Differences are especially important to me as a person and an academic. I can mention three that have had a huge impact on my life.
First, I began a life-long fascination with and study of atheism in my early thirties in graduate school. What did I learn from Dewey and the other American Naturalists? That atheism has good intellectual backing, that faith in God is chancy but worth the risk, and that atheists can be saints. Dawkins and the more recent flaming atheists are enough to shake one's admiration for the older atheists.
Second, as a callow budding intellectual I was marked by a resentful rejection of Catholic scholasticism until I read Bernard Lonergan's Insight when I was about 28. It rocked my intellectual life: there could be a vigorous Aristotelian-Thomist-Kantian intellectual life in Catholicism that made more sense than its opponents and critics. Brilliant. Read it carefully and slowly.
Third, because I transferred my teaching to the University of South Florida's religious studies department, I had to face and learn from the scads of fundamentalist and evangelical students. The long-range effective this confrontation ended in my reinterpretation of Catholic ecclesiology: the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church is no longer primarily Roman. Now it seems to adhere in all sorts of branches and the Roman shibboleth of "the one true church" falls into a polemic abyss.
My Significant Others are in my home or nearly so. Although I was raised Roman Catholic by my Vatican Council II parents, my spouse is a Lutheran pastor, our children rebelled against us by decamping to the Methodists, and my mother’s family is completely without religious connections. In this situation one can hardly help speaking of the one, holy, small-c catholic, and apostolic church. The language of Others simply seems out of place because the rich blend of flavors, convictions, and practices without which my remaining in the Roman Catholic church would not be happy or even possible.
What do I gain from them? Too many things to list. But here is a start:
∙ Women’s ministries of Word and Sacrament.
∙ A habit of ecumenism.
∙ Denominational respect for communities’ needs for special ministry when pastoral
leadership changes or goes awry: interim ministry, swift responses to clergy misconduct.
∙ Sacramental hospitality. With the exception of a very few communions, Protestants practice an open table, on the theory that no sinner should have to forego the grace of Eucharistic union with God and community.
∙ A robust sense of ecclesia semper reformanda, which manifests as a habit of also looking forward to ask how the church should be now in order to realize the Reign of God in the future instead of only backward in worry about what (sometimes non-essential) piece of tradition we might drop inadvertently.
∙ A deep compassion for the genuine hunger that many people without religious traditions suffer in the face of life’s adult stages and challenges, for the helplessness they feel without the puzzling but still comforting groundings I find in my faith.
Cristina L.H. Traina, c-traina@northwestern.edu
Northwestern University,Evanston, IL
Here are some of the most profound experiences of the “most significantly different others” in my life. Facing my own death in the midst of many other wounded people in the Columbia Presbyterian emergency room. Being told by nurses at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center that “we kill you and bring you back to life again” through the bone marrow transplant. And it did feel like they killed me and brought me back to life. Experiencing those same nurses taking significant risks to save and protect my life. Experiencing my then girlfriend give up her job at home (in Connecticut) to take care of me 24/7 in Seattle, Washington. Her gift of love was completely gratuitous and life-giving. So was the gift of my sister’s bone marrow.
And in the midst of facing my own death in my early twenties—medical staff also told me it was most likely I would die—I found a “significant Other” within me that I had not previously experienced so deeply. I felt completely at peace and full of courage and love, open to life and death. This power within was not me; yet it was fully within me and fully beyond me for it endures beyond and in death. I am humbled to this day that I am granted the gift of life!
My beloved Kara and I were married three years post-bone marrow transplant. We are celebrating our 28th anniversary soon. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (“Fred Hutch”) pronounced me cured of leukemia five years post-transplant.
