Catholic Yoga: Confession and the Lost Art of Spiritual Gastroenterology

Like most postmodern Catholics of a certain age, I hate going to Confession – really and truly dislike it. It’s worse than going to the dentist or the gastroenterologist. Like the gastroenterologist or dentist, confession is inherently embarrassing. It probes for decay and disease and often finds it. It’s uncomfortable. It can be painful.

Priests today, like modern dentists, do everything they can to make you feel at ease. They offer analgesics. They try to be as non-threatening and encouraging as possible. Some even offer the equivalent of nitrous oxide. I was told recently that when the actor Mickey Rourke goes to confession, he and his priest drink wine and smoke cigars. That is the way it should be. But as much as he might sugar coat it, a good confessor is still poking around deep down in your soul, scraping here, probing there, noting the presence of unusual growths that should probably be cut out. Many times, it’s just routine. A quick in and out. Like a quarterly teeth cleaning. No big deal. But every once and a while, it becomes a disgusting, uncomfortable process, involving blood and pus.

For people today, it’s particularly uncomfortable because we have been led to believe, since we were young, that we’re all “okay.” I’m okay, you’re okay. It’s all good! As I’ve said before, the only Immaculate Conception we children of the Sixties believe in is our own. There are no more sins, only neuroses. The only sexual sin is failure to orgasm. But it hasn’t always been so. As late as my own childhood, confession was once quite popular. The lines for confession often extended out of churches into the street. Perhaps people in an earlier time accepted their own sinfulness as a matter of course and embraced the relief that comes with confession. It’s been said that confession is a kind of Catholic yoga, free psychotherapy for the masses – and people in previous eras took advantage of it. In earlier times, people accepted both the reality of sin (violent, real, soul-withering sin) and the fact that they are inherently flawed, given to taking short cuts, repeat offenders in every sense of the word.

For about a century now, we’ve been telling ourselves that such a worldview is too pessimistic, even vaguely neurotic, and so have cultivated an image of ourselves as merely earnest strivers out to better the world. Perhaps some of this was necessary… because there is a heterodox strain of Calvinistic dualism in U.S. Catholicism. It may have come from Jansenism or from our Puritan neighbors but it’s there. Yet, like many correctives, this attempt to remove shame from our lives has gone too far. We now are literally shameless. Activities and attitudes that once required penance are now entertainment, celebrated on reality TV shows. Why go to confession when the activities you need to confess can, if broadcast to millions, make you rich? Don’t we all want to cheat our best friends out of fortunes and, like Mark Zuckerberg, found Internet empires? Don’t we all want to “hook up” with really “hot” guys and/or gals? Isn’t fame – bragging about our own wonderfulness — the path to wealth and happiness?

Catholics have a duty to go to confession at least once a year. It’s called the Easter Duty. Most ignore it. My friends in Opus Dei , which has as one of its “missions” the revival of confession among Catholics, like to say most Catholics haven’t been to confession since high school. I know that’s probably true. The only reason I go to confession as often as I do, which isn’t all that often, is because I occasionally attend an Opus Dei “evening of recollection” at a local high school. I’m not a member of Opus Dei but have a few friends who are… and I admire a lot about them. Unfortunately, some Opus Dei priests can be creepy, traditionalists in a bad sense. Our local parish priests are a lot better confessors because they function in the real world of single moms and scheming corporate lawyers. (The last time I went to Confession, right before Easter, I had the priest snorting in mild derision at my pathetic sins.)

Now, my evangelical in-laws, in occasional outbursts of anti-Catholicism after a few glasses of wine, will complain that they “don’t need some Catholic priest” to forgive their sins, that they can go “directly to God.” Of course, that’s true enough. That’s true even in Catholic theology… although I won’t bore you with the details and talk about mortal versus venial sins and acts of perfect contrition and all that. I also won’t bore you with the historical and scriptural evidence for sacramental confession. But saying you don’t need a Catholic priest to forgive your sins is a lot like saying you don’t need your dentist to clean your teeth or your gastroenterologist to clean your bowels: good luck with that! We go to confession for the same reason we go to the dentist: precisely because we don’t clean our teeth regularly or floss sufficiently and precisely because we don’t examine our conscience regularly and ask God for forgiveness. No, you don’t “have to” go see your gastroenterologist. You can take your chances. You can skip that checkup at age 50. After all, who wants to get a colonoscopy? But every once in a while, one of those intestinal polyps can get a little dicey and, if left unattended, can gradually grow into a nasty tumor that will kill you. So, no, you don’t “have” to go to Confession. But it’s a good idea.

One last thing. Like many healthy practices, like hot yoga, you can get used to Confession. It takes a while, but you can even get to like it eventually once you’re in the habit. Here’s why. There is something inherently powerful about someone listening to the deepest, darkest secrets of your soul – or at least to the deepest, darkest secrets you can bring yourself to talk about – and then saying that, by the power and authority invested in him by God Almighty, your sins are forgiven, truly and really forgiven. It can be truly transformative. That’s because many people, deep down, harbor a profound sense of shame despite all the best propaganda of our culture that there is no such thing as sin. When that sense of shame is brought into the open, like a bowel obstruction, and cut out, there is a real sense of relief and even of well being. You feel a lot better. If sin ages you, as it does, the forgiveness of sin is God’s anti-aging medicine, his way of keeping you young.

