Sr. Vicki Toale. O.P.

Sister Vicki has a doctorate in Theology and is an Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Molloy College. She will discuss her concern about the stalemate between VOTF and Bishop Murphy and will suggest how VOTF might move the dialogue to a higher ground. She will explore what it means to be a (small "c") catholic, what Vatican Council II has stated and what God intends of us – the call to be present to God – which changes us.
The following was delivered at the Northwest Nassau Parish Voice on May 22, 2007.

Beyond Rightness and Wrongness

I grew up in Brooklyn in the 50’s, as a middleclass, white, Catholic girl. It was a very focused and closed culture built on respect for and obedience to just about everybody; my parents, my teachers – the sisters – and of course the priests of my parish.  I always had a hard time with this, not the respect part but the sometimes-blind obedience that was expected.  One of my foundational stories recalls the last time my mother went to a parent-teacher conference.  I was a freshman at Bishop McDonnell High School and my official teacher told my mother that I was very bright BUT “She thinks she’s the teacher.”  Without batting an eyelash my mother replied, “That’s OK, Sister, she thinks she’s the mother too.”  Only now can I truly see this as a conflict not of values but of  power and authority; one that continues to affect me.  How can I claim my dignity as a mature person and still respect and “obey” legitimate authority yet challenge the abuses of power that exist almost by definition in any society?

So here I was, a person with a mind, surrounded by people who were more than willing to TELL me what was “right”, and more importantly what was “wrong”.  How could I help but conform or be uncomfortable. . .  Maybe it worked for some who grew up during the “good old days”, and maybe it works for some today, but I cannot see how it can be that simple.  Almost every time I hear right and wrong invoked, it carries tremendous amounts of righteousness.  There’s a lot that has transpired between then and now but that foundational story sets a framework for what I would like to share with you tonight. 

Let me begin by explaining the title: Beyond Rightness and Wrongness.  It comes from a poem by Rumi, a 13th century Persian mystical poet which has captivated me. 
“Out beyond right and wrong, there is a garden; I’ll meet you there.”  
Can there be anything beyond right and wrong?  I must tell you am more and more convinced each day that the world we live in can be perceived only as: beyond right and wrong.

          But what of this garden where I will be met; and who will be there to meet me?.  Let me state unequivocally that I believe when we speak of things of the greatest meaning we can only speak in images and with metaphors.  As I look back to the 50’s I see the certainty that was its hallmark as façade, or maybe a freeze-frame of what we/they wanted life to be like.  The Hebrew people of 1000 BC when faced with the ultimate meaning of life: they were a people chosen by and devoted to God yet their lives were filled with contradictions that would never be described as the way life should be.  In their great wisdom and under God’s inspiration they turned to story.  We were created to live in a garden and we blew it.  A simple story yet incredibly profound.

          I would like to look at both parts of that image. How do you picture that garden?  We call it Paradise.  And the “sin”? It has something to do with the knowledge of good and evil.  Any of you who have fallen in love with love, and I hope you have and do regularly, know what paradise is.  And any of you who have fallen in love with a real person knows the paradox of paradise, the knowledge of good and evil.

          Beautiful flowers decorate gardens; luxurious, fragrant blossoms attract and delight. But we don’t marry, befriend, commit ourselves to the care of or spend our lives in the company of these flowers without recognizing very quickly how much work goes into the relationship.  The flower attracts us but we commit ourselves to the root system.  You don’t marry a person; you marry a whole family, the roots of who that person is.  Cinderella and the Prince may have lived happily ever after; but the stepsisters showed up regularly to celebrate the holidays.  The root system, the culture of St. Vincent Ferrer Parish in the 50’s, is thoroughly ingrained in me.  Even though I consciously resisted it.  I cannot imagine how deep it exists in the hearts and minds of so many others who didn’t think they were the teacher or the mother.

