made by the conversation: a possible world is conjured up and projected; a story gets a new plot or possibility; history is enriched by a new version of how it might be lived. (AF, 160-61)

We become people of size when we risk our pre-conceived worlds, when we open ourselves to new possibilities, when we co-create each other, when we work together for a "new version" of personal and communal life.

3. Presence

The concept of "presence," if it can be called a concept, appears early in Bernard's work. "Whatever shapes or creates me in any way is present to and in me. Presence refers to whatever has a hold on my becoming" (RE, 286). And then in The Future Church of 140BCE: "Presence does not primarily mean here rather than there, today rather than yesterday, close rather than far. It has more to do with whomever and whatever has played a large constitutive role in my experience" (FC, 61).

We can live our lives unattentively, unthinkingly, routinely – and presence will always elude us. Or we can allow things to touch us, to take hold of our becoming, to stir our souls, to enter our world. By "things" I do not mean "objects" – rather, I mean the "thou-like" quality of the people and events of our lives, the sacred texts and symbols of our tradition, the questions and concerns of our age.

Presence infuses everything with life and vitality. There is no need to posit a divine world; the world is already naturally divine. "There is no thing in the world in which there is not life," a Hasidic master says, "and each has the form of life in which it stands before your eyes. And lo, this life is the life of God."

There is a holy spark in every living creature and every human being. Presence presumes energy and life, rather than an indifferent or anonymous existence. Presence means that things are diaphanous and alive, such that each living being blazes with intense singularity and uniqueness. Presence is a marvel and a miracle, and super, super natural. Presence requires an alert receptivity, a keen reflective attentiveness that, in the words of David Tracy,

embarks upon a journey of intensification into the concreteness of each particular reality – this body, this people, this community, this tradition, this tree, this place, this moment, this neighbor – until the very concreteness in any particularity releases us to sense the concreteness of the whole as internally related through and through.

Inherent in Bernard's writings is the conviction that there should be no separation between the love of God and the love of neighbor. Perhaps there is nothing worse than a spirituality that cannot accommodate humanity. It is, rather, our spiritual duty to become human. This "becoming human" is not a task we set ourselves to achieve; rather, it is a task given us by divine life. If the task of religious faith is to try to "humanize" our world, or to "personalize" our world, or to overcome the world of "It" and welcome the presence of "Thou," then surely this is also what it means to "divinize" our world.

Presence in life presumes communication and the very real possibility of dialogue, if only we could listen and be attentive, if only we could believe that there are, as George Steiner reminds us, "real presences" in life, real signs of vitality and personality. Bernard cites Heschel: "There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses." He goes on to say: "Experience cannot prove God. The experience of God is not about proving. It is about testifying" (FC, 56).

It is rare to encounter a text by Bernard without the inclusion, somewhere along the way, of poetry and even artwork. Presence is closely aligned with the aesthetic – which enlivens us with beauty and grace – rather than the anaesthetic, which dulls our senses and deadens our soul. The artistic work, says Steiner, comes to us as a visitation and a summons – "an Annunciation of a terrible beauty or gravity breaking into the small house of our cautionary being. If we have heard rightly the wing-beat and provocation of that visit, our house is no longer habitable in quite the same way as before." One of Bernard's most recent books is titled, The Beating of Great Wings. In the epigraph to this text, Bernard cites a poetic text from Henry Nelson Wieman, noting that the annunciation and the visitation always requires some measure of dying and brokenness: "We must be broken because there is a good so great it breaks the bounds of our littleness."

Life is full of joyous, sorrowful and glorious mysteries. "If we listen togetherveryquietly,Iwagerwecanhear,albeiteversofaintly,thebeatingof great wings" (BGW, 2). Maybe these great wings are like the Spirit hovering over creation. When we become aware of Presence, it is almost impossible for our hearts not to be stirred by response. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner captures this in his Book of Words: "You become aware that you are in the Presence. What then? Silence? Song? Blessing? Candles? Charity? Study? Reaching out to another? Just these are the beginning of the response."

Presence is perhaps another word for what the Catholic tradition calls "sacramentality." Sacramentality means that what we perceive as ordinary (it's only or merely this) suddenly becomes extraordinary (it's actually or really this!). The things of our lives often mean so much more when we infuse them with a sacramental sense of "real presence." For example, a table with lit candles, bread, and a carafe of wine stands in readiness for the guests to arrive. Many of us know Bernard's love of cooking and offering hospitality. The sharing of a meal and wine reminds us that human beings always seem to discover a sense of communion when they eat and drink together. Bernard writes: "Presence happens when God exercises a hold on our becoming, when God makes a difference, when the Christ-event clarifies God's intentions in specific events, when the Spirit creates in us an appetite for God" (BGW, 38).

4. Attend to life – this is the best way to attend to God

When I was a young graduate student, one of the first books Bernard handed me to read was Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, a brick-like tome of some 600 pages! A "book of size," indeed, with equally sizeable insights. I learnt almost all I know about hermeneutics from Bernard's engagement with thinkers such as Gadamer. One of the many insights that have remained with me is that the art of interpretation is intimately tied to the art of creativity, and this is as it should be, for the creativity of a work necessarily calls forth the creativity of the interpreter. This active engagement with sacred texts and great works of literature and art is indelibly inscribed in Bernard's own writings.

Bernard once complimented my own work by saying it is "thorough and in the mood of Gabriel Marcel, systematically unsystematic!" If this is what endeared my work to Bernard, it can only be because I was inspired by his own "systematically unsystematic" approach. Yet, what does "systematically unsystematic" mean? It is like a Zen koan. Perhaps it means ensuring that our approaches to life, sacred texts and each other are taken seriously, yet as shot-through with existential concern – given in life and not detached in theoretical remoteness. "All systems of thought sooner or later exhaust their ability to illuminate experience" (JM, 184). In his "autobiographical tracings," Bernard notes the importance of Marcel. "I most appreciated Marcel's reminder that experience itself is not perfectly orderly and angular, but often random and meandering." He goes on to say, "I took all the orderly outlines that I had prepared for my high school religion classes and burned them, and resolved to let each class evolve anew ever after" (GJ, 10).

It would be impossible to read Bernard's work without noticing his unwavering commitment to "radical empiricism" and the immediacies of "concrete experience." "The worldly presences of God are the data of theology," he writes. "Religious empiricism can be stated that simply" (BGW, 32). Or again: "God is available to us in every drop of experience" (FC, 59-60). Or yet again: "Events are laden. They are heavy with a thousand causes. They are luminous with a thousand references. They laugh or cry with a thousand feelings" (BGW, 27).