How to Muddle Through in Life

In the end, life is about muddling through as best you can. Most self-help books (and I read a lot of them) will advise you to find your “life’s purpose and passion,” but that’s like telling you the secret to success in business is to found a good company and make lots of money. The devil is in the details.

If I had to summarize all that I have learned about making your way on the path of life, however, I think it would come down to just a few core principles.

1. Put a priority on education. No one ever got very far, or became very happy, by being dumb. Stupidity is not a virtue, no matter what Hollywood tells you. Of course, by education I don’t necessarily mean college… although for most people, that is what it means. If you want to be an actor, fine… but learn everything you can about acting and about everything else you’re interested in. Read every acting book there is. Get the best training you can find. Ask questions constantly. Be curious. Be the geek who stays after class, asking followup questions. If you’re a mechanic, get advanced training. Sign up for courses. Take distance learning courses. Go to graduate school. Keep learning, keep studying. Become a perpetual student. Fill your home with books… and read them. Subscribe to as many magazines and journals in your field as you can afford. Take notes. Get a journal and write in it. If you’re in high school or college, make it your mission to learn everything you can… whatever it takes. If you’re already in the work force, make it your mission to learn everything you can about your profession, or your job, or your business. Become the “go to” guy or gal in your office, the expert the boss looks to for answers. Don’t be a smart ass about, don’t show off, just be knowledgeable – in your own quiet, unassuming way.

2. Try a lot of different things… especially things you don’t think you’ll be good at. I think this is good advice for young people but even better advice for old people. The infinite power that created galaxies and us gave us all talents and magic powers we don’t even know we have so the purpose of life, and especially when we’re young, is to experiment to discover what they are. The only way to do that is to try different things. In high school, if you’re a chemistry whiz and the math geek, try out for the football team. You might be surprised. You might, to your amazement, find you actually like tackling people. Similarly, if you’re a jock and a natural athlete, show you really have guts and try out for the school musical. Learn to play an instrument. Take up a new foreign language – like Chinese, perhaps. A few years back, there was a wonderful movie with Jim Carey called “Yes Man.” It was about a man whose life was utterly transformed when he went from saying “no” all the time to automatically saying “yes” – yes to volunteering, yes to learning Korean. Remember the old proverb: Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. It doesn’t matter if you’re lousy at something or don’t really know what you’re doing. If you were good at it, it wouldn’t be something new… and therefore wouldn’t test or stretch your abilities. I’m not particularly good at taking my own advice but I have tried to do this a little. I worked at a lot of different menial jobs when I was younger – fry cook, delivery boy, warehouse man. I learned a lot from all of them. When I was forty, I took up Aikido – a strange Japanese martial art that is derived from jujitsu. Change is good. Do different things. Never stop experimenting.

3. Make a solemn, lifelong vow of kindness. In Mahayana Buddhism, this is called the Bodhisattva Vow, the commitment to work for the salvation of all sentient beings. In the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, this is choosing the standard of Christ. In essence, you make a lifelong and solemn commitment to be kind – to your family, your friends, strangers you meet, animals, the earth. If it’s not kind, you don’t do it. It’s that simple. Be the one kid in class who sticks up for the underdogs, the new kids, the kids who get taunted and mocked. Be a decent human being. Make it a conscious choice. Decide to become a Knight of the Round Table. Defend the innocent. Stand for justice. Be courteous to all, especially to people who don’t deserve it. I don’t really believe in karma, but when it comes to “random acts of kindness” I’ve always found that it’s true. Even from a selfish, self-interested perspective, kindness almost always pays off in unexpected ways. It’s something we never think about but it’s a foundational principle for a successful life and general happiness.

4. Serve a higher purpose. One of the tasks we are actually performing, as we flop about in our twenties, thirties and forties, looking for something to do with our lives, is searching for a cause or mission worthy of our commitment. To be truly happy in life, we have to serve something bigger than our own bellies, we have to work for a noble cause. For many, if not most of us, that cause can be something as simple as our own families. To raise and educate children in modern society, and keep them safe and strong and thriving, requires sacrifices and work most people have no clue about – until they actually face it themselves. Oftentimes, service to the higher purpose of our children requires us to work in hum-drum jobs just to earn money – even hum-drum jobs like law or medicine. As a result, we should realize that is what we are doing and make it a conscious choice rather than something we drift into by default. I am deliberately trying to sell more life insurance than any other salesman in my town because I have three children to get through college. Of course, it helps if we can combine our high purpose and our work, if our work serves our higher purpose… and that is the subject for another chapter. But even if we haven’t figured out how to pull that off, even if we have to work as a house cleaner or a computer programmer, we can still serve a higher purpose. This is essential to our happiness. Find that higher purpose in your life. Keep thinking about it, refining it. Read books on mission. Find a “failure is not an option” mission and commit to seeing it through.