          I have recently been trying to remove the overgrown weeds in our backyard.  Clippers and a few sore muscles cleared the surface; but when I decided it was important to remove the roots, I could not believe how deep, how strong, and how many roots lie intertwined just beneath the surface. I continue to remove them but can do no more than a few square feet at a time.  The same can and must be said of our Church.  The Second Vatican Council one of the very few, if not the only Council called, not to correct a “wrong,” but to look at the Church itself, was convened, conducted, concluded, and codified over forty years ago. Yet so little seems changed.

          The surface changes were implemented with dizzying speed and little preparation.  An institution that prided it self on the conformity of its structure, as it had been defined at the Council of Trent was all of a sudden named mystery.  The now Cardinal Avery Dulles taught us about the many models of Church.  The institutional aspect now had to share the spotlight with gospel, community, service, justice and the Holy Spirit.  All of a sudden there were many different images, different paradigms, different possibilities that caused no little confusion; but created great energy and participation for those no longer relegated to the pay, pray, and obey category.  But the more radical changes, the ones that call for real change within the Church, change that we cannot envisioned yet, lie within a deep and complex root system and will take a very long time and great determination to unearth.

          Let me tell you a brief story.  Joel Barker uses this story in a business video about change.  There once was a man who had a state of the art sports car that he loved to drive out on deserted roads in the mountains.  The car responded to his slightest touch and he reveled in early morning drives in the country.  One morning, as he drove along a particularly winding road, a car came careening around the curve ahead of him, swerved in and out of his lane and barely missed him as it passed.  As she passed him, the woman driver of the other car yelled to him, “Pig!”  Incensed that his pleasant drive had been ruined, angered by the fact that this woman had dared to yell at him after almost killing him, he yelled back at the top of his lungs, “Cow!”  Somewhat mollified he continued his drive, rounded the corner and hit the pig standing in the middle of the road.  This is a paradigm story, a story of real difference of perspective, because what was meant as a warning was heard as a threat and responded to as an insult.

          When we look at the Roman Catholic Church today, we do so from very different perspectives; we use different models to explain who we are and how we are together.  Models, which, upon reflection, Cardinal Dulles realized, were ALL defective.  This is not necessarily “wrong,” the Church’s decision to include four gospels in our testament of faith could lead nowhere else.  But it can and does lead to a lot of rancor and name calling if we don’t go beyond rightness and wrongness. 

          The story of that first garden, which I believe is truly a foundational story, was an attempt to speak to what is, not what was, or to speak for what was for them then, not what was from the beginning.  It is not about what could be or what used to be; it is about what is.  It clearly describes who is in charge and who it is that knows right from wrong.  The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil belonged to and still belongs to God.  Yet we cannot eat of our tree, the Tree of Life, if we do not discern how we should be with one another and what this God asks of us. The question will always exist among us, “What does God expect of us and who is it that speaks for God?”  We must never forget that God will always be larger and more mysterious than any possible human expression has been or can be; yet we must speak.

          In the interests of time, let me skip from our childhood as a people to now, as I did with my own story.  Our Church, the Roman Catholic Church, rooted in the soil of the Hebrew tradition, the experience of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and the power and structure of the Greco-Roman World for 2,000 years, has had a rich and vibrant life.   The Church developed in a culture that preferred logic to image, law to story, and institution to intuition.  I don’t know how many years the roots I am trying to remove from my backyard have been growing; but I think you get the picture.

          We, as vowed women religious, have been dealing with our own roots since the 60’s. The Council Fathers, deliberating on the roles of clergy and laity, treated religious orders as a third category, and directed us to study our founders.  It may or may not have seemed a harmless task to them, but as we dug deeper and deeper into the charism or gifts of our founders, a task we continue to struggle with, given the tenacity and complexity of cultural and religious roots, we rediscovered and reclaimed the prophetic and mystical voices that had been choked by structure and conformity.  We have been more able to respond the “signs of the times” because we shared less power and privilege than the clergy and therefore had less to lose and fewer roots in that area.  We continue to deal with the images of the “real” sisters and brothers from the 50’s.  We struggle to find our own place in the Church, capital C, and with the church, small c, the people of God.  Thank you for challenging us to be more.