When Kara and I moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s, we were blessed to find an apartment adjacent to Sacred Heart parish on the top of the crest of Fillmore Street. For the first three Sundays that we attended Sacred Heart, the congregation literally embraced us in a huge group hug every Sunday. They literally welcomed us with open arms. At Sacred Heart parish we became part of the Black Catholic family. There we experienced a depth of welcome and love that we had never previously experienced in any other parish. There we began to learn about the “uncommon faithfulness” of African American Catholics in the midst of death-dealing racism in the city, society, and Church. But when the parish was closed some fifteen years ago, a neighboring and predominantly white parish refused to welcome and incorporate Sacred Heart parishoners. Racism as the refusal to welcome brothers and sisters of color still wounds the Body of Christ.
Kara and I were then inspired to adopt African American children nearly twenty years ago. Raising children of color is a fast-track for learning how we are far from being a “post-racial” society. And children reflect the overflow of life and love. Part of the problem of white privilege and power is how we remain blind to the perverse ways that racial bias forms who we become as human beings, including how we think and act in the language of exchange. That language, inasmuch as it reflects a matrix of domination, reflects the lie that is white supremacy in America.
I think that the Significant Other in the unity of creation calls, lures, draws us into humility before the Other within us and among us. Indeed, humility means recognizing how we are rooted in the earth—in the moss and the dust that is scattered joyfully throughout the cosmos. The Significant Other and others give us life before we are even born.
I certainly stumble and forget how I need all others for life and how the most Significant Other overflows with life and love every moment. Even as I stumble and forget, I hope that I and we join on a path of unlearning cultures of dominance as we embrace and dance with the Unknown within us, among us, and beyond us.
Alex Mikulich, mikulich@loyno.edu
Loyola University, New Orleans
Probably the most influential interaction for me personally was a consortium of theological educational institutions in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that was called the Second Century Seminary. Scholars from Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and non-denominational traditions met to discuss issues from the Second Century as they impacted Biblical interpretation. I will never forget a dialogue between Cistercian Fr. David Balas with Baptist thinker R. Alan Culpepper on Johannine interpretation. Culpepper argued for a novel interpretation based on his perspective of the intended reader; Balas demolished his argument by showing from an historical perspective that such an intended reader simply did not exist at that point in time. As a Baptist, I found myself agreeing with the Cistercian over my fellow Baptist!
Secondly, our College Theology Chapter in the New Orleans area functioned well (particularly before hurricane Katrina), and we had a number of meetings with interactive dialogue between Catholic scholars from Loyola and Xavier universities with we Baptists from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. It was always a fruitful dialogue. Those meetings led to us hosting some Catholic faculty members and students to meet and dialogue with some of our faculty and doctoral students. We learned much from each other. I have also profited from interactions with Catholic thinkers through LAICU (the Louisiana Association of Independent Colleges and Universities) and as a member of the Commission on Accreditation for ATS.
A third opportunity for helpful dialogue has been in my engagement with bioethics issues. I served on a hospital bioethics panel with several Catholic leaders. I have also served on discussion panels at our institution and at Loyola University of New Orlea. I represented Baptist perspectives, along with panel members from the legal and medical fields. These were helpful and fruitful discussions.
Finally, my own participation in Catholic Books Review has been a helpful scholarly interaction. I'm a "minority" contributor as a Southern Baptist, and my participation in an online journal with that name has seemed curious to my evangelical friends at times, but I have learned much from the books (often from Catholic thinkers) which I have reviewed, as well as from the reviews of the other contributors.
In short, the more opportunities we have for interaction and dialogue, the more we will learn to appreciate and profit from the wisdom that each of us have to share.
Steve Lemke, Provost, slemke@nobts.edu
New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
My focus is not so much on what one gains from such relationships, but the challenge of encounter. The "Other" whom I tend to dismiss much too quickly as having nothing valuable to contribute to any conversation is the 'Other' within the Roman Catholic Church, the people who are not willing to listen to or take seriously my ideas, but at the same time I am no more willing to listen to them or to take their ideas seriously.