5. Be flexible. Precisely because I’m not a particularly flexible person, in both a physical and a psychological sense, I know something about flexibility and its importance. I’m naturally rather stiff. It’s kind of a running joke in my Aikido classes. My ironic nickname is Gumby because I move like Frankenstein’s monster. But flexibility is something you have to consciously work on. You have to stretch regularly. You have to breathe, bend, get out of the way. This is why Aikido is so good for you. The essence of ukemi, the Aikido practice of “welcoming” attacks, is flexibility. Say someone throws a punch at you or tries to kick you. In karate, you would typically just block the attack, hard. In Aikido, you move out of the way and “blend” with the attack, actually trying to ride it the way a surfer rides a wave. This requires great flexibility as well as balance, timing and lightness on your feet – all great attributes to have when facing the blows that life throws at you. It’s helpful throughout life to remain flexible. You have a plan but you have to adapt. You take advantage of opportunities you didn’t expect and you recover from setbacks you didn’t see coming. Of course, you can’t be so flexible you just fall down. That doesn’t help you, either. Someone who “goes with the flow” too much ends up over the waterfall. In Aikido, the trick is to be flexible yet “buoyant,” maintaining contact with your attacker with an ongoing energy. You don’t just collapse. It’s the same thing in life. You have a direction, an energy, an intention. You have ideals and moral principles. You’re more flexible about means than ends. You know approximately where you want to go but realize there are a variety of ways of getting there.

6. Have a plan. It helps to have a plan, to think a few moves ahead. Most people don’t. You can overdue it, of course. There was a character in the old Australian TV series McLeod’s Daughters who had this elaborate flow chart of her life, with every contingency anticipated, every step outlined. It filled an entire wall of her room. The Master Plan both fascinated and horrified her friends… as well as viewers. But all things being equal, having a plan is better than not. You can have a plan for getting through college and/or graduate school… for landing a job… for your career… for meeting and marrying the love of your life… for your business… for retirement. They say that the single reason why most businesses fail is because the owners didn’t take the time to write up a business plan. Whenever I’ve struggled in my life, usually in business, I’ve written up a Plan for how I am going to get through things… and then tried to follow it. Things usually work out. Without a plan, I flop around like a fish on a dock, desperate and in a panic. I even try to plan my day a little – not too much, but enough so I know what I want to accomplish. I also find it’s very helpful to write things down. I buy expensive leather-bound Italian journals, fill them with my plans, and take them with me everywhere for constant review.

7. Have fun. These “macro” imperatives for life reflect my own values, of course, but I think they are fairly universal. What’s the point if you don’t have fun? That applies to every stage of your life – high school, college, your jobs, your marriage, raising kids, your business, retirement. One of the things I most admire about the late conservative writer and publisher William F. Buckley, Jr., was his enormous capacity for and dedication to having fun. Unlike many conservative political activists, Buckley believed in having a good time. He and his wife hosted dinner parties, cocktail parties and receptions. They spent a full two months every year in Switzerland, skiing and writing. Buckley was a passionate sailor and was constantly organizing expeditions and trips. He enjoyed life, good friends, his wife and son. I think we should all strive to have more fun. As the saying has it, we should work hard and play harder. By all means, go to medical school… just make sure you take spring break off and head to the Bahamas. That’s my advice for my overachieving children.

8. Realize the path is the goal. That’s the title of a book by Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist meditation master and founder of the Naropa University in Colorado. He was talking about Buddhist meditation but I think it applies equally to life. You know what they say, life is what happens while we’re making other plans. It’s human nature, I think, to have big goals… big plans… and to assume that once we reach them, we’ll have it made, be happy. But we should all be mystical enough to realize that, in a very real sense, we’re already there, life itself is the goal. The kingdom of God is among us, right now. Everything we could want in the universe is already ours. “Everything I have is yours,” the father tells the prodigal son, who never realized the gifts he had right under his nose. We should make big plans, struggle hard to achieve our goals, suffer the disappointments of failure, and yet maintain what the Mormons call an “eternal perspective” and realize that the path is the goal.

Robert Hutchinson is an writer and essayist. He latest book is The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.

How to Be Happy in Life

There are many different ways of life, of course, and each person has to choose the way that fits his or her personality and intuitions about what life is all about and how to be happy. There is the way of the adventurer. The way of the businessman. The way of the scholar or priest. There is the way of the artist or mystic. There is even Gurdjieff’s Way of the Sly Man, the secret mystic who lives like an ordinary business man. But because I studied Aristotle at a young age, I’ve always been persuaded that, when considering how to “structure” your life, you should consider how best to use whatever God-given talents you’ve been given. In his Nicomachian Ethics (1095a15–22), Aristotle said that happiness (eudaimonia) comes from the full exercise of your powers… from using your gifts… and I’ve always thought that is true. And that is why, for me personally, one of the dominant themes of my life has always been what I call balance – the attempt to arrange your life, in so far as its possible, so that you have some balance in life and are able to use as many abilities as possible. Perhaps this is actually the Way of the Dilettante but I prefer to think of it as the Way of the Renaissance. In other words, I wanted a life in which I could marry, raise a family, think, create, study, make money, travel, play sports, stay in shape, play music, read books, and, in general pursue my interests and passions. I tried to make choices, as life went on in its haphazard way, that created conditions in which this multi-faceted, balanced life would be possible.