The Vatican Council was called to respond to the disillusionment within the Church in Europe.  It’s proclamations came as a shock to the Church in the United States.  Well the disillusionment has caught up with us today at a moment when we are no longer carried by the enthusiasm we once experienced.   Enthusiasm is a word that means being present to, or filled with the presence of God. This is one of the serious problems I see in most if not all churches today.

There are many serious differences that exist in the Church today.  Differences that are not easily resolved.  Cultural roots lie beneath each position, supporting genuine faith and passionately held positions.   Today many prefer Luke’s story of life brought about by the Spirit to Matthew’s which is grounded in “what had been said in scripture” to come to an understanding of Jesus.  It is interesting to note that before the reform of the liturgy, it was Matthew’s gospel that was proclaimed at 80% of the Sunday Masses.

The serious differences I see in the Church today are paradigmatic and therefore difficult for some people even to see.  They are nonetheless questions that must be addressed: Did the Second Vatican Council call for real renewal and reform or was it just a blip on the ecclesial screen?  Should we be more focused on Church Tradition or on the mystery of Jesus in each of the gospels?  Are we Church Catholics or Gospel Catholics? Or, more importantly, how can we be both?  What do we do with the 1700 years of privilege that has existed almost invisibly within the Institutional Church exempting it from accountability to any but itself?  Because they are paradigmatic questions they are incredibly difficult to resolve or sometimes even to discuss.  Those of us who have fallen in love with real people know how difficult it is to deal with real issues.

          Let’s go back to right and wrong and the tree.  The imagery of humans coming to “know” and thereby coming into conflict with their God reflects, I believe, the natural growth of the human person.  Each of us, I hope, lived in paradise when we were very young.  It was about four foot square and sat in the middle of the living room.  We were surround by toys and Zwieback Cookies. This was before Cheerios became the snack of convenience.  Any way, one day we stood up and discovered the world outside our playpen, and our growth toward personhood began.  All around us were alerted to this change by our determination to climb out of our garden paradise and the addition of the word, “No!” to our vocabulary.  Our parents tried to prevent us from hurting ourselves and destroying the order of the rest of the house; but we could not be restrained though we could be contained, controlled and taught to conform. 

          We needed to get beyond a four-foot world and so we were taught, or at least they tried to teach us, to march to the “right” drum.  There was many a squabble over keeping in step or wearing the right uniform but we, even I, didn’t ask why we were marching.  That is the adult question and so few people in the 50’s got there.  We were content or discontent but all we had was the parade.  This is actually a stage of faith as described by James Fowler.  We believed because those around us believed and we followed uncritically.  It doesn’t really matter how it happened, many blame the changes in the Church or the changes in the world.  I understand it to be part of human development.  We began to think critically for ourselves, as a people, not just isolated individuals.  The country was moving from a stage three level of faith to stage four; thinking critical for oneself.

It was now OK, no it was expected that we think for ourselves, and it was difficult.  As rebellious as I thought I was, I didn’t begin to think for myself until I was 26, which was about 8 years after I had entered the convent.  Those were the days of great excitement and turmoil within the convent walls.  And I have to tell you that it was high school students who challenged me to move beyond.  One of those students is about to become one of the leaders of our community.  There was and still is still a clash between those who wanted to march as we always had, and those who were sure the new way was “right.”  In the midst of all this we tried to hear Pope John the XXII remind us, “Peace must be realized in truth; it must be build upon justice, it must be animated in love and it must be brought to being in freedom.” [Pacem in Terris]

Because of this growth, because of our new, deeper consciousness, the old paradigms became less satisfactory, rules and customs were changed.  The surface was cleaned up leaving us see what had been laying beneath the surface for years.  In many cases we were delighted to claim true participation in the life of our faith, in others we could only stand in horror at what had grown up among the flowers in our garden.   Here again I would like to remind us of how difficult it is to see the new when the lens through which we see has been ground by a previous, even if outdated, cultural milieu. The Institutional Church could not, cannot, has a very hard time criticizing itself, as we all do.