As I've been reading Pope Francis' sermons and letters, I find that he is posing a real challenge to all parts of church and society to actually encounter the other. He most often presents that challenge as a challenge to go to the poor, to encounter them in the reality of their lives, and to enter into a real - and respectful - dialogue with them. Such dialogue is difficult because of all the betrayals and exploitation and misunderstandings that have characterized the discourse between rich and poor, but Francis is calling on all sides to try to name the differences, and in that naming come to an understanding and a valuing of the diversity of human society. When the 'other' has value and when their 'lens' is found to offer profound insight on human existence, then it is very difficult to go along with the social structures that depend on difference and division and that by their very nature relegate many to a life of deprivation. Encounter naturally leads to change in the status quo.
So, Francis' challenge to encounter and to dialogue is one that has me looking at my brothers and sisters within the Roman Catholic Church with whom I disagree, and wondering if such dialogue and encounter is really possible. It takes two to have a conversation, but it only takes one to initiate it.
Linda Harrington, LSHarrington@cableone.net
Briar Cliff University, Sioux City IA
Several years ago I had occasion to teach classes on Christian prison literature at two Washington State correctional facilities. Doing so was part of my research for a book I am writing on Christian prisoners of conscience, including Vibia Perpetua, Maximus the Confessor, Thomas More and Martin Luther King, Jr. I began to wonder if persons who were actually incarcerated would see things in these writings that I might miss. With the kind assistance of two prison chaplains, I was able to arrange classes for inmates who had been convicted of felonies such as manslaughter, armed robbery and drug-pushing, but who were now trying to live a “religious” life while behind bars. One class was held at a women’s prison, the other at a men’s facility.
I can’t say that I learned much from my students about “Christian prison literature,” or at least about the religious content or literary form of the two works I studied with them, The Passion of Sts. Perpetua and Felicity and MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But I did come to learn a very great deal about my students themselves, about the trials and tribulations of trying to live a life of faith while in “the joint,” and, perhaps most significantly, about myself. Very soon into the first class, I began to realize that my own Christian walk was rendered much easier—and perhaps severely vitiated—both by white privilege and by my professorial status, and I wondered if I could stay true to my religious convictions and practices if I were subjected, not only to the usual privations and humiliations of prison life, but also to the special pressures brought upon Christian inmates by guards and other inmates.
These unnerving thoughts all came to head at the conclusion of the fourth and final session of the class at the women’s facility. The students had been discussing Perpetua’s comment, “My prison suddenly became a palace, so that I didn’t want to be anywhere else” (Passio Perpetuae #3.9), and had concluded that thanks to their growing faith and their profound sense of friendship and solidarity with each other, they had discovered a sense of moral and spiritual freedom during their imprisonment which they had never known before. It was unspeakably moving. When class was over, we exited the classroom. The women turned to the left, and walked down a corridor back to their cells, while I turned to the right and exited the prison yard through the remote-controlled steel doors. As I walked to my car, I thought of Jesus’ parable of the judgment of the nations (Mt 25:31-46). By the laws of our land, I was a “sheep,” going away, if not to eternal life, at least back to suburbia, and my students were “goats,” returning to the temporal punishment which had been meted out to them. But I suddenly had very grave doubts about whether the secular authorities had divided up that little flock of scholars in the same way as our Lord would have done.
Richard B. Steele, rsteele@spu.edu
Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA
The biblical story of the Tower of Babel has always struck me as the primordial encounter of the distant other. The incident unfolds as a metaphorical explanation of the world’s diversity of cultures, suddenly separated by linguistic incomprehensibility and geographical distance. But—as masterfully developed by Theodore Hiebert—the text explicates a more analogical theme, indicative of humanity’s tendency to remain stably anchored in its own comfort zone of identity, whether ethnic, linguistic, or geographical, countered by God's dispersion.
Rather than indicative of divine retribution, God’s scattering favors multi-cultural dispersion and ethnolinguistic multiplicity. When illumined by this perspective, God effects a complete undoing of the comfortable unity the city and tower provide, compelling humanity outward beyond its security toward the uncertainty of an unknown.
This outward dispersion toward the unintelligible other remains each of our personal “Babels.” The leap from kindred comfortability to the challenge of translating multilingual divergence moves us way from our own centers. Approaching the margin, we approach something so “other” it becomes an inexplicable encounter with the divine. Perhaps God’s discomforting in-breaking at Babel urges us to embrace so-distant otherness as the incarnational, divine Other. Once unintelligible, its language then becomes our own.