For example, I knew early on that I wanted to be my own boss – both because I would probably make more money with my own businesses but also because it meant I would have more free time, the ability to travel, the ability to see my children growing up, and so on. As a result, I never really pursued any sort of corporate job or career. This has its disadvantages, of course. We’ve always had to pay for our own health insurance and medical costs, for example – and to this day marvel when friends complain about their $30 “co-pays” and rising insurance costs. We paid for each of our children’s deliveries, about $5,000 each, almost literally in cash. We’ve also had to create our own Defined Benefit Pension Plan with its myriad federal regulations, its mandatory reporting requirementss, its frequent demands for cash, and what I like to call the “adult supervision” of a professional pension fund administrator – a delightful woman, the “dragon lady,” who is an Orthodox Jew and who does her best to keep us out of trouble with the Feds.

But overall, being self-employed, in my opinion, gives you many more opportunities for the “full exercise of your powers” and be happy than working in a nine-to-five corporate job. I am revisiting all these issues afresh because, as I write these words, my eldest son is plotting his own career trajectory in the corporate world of high finance – and I marvel both at his ambitious determination and at the assumptions that underlying his plotting. It is so utterly alien to my own way of life – trying to fashion a career in a corporate setting – that I am only now appreciating the stubborn but quite deliberate choices that went into our way of life.

Another part of living a balanced life is making money – not a lot of money, perhaps, but enough to provide a safe and comfortable home, in a quiet and secure neighborhood, and so that you can afford such luxuries as sports teams, music and language lessons, health care, good schools and so on. If you want to marry and raise children – which, for most people, is the most realistic path to becoming a decent human being and whatever enlightenment is granted us on this earth — a minimum amount of money is a requirement. The practical upshot of this, for me, was that I didn’t want to choose businesses or jobs that would make me too poor. I’ve never really been all that materialistic (as anyone who sees the old truck I drive or my clothes would confirm) but I do like to travel, buy books, study Aikido and philosophy in my spare time, and provide educational opportunities for my children. This meant that my wife and I had to figure out how to make money – and thus becoming a starving artist wasn’t a choice I was prepared to make. I admire artists for their single-minded dedication to their art… and I actually would encourage anyone with serious talented to pursue art or music as a career choice… but you still have to earn a living, artist or no.

When young people call me up, as some do, and ask me if they should become writers, I always say the same thing: Absolutely! It’s the best way of life in the world! My only caveat is that, to be happy, most people will want to marry and have children, to exercise all of their powers – not just their artistic ones – and that you therefore have to balance your artistic pursuits with the need to make money and provide a comfortable home. You want to enjoy your body and stay in shape. Play tennis or softball. Go to yoga classes. This is self-evident to many people but not to all, especially not to all of my children. When you are young and idealistic, you want to give yourself over to a great artistic passion or project – to spend years working on plays that never get produced, or a great novel, or painting, or a rock band. In your early twenties, that’s what you should do – test out your abilities and explore different ways of making a living. But if you want to have a happy life, you need to know that you have to balance the desire for creative pursuits with the need to make a decent living – not to “sell out” but in order that you can “exercise your full powers,” so you’re able to become a full human being.

Again, I am only thinking about these issues because I have so many children. But I really do believe balance in life is essential, perhaps even a key to happiness – even if you decide that your talents lie in science, or engineering, or medicine. For example, my eldest daughter is thinking about becoming a doctor. My wife likes this idea because her sister is a doctor and she likes the economic security that being a doctor can provide to women, especially in an increasingly competitive global economy. I think that’s great, of course, and will do everything I can to help my daughter through medical school, if she decides to pursue that course. My only caution to her would be to strive for balance – to think about how to balance the demands of a medical career with the needs and expectations of family life, her musical talents, her passion for swimming and athletics. Medicine is a fairly demanding and monomaniacal profession… but I know it’s possible to build a balanced life as a doctor, as my younger brother and my sister-in-law have proven. But it takes effort and deliberate choices.

Studying Philosphy at the Catholic University of Leuven

Rob Bell Asks the Big Questions Ignored by Many Churches

What I love most about Rob Bell’s controversial book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011), is the way it has triggered a new debate about what is really at stake in Christianity.

The odd thing about Christianity, at least in the United States, is that tens, even hundreds of millions of its adherents can’t really articulate its core beliefs beyond the most superficial, kindergarten level.

That is not a snobbish slam on Americans but simply a fact of life.

Like most religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism), Christianity is not so much a philosophical system as it is a subliminal, pre-conscious worldview that is passed on from generation to generation through rituals, symbols, readings from canonical texts, stories, proverbs, finger painting and occasional catechetical classes. This cultural inheritance carries, of course, philosophical ideas and historical claims, but it is the rare adult Christian these days who has taken the time to examine systematically any of that inheritance.