During the 19th century, for the first time in the history of the world, the world, came to recognize the buying and selling of human beings as wrong.  There were those who had seen it sooner but it took 5000 years for culture to come around to the horror of this practice.  It was never objectively right; but we can’t look back and apply our standards to those who enslaved their brothers and sisters.  What we can do, and this is not an easy thing, is acknowledge the pervasiveness of racism that still exists in our culture.  We must deal with the roots invisibly and deeply embedded in so many of society’s systems and structures. 

During the last 40 years we have begun collectively to “see” the horror of child abuse.  I use this time frame because when I was teaching in the mid-sixties parents were still telling me to hit their child if he or she got out of line.  We have now begun to acknowledge how children have been, and are still being abused, physically, emotionally and sexually.  There is no excuse for this and yet we were blind until recently to the horror children experienced.  No one in the history of the world had to tell the slave of the horror he or she was experiencing.  Nor did anyone have to tell the child that what was happening was abusive.  We just didn’t see it as a culture.  That in itself seems outrageous; but I know how much I have had to refocus my perspective of right and wrong as I have lived these past 60 years. 

It is so much harder for institutions to change.  This in no way makes abusive behavior or attitudes that protect abusers right; but we must acknowledge the depth of the roots that must be destroyed.  I used the example of racism above to put the difficulty of dealing with child abuse in perspective.  What we have to do is to move beyond right and wrong, not bypass it, but acknowledge it and then move to a higher level. 

Actually we are being called to the next level of faith; Ken Wilber claims that we are the first generation for which it is possible to deal with difference with the respect due it.  Steven Covey calls us beyond efficiency to greatness; the mystics of every discipline call us to move beyond petty squabbling.  Whether our club be civil law, Church law or what I “know to be right” and how you are “wrong” and  thereby stupid or evil,  it is still a weapon that is beneath the dignity of a mature adult human being.  The next level of faith, stage five according to Fowler, enables us to deal with the diversity of the world around us without uncritically condemning any position that disagrees with or challenges our truth.  We can only truly dialogue with people whom we respect, and speak respectfully about.  Our words are just as dangerous, if not more so, than the guns others use to make their point. 

This is what lies beyond “rightness” and “wrongness;” this is what we will experience in the garden, a God who calls us to eat from the Tree of Life.  And I am sure I am going to be quite surprised at who else has been invited to eat of this tree.  We weren’t perfect and then we lost it, we have always been human and have been called to grow up in the presence and with the assistance of a God who loves us as real people, a God that has the distance to smile, however wryly, at our childishness.  We cannot survive without culture or we would be literally reinventing the wheel.  Neither can we ever forget that culture is not our true home.  We belong in the garden.

My greatest fear for the Church is the great number of students I meet for whom the Church is irrelevant.  They don’t meet God when they meet us, small c or capital C.  And they grew up in a world totally different from the one most us did.  They don’t have the roots that we do, but that is another reflection.

My hope is the fact that you continue to hang pictures of the leaders of the church of Rockville Centre on your walls.  The one I am specifically referring to is the one right over your bathroom sink, the one you look at and into frequently.  Do you see the Jesus that calls you to be an apostle, in the manner of Peter or the manner of Paul, whose claim was less traditional?  It is Jesus who calls to us, who will meet us in the garden.  It is Jesus we must fall in love with; not the Jesus encrusted by culture but the Jesus on fire who tells us that we must love our God, ourselves, our neighbors and yes, our enemies.  This is the power, the power of truth spoken in love that will kill the weeds that are choking the flowers.  That will enable us all to witness to God’s presence among us.  This garden is real and it begins the eternal life that is to know the God who invites us all, as we are, to eat of the Tree of Life.