Neville Ann Kelly, nevkel@gmail.com
Director, Lean Scholar Initiative
Isn't it the message of the Incarnation that the other is God with us? Not only is the Other present within us – God's very breath gives us life – but God is present in everything and everyone. Louis Janssens speaks of the spoor or spark of God in every person and every bit of creation.
What is the implication? Prayer is not contact with a far-away being. Rather, it is recognition – a grace and not something we can force – that God speaks to us from our own reality and from the encounters we have with others. In the tears of the parent grieving a dying child, in the dirty feet of a young child as I wash them, in the eyes of someone hungry or depressed, in the ecstasy of sex or the loneliness of a cold singular bed, God is there. In the blood of the black child lying dead from a gun shot, in the blood surrounding the newly born baby, in the blood of the cross, God is there.
Even in structured prayer, incidents and persons from our lives come to us. We see them and ourselves in a different, ecstatic way. Sometimes this brings great consoluation; sometimes it calls us to a new way of being. I think of the Merton experience of being one with people "in the world" and not just one with God in monastic prayer.
What can we do? Open our eyes and hearts in hope, in expectation. Stand on tiptoe to welcome whatever comes. "If you only recognized God' gift and who it is that is asking you for a drink. . . ." "Lord, when did we see you thirsty?"
Dee Christie, dlchristie@aol.com
John Carroll University, University Heights, OH
When I was growing up in central Pennsylvania people lived in neighborhoods marked off from one another by religious, class, racial, and even ethnic differences. At that time the divisions between neighborhoods were not as significant as they were in the years when my parents were growing up. Yet, there was often a clear distrust and, at times, an open prejudice against those from other neighborhoods, those who were different. But things have changed. More and more people have come to recognize that encounters with different people can lead to see life in new ways.
In my own life I often find that there is still one area of life in which it can be difficult to respect and honor differences. This is when I encounter someone who is both like me and at the same time different from me. For example, as a Catholic with liberal leanings, I sometimes find it difficult to listen to Catholics with traditional leanings. I have at time found myself thinking: “Our visions of our church are so radically different that one of us must be wrong.”
As I have reflected on the reality of similarity combined with difference in my life, I have come to see it as a blessing. While I never cease trying to learn from difference, I know that it is only by the grace of God that I am able in some instances to continue to strive to see differences as an occasion for learning and not as a cause for distrust.
Harold (Bud) Horell, horell@fordham.edu
Fordham University
One issue, among many, that occurs to me when thinking about “significantly different others” is that of alienation. I think about the alienation:
—when I realized as a young child that many of the other kids in my elementary school in St. Louis lived in families with money and fine homes and clothes;
—when we became working class in California, and other kids in my elementary school spoke Spanish and lived in shabby little residences for fruit pickers, sometimes with little more than dirt floors;
—when in high school I "got religion” as a born-again fundamentalist Baptist, which made me different from some but more like others in my own family and community;
—when I became politically radical in the 1970s, leaving me at odds with the dominant culture at large and significant others among family and friends;
—when I left the orbit of Baptists for the United Church of Christ, going from one of the most conservative to one of the most liberal Christian denominations in the world.
Each communal transition has involved alienation from members of former communities and new relations with people now of shared sentiments and lifestyles. There is a certain amount of poignancy as I’ve searched for common ground on which to maintain damaged or reconcile broken relationships across cultural divides. And the process never seems to end with the ongoing culture wars as friends, relatives, and acquaintances line up in various configurations, depending on the issue at hand. Of course, these personal events hardly touch the greater divisions collectively between classes, peoples, races, and religions so far addressed in the posted responses.
In our romantic and celebrative moments, we can affirm the great value of others who, in the words of the Neo-Confucian Lu Xiangshan, “grind and polish” us on our journey through life. In other moments, we know the heartbreak of a world too deeply divided.