It is the rare Christian indeed who gets a systematic presentation of the key ideas and philosophical presuppositions of his or her religion – perhaps in a parochial school religion class or in a Christian high school senior seminar.

Some Christian denominations do a better or worse job at this than others, but even those denominations that try to give a systematic overview of what Christianity is all about rarely rise above the most simplistic, elementary teaching. Most children today inherit so little of the “basics” of Christianity – the who, what, when and where – that few denominations or schools can spend much time on the “why.” When people are not all that clear precisely who the Apostle Paul was… or what the Exodus was all about… you don’t have much time to discuss what it means precisely to be “saved” or the Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s universalism.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had discussions with highly educated people – engineers, doctors, judges, movie directors – who will, when discussing ethics or religion, revert to what they learned from Sister Mary So-and-So in Eighth Grade or a class they took in Vacation Bible School.

It is a jarring shock to many naïve young people when they get to high school and college and start to actually think about the ideas and beliefs they inherited from their parents. The mere discovery that Christianity didn’t pop full-blown into the universe but evolved slowly over hundreds of years is unsettling to quite a few.

Some reject Christianity outright as soon as they make the startling discovery that the Gospels don’t agree on all the details of Jesus’s life… or that Genesis was written in a pre-scientific age and wasn’t supposed to be a treatise on astrophysics… or that the Gospel writers made use of Jewish scriptures in ways that, to modern sensibilities, seem a bit unusual.

So, that is why Rob Bell is such a bracing blast of cold air that should be welcomed by all.

His book, Love Wins, asks fundamental, Big Picture questions about what Christianity actually teaches. Even if you disagree with his answers – and judging from the firestorm in Protestant evangelical circles, many people do vociferously – you have to concede that his questions have rekindled thought. It is making thousands of adult Christians confront, often for the first time, what is really at stake in Christianity:

> How exactly did Jesus’s death save us from anything?

>> Who or what is Jesus saving us from?

>> Is the point of Christianity that Jesus came to save us… from God? If so, if he saved us from God, then how is that good news? Doesn’t that make God a deity from which we should, well, hide?

Of course, Christians have been debating these issues for centuries… but these debates rarely filter down to the masses in the pews. Pastor Bell’s book, precisely through its deliberately provocative questions and chapter headings, is forcing the issue upon a reluctant (mostly Protestant) Christian community – although I would say that the debate has profound implications for Catholics and Anglicans as well and even for non-Christians.

That’s because what is at stake in the “Love Wins debate” is what kind of a world we live in, what kind of a God we worship (if we worship a God), what we can expect from life, what we are here to do, the kind of people we should aspire to become, and so on.

These are questions that transcend denominational and even religious boundaries.

One tip: Buy the audio recording of Love Wins in iTunes or on CDs. Pastor Bell reads his book himself, and he is a marvelous narrator. He doesn’t merely read the text but interjects little comments so you have the feeling of attending a kind of small group seminar with him as the facilitator. It’s a great book for commuters, one that I am mischievously giving to all my Calvinist friends and relatives. (Rob Bell is the bête noire to all the followers of hyper-Calvinist preacher and bestselling author John Piper.)

The Absurdity of Analytic Philosophy

Anyone who has struggled with the arcane texts of contemporary analytic philosophers will appreciate this delightful cartoon on YouTube.

Today’s Golden Age of Philosophy

Few people know this, but our age is an amazing time for people who love philosophy.

When I was in college 30 years ago, philosophy was strictly an academic exercise and there were few resources available for people, like me, who view philosophy more as a way of life or avocation than as a job.

Today, however, all that has changed.

There are three or four excellent “magazines” about philosophy – such as Philosophy Now and The Philospher’s Magazine – that are filled with funny, off-beat, irreverent articles about philosophical topics. A number of top-rate publishing houses, mostly in the UK, such as Routledge and Blackwell Publishing, produce books aimed at a general philosophical readership.

There are philosophy radio programs such as Philosophy Talk… coffee houses… salons… adult education classes… and literally hundreds of websites for the interested reader. There are even philosophy comic books, such as LogiComix about the life of British logician Bertrand Russell. It’s simply amazing. It’s a golden age of philosophy, I think.

The irony, however, is that there is still no solid consensus on what, precisely, philosophy actually is. In its historical and etymological sense, philosophy is literally “love (philia) of wisdom (Sophia),” and that is always how I have looked upon it. Philosophy, for me, is the attempt to reflect upon experience in order to understand more about life and how we are to live. My aims, like those of Socrates, are primarily practical: I want to understand the world and myself to live better.

Today, there are three, perhaps four major “schools” or approaches to philosophy, each with their own journals, intellectual heroes and methodologies. It is one of the scandals of contemporary philosophy that these schools are somewhat incommensurable, meaning they are so different in their approaches and ideals they are almost incapable of speaking to one another. It’s as though organic chemistry and 17th century French literature are forced to share the same offices and pretend they are the same discipline (I exaggerate but you get the point).

The first approach may be called, for lack of a better word, Traditional Philosophy: this is the approach now largely taught only in Catholic universities. It is primarily historical in orientation, a “history of philosophy” style in which students study the thought of, say, the ancient Greeks, and Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel and so on. There is very little attempt to think through how the thought of these philosophical greats can be reconciled. The idea appears to be that by working through all of these great thinkers, eventually the student will come to his or her own philosophical conclusions — although there is really no fixed “method” or approach given for doing so. I always think of this as the University of Chicago or Great Books approach. A variation of this approach is Catholic philosophy, including various schools of Thomism (such as the Transcendental Thomism of Merechal, Karl Rahner and, my guru, Bernard J.F. Lonergan)

The second major approach to philosophy today is what is known as Continental Philosophy. This is the philosophy that is most commonly taught in Europe and, again, in some Catholic universities in the U.S. In practice, it means primarily the philosophical systems of phenomenology, existentialism, so-called “critical theory” and their postmodern descendants. When I was in college, this is what I studied (in addition to traditional philosophy). We read the classic texts of phenomenology as well as such trendy philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Edith Stein and others. Today, those names have largely been replaced by those of postmodern French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard. While classical Husserlian phenomenology does attempt to “solve” major philosophical problems and actually be a descriptive science, in practice students of Continental Philosophy, like their Traditional Philosophy counterparts, spend much of their time studying the works of individual thinkers and writing papers on aspects of their thought. (There is a greater interest in Continental Philosophy in social and political questions, however.)

The third and allegedly dominant approach to philosophy today is Analytic Philosophy. This is the philosophy most commonly taught in the UK and in major U.S. universities. Built upon the infrastructure of British empiricists such as David Hume, Analytic Philosophy appeared in the early 20th century through the work of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. When I was in college, I found Analytic Philosophy to be mostly unintelligible gibberish. The emphasis on symbolic logic and the solving of trivial intellectual “puzzles” was, to me, an absurd waste of time.

In the past few years, however, I’ve been reading more about Analytic Philosophy and I am now much more impressed. Analytic Philosophy has matured over the past few decades and is now more of a philosophical “style” than it is a collection of doctrines. The style is more like that of my hero, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, in that Analytic Philosophy is much more interested in actually solving philosophical problems than it is in clarifying the thought of past philosophers. Thus, Analytic Philosophy is characterized by a thematic, rather than a “history of philosophy,” approach. It uses or creates a specialized technical vocabulary to elucidate the various “options” available in any given philosophical issue… marshals the evidence in favor or against those options… and then attempts to actually “settle” the issue. It’s actually quite refreshing.

The only problem with Analytic Philosophy from the perspective of a traditional philosopher or “lover of wisdom” is that it’s still focused primarily on trivial problems or mere puzzles (perhaps because those are the easiest ones to “solve”). Academic analytic philosophy is often little more than “chloroform in print,” boring to the point of dispatching its readers into a catatonic stupor. The cure for this tedium has been, over the past several years, the appearance of those popular philosophy journals and publishing houses I mentioned earlier. Precisely because they are aiming at a wider audience, the popular philosophy authors have to turn their attention to the Big Issues that interest real people – and thus are forced by the market to abandon the tedium beloved by academics and use their philosophical skills to address topics people actually care about. An example of how wonderful this can be is a book I am reading right now, Michael Sandel’s magisterial Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? It’s clear, concise, lays open the various options available on contentious issues, concerns serious subjects (what is justice?) and doesn’t resort to pretentious displays of symbolic logic to make its points.

These days, I mostly read good Catholic philosophy (such as can be found in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly or Method: A Journal of Lonergan Studies) and “popular” analytic books such as Justice or those produced by Routledge.  I still can’t read academic analytic philosophy journals.  I tried subscribing to Faith and Philosophy, the (mostly analytic) journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, but found it deadly dull and exhibiting the worst aspects of analytic pretentiousness.  Here’s a sample, taken from John Turri’s essay, “Practical and Epistemic Justification in Alston’s Perceiving God” (July 2008, p. 290):

“Alston’s thesis is that putative perceptions of God often justify beliefs about God.  A subject S has a putative perception of God when S has an experience e in which it seems to S that God appears to S as P.  If, based on e, S forms the “M-belief” that God is P, then S has a justified belief that God is P.  An M-belief is a belief that God is P, which is based on a putative perception of God.  (I will often substitute ‘q’ for the proposition that God is P.)

I dunno. My reaction to writing like that is the same as George Will’s: Just because life is absurd that doesn’t mean philosophy should be as well.

I don’t mean to pick on John Turri, whom I am sure is a great guy and a lot smarter than I am. But this sort of stuff is meant solely for professional philosophers in universities… and is largely what turns people off to philosophy as an academic discipline.  If Socrates had spoken like that, they probably would have forced him to drink hemlock much earlier and philosophy would never have gotten off the ground.

A Routine Near-Death Experience… and a Rumor of Angels

Two days ago, I was almost killed in an instant. I had one of those experiences that shake you to your very core – and which, to me, constitute some sort of proof of divine providence.

It was a very ordinary day. I drove my son to the beach train for his daily trip up the coast to high school. My wife had given me some money and asked me to stop at the store to pick up some sour cream. We were having chicken fajitas for dinner, and one of my kids like sour cream on them.

I pulled into the grocery store parking lot around 7:30 a.m. As I walked into the store, I noticed three very young children right outside the door. They caught my attention because they were pretty young to leave alone. There was a baby in a stroller and a boy and a girl of about four or five years of age, watching the baby. I assumed the mother left them outside and ran into the store to buy something. “That’s a bit odd,” I thought. “I hope the mom hurries up. They’re a little young to leave alone.”

I went into the store, found my sour cream, and left. I then got into my car, buckled up, and headed to the exit of the parking lot.

Now, the parking lot of this grocery store is slightly raised from main street of town that runs in front of it. The store itself, on the right, extends right out to the sidewalk. On the left, there is a brick wall that runs parallel to the sidewalk. Because the exit is a kind of ramp, the brick wall blocks your view of the street to the left. The parking lot exists onto the town’s main street, and there is a street light that lets you turn either right or left or go straight ahead.

The light was red. I was sitting in the car, waiting for the light to turn green so I could make a left-hand turn into traffic.

I looked over to my right and saw… the three little kids I had noticed before I went into the store! The mother (a young Italian woman) was pushing the baby stroller. She was wearing blue jeans and a black sweater. “Oh, good, the kids are okay,” I thought to myself, watching the mother nudge her two older children along. My attention was diverted for maybe 10, 15 seconds, as I watched them.

Then I looked up. I saw that the light had already turned green and I was holding up traffic a little. There was another car behind me, patiently waiting.

I started to move forward into the intersection when… WHOOSH! a car, traveling maybe fifty miles an hour, ran the light right in front of me! MOTHERFUCKER! The moron had just run the red light!

My heart caught a beat.

I moved into the intersection, turned left, and continued driving… but my heart was racing.

I suddenly realized that, had my attention not been diverted for those 10 to 15 seconds, had I moved into the intersection right when the light had turned green, I probably would have been directly hit (“T-boned,” as they say) by the car running the red light. At the speed the car was traveling, I could easily have been killed.

What caused me to hesitate? You can say it was just dumb luck. I had noticed those little kids going in… and their appearance, right when I was waiting for the light to change, caught my attention again. It was that moment of waiting that saved me.

A coincidence? Perhaps. But it is just these moments of so-called synchronicity… these gentle interior “nudges” that result in life-altering or, in my case, life-saving consequences… that encourage many people to see in life the hand of God (or his angels) at work.

Of course, you can also say the reverse works as well: Bizarre, unexpected coincidences… people being in the wrong place at the wrong time… that result in innocent people being killed or involved in horrible accidents.

For me, however, this strangely ordinary, almost routine brush with death was indeed a powerful wake-up call.

It reminded me once again of just how precarious life really is. Had I not noticed those young kids, I could have driven into the intersection – and died instantly in a horrible explosion of twisted steel and glass.

My wife and young daughters would have gotten a phone call from the local police. There’s been a horrible accident. You should come to the hospital.

The emergency room doctor would have told my wife that they had done all they could… but the internal injuries were too severe.

Needless to say, I now look both ways before moving into any intersection… and I pray more than usual for God to preserve my life at least until my children are fully grown.

I am grateful for whatever influence it was that caused me to hesitate before moving into that intersection.

Guardian angel indeed.

The Earthy Mysticism of William McNamara

In the late 1970s, while studying philosophy in college, I discovered the “earthy mysticism” of William McNamara. For more than 30 years, it has remained the dominant spiritual influence of my life and is partly the reason I remain, despite everything, a committed follower of Christ and a stubborn (if not very pious) Catholic.

A charismatic retreat master and former Carmelite friar, McNamara espouses a gritty, life-affirming, no-nonsense approach to Christian spirituality that is unique and, to me, exhilarating. Despite having encountered over the years a wide assortment of gurus and spiritual teachers from many different religious traditions, I have never found a spiritual synthesis quite like that of McNamara’s Earthy Mysticism.

McNamara’s approach is both very traditional and, at the same time, strangely radical. His heroes are the classic Carmelite mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, but also literary figures such as Zorba the Greek and philosophers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Abraham Joshua Heschel.

For McNamara, mysticism is not an otherworldly flight from reality but the opposite: a robust and courageous immersion in life in all its fullness and, through that immersion, an encounter with the Source of all (revealed, for Christians, in the person and work of the carpenter of Nazareth). With his long black (now grey) beard and full head of hair, McNamara looks like a wild-eyed rabbi or biblical prophet: a “disciplined wild man,” his term for a mystic.

In the 1970s and ’80s, McNamara’s message was challenging, defiantly anti-establishment: He insisted that all human beings, and certainly all followers of Christ, are called to be authentic contemplatives (mystics). Asceticism, the gradual sloughing off of pettiness and cheap thrills, is merely a way of whetting our appetites for the main meal of life.

The hustle and bustle of modern society is not such much sinful as it is deadening: or rather, it is sinful because it is deadening… or deadening because it is sinful. In his classic 1974 book, The Human Adventure: Contemplation for Everyman, written in the midst of the allegedly bohemian counter-culture, McNamara described the insipid dullness of materialistic society:

There are few towering pleasures to allure me, almost no beauty to bewitch me, nothing erotic to arouse me, no intellectual circles or positions to challenge or provoke me, no burgeoning philosophies or theologies and no new art to catch my attention or engage my mind, no rousing political, social, or religious movements to stimulate or excite me. There are no free men to lead me. No saints to inspire me. No sinners sinful enough to either impress me or share my plight. No one human enough to validate the “going” lifestyle. It is hard to linger in that dull world without being dulled.

Ultimately, Earthy Mysticism is an invitation to the radical amazement that comes with being fully, ecstatically alive. It is not a series of programs, methods or techniques but an attitude towards life, a willingness to ride the wild roller coaster of being a human being — with its rapturous joys and overwhelming sorrows.

McNamara’s brand of Earthy Mysticism seeks to reawaken in us a primordial astonishment at the real world and the God who is revealed in and through it. It seeks to help us recapture our original awe. When we pray, McNamara says, we enter the cave of a lion and do not know if we’ll come out alive. “God is not a nice or comfy thing to be possessed” through meditative techniques, he writes in his most recent book, Wild and Robust: The Adventure of Christian Humanism. “God is an earthquake.”

Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve, Part II

People often ask me why I remain a Roman Catholic – given all the scandals over homosexual pedophiles in the Church, the Peter, Paul and Mary liturgies, and so on.

They’re not asking me for the party line reason but my own, very personal reason.

And this is what I usually say: Whenever I really look into a question – an ethical, political, scientific, religious, Biblical, historical question – whatever it is – whenever I really dig deep and wrestle with all the issues involved, from abortion to Biblical studies – I find myself inevitably concluding that the “official,” even papal position ends up being correct.

I mean that very sincerely.

Over a lifetime, such independent investigations develop a certain amount of trust – the same kind of trust you might feel toward, say, your father, despite his annoying idiosyncrasies.

Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve is just another example of this.

Whenever I am goaded by my Protestant friends or in-laws to, once again, really look into the controversies over evolution and creation, I find that, as usual, the Catholic position ends up not only making the most sense exegetically (in terms of the Biblical texts) but is also, amazingly enough, supported by strong scientific evidence.

And that brings us back to Adam and Eve.

For years, I believed that the world was basically covered by overgrown chimpanzees… and that, maybe 50,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon Man suddenly appeared to chase down Woolly Mammoths and drag their wives by their hair into the cave.

But we now know that isn’t the case.

Human-like (hominid) species flourished on earth up to a million years ago – and they looked a lot more like Raquel Welch in the film “One Million Years BC” (a big favorite with my classmates when I was in fourth grade) than they did like Cheetah.

Anthropologists now keep pushing the dates for proto-human groups back hundreds of thousands of years – as far back, in fact, as 800,000 years ago. The scientific evidence for these groups is overwhelming (which isn’t, by the way, the same thing as evidence for Darwinian natural selection).

Nearby is an artist reconstruction of some hominid forebears of ours, Homo heidelbergensis (“Heidelberg Man”), an extinct species of human that may have lived around 600,000 years ago. This is not the knuckle-walking semi-semian many people assume, but a genuine cave man who stood about six feet tall, walked upright and had a brain as big as that of modern humans. There is evidence that Heidelberg Man used primitive tools, buried his dead and may have possessed a language.

An even earlier species, so-called Homo antecessor, fossils of which were discovered in the 1990s in Sierra de Atapuerca region of northern Spain, may have lived as long ago as 1.2 million years ago. This early human species also stood about six feet tall with the males weighing about 200 pounds but had a 20% smaller brain.

There weren’t a lot of these creatures roaming the world back then – as few as a few thousand, perhaps. Our genuine cave man ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis, is considered by anthropologists to be the ancestor of both the extinct species of Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens). Neanderthals lived in the period from 600,000 years ago until around 30,000 years ago, when they mysteriously became extinct. DNA evidence suggests that there was some, although very limited, inter-breeding between Neanderthals and modern humans.

Anatomically modern humans, known as homo sapiens sapiens, first appeared around 200,000 years ago in Africa. In Europe, they are called Cro-Magnon Man

Now, with all of these various proto-human groups running around the world between 1 million and 30,000 years ago, how likely is it that we are all descended from a single historical human couple, an Adam and Eve?

After all, doesn’t it make more sense that there were many ancestors of the human race?

Well, here’s what fascinating… and what makes any effort to reconcile the Biblical account of creation with what passes for scientific anthropology even more difficult.

The DNA evidence actually does show that all human beings alive today do descend from a single mother – so-called Mitochondrial Eve. Different DNA evidence also suggests we are all descended from a single male – Y-chromosomal Adam.

What isn’t clear is whether the genetic Adam and Eve lived at the same time. It’s possible that they could have literally founded the current human race… but it’s also possible that Eve was an older woman (by tens of thousands of years!).

The bottom line is that the scientific evidence tends to support monogenism, the unity of the human family, which is what Pope Pius XII insisted upon as a key point of Catholic doctrine vis a vis any scientific theory of evolution in his encyclical humani generis.

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