Seeking the Face of Christ: Part II—The Leap of Divine Joy by Ged Ayotte

This is the second of a three-part reflection. Part I, “The Plea of Bartimaeus,” is available here.

A recent podcast helped me in trying to penetrate the mystery of so much evil being either promoted, or at least tolerated, by good people. It was a reflection on the lives and deaths of Edith Stein, OCD, and Alfred Delp, the German Jesuit who confronted Nazism and was martyred by the Gestapo as a consequence.

Fr. Peter Nguyen, who offered the reflection, was puzzled by the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda in successfully co-opting an entire nation to stand by, if not endorse with a fascist salute, systematic evil unfolding daily on an industrial scale. Fr. Nguyen used a phrase to describe the “success” of the Nazis in influencing the hearts and minds of countless millions of good Germans which I think one could spend an awful lot of time unpacking: He said that they “invaded the interiority” of the masses. I’m convinced that this gets to the heart of the matter. Isn’t it deep in our “interiority” where each of our authentic selves is touched and encountered by the Source of life and love? That sacred space within where we are invited into a most intimate encounter with the Holy Spirit and asked to take the risk of faith, trust, and love—remembering, as Paul reminds us, “that the greatest of these is love”? That space where an affective experience of the Spirit of God sustains, directs, and gives us life as we look for God in the reality of the daily? It is our psychospiritual core, so to speak.

Fr. Nguyen then suggested that the ideology of any totalitarian system can seek to blind a person. He posed a stark question: “How does one wake up when one has a bureaucratic mindset, or when the affect in one’s interiority has been sometimes suppressed?” Surely this is the most blasphemous and horrific “place” for one human person to manipulate another. But I suspect this happens on a scale and with a frequency beyond our imagining, perhaps at times without even the conscious awareness of the perpetrator. It’s within this place of “interiority” where we are called to listen most deeply for the voice of God coming, as the prophet Elijah learned, not typically in earthquakes or hurricanes or firestorms, but in sacred stillness and silence.

Like the unwise bridesmaids (Matt 25:1-13), if our lamps aren’t lit and we are not awake, there is a high probability we will not hear God’s voice. And as the psalms and St. Paul both remind us, if our hearts are hardened in any way—by hubris, by unresolved anger and resentment, by approaching the other as an object (an it, as Martin Buber would say, as opposed to a thou created in the image of God), by personal ambition and an inordinate attachment to power and status—we are unlikely to hear it as well.

It’s in this place of reflective interiority where we are invited to live in a relationship with God characterized by trust and the free offering of our own vulnerability. Any external “authority” must first of all honor that sacred freedom and uniqueness in the individual, and must seek to use power solely for the empowerment of this child of God. It must never wield authority in a way characterized by harsh judgment, diminishment, marginalization, and a stark deprivation of empathy and compassion. I recall Fr. Broccolo’s caution to our class of lay and ordained ministers at Seattle University in a “Theology of Ministry” course decades ago. His first words on the first day were, “The purpose of this class is to minimize the damage you will do in the church.” Now there was a wise teacher and fine priest.

How ought we then to consider the impact of something like the “oath of fidelity,” for example, in all of this, the requisite promise of “submission of will and intellect” to an all-too-human authority? An oath which may seem dismissive of the power of the Spirit working in the sensus fidelium and in the earnestness of the informed conscience of the individual. Especially as we come to realize our collective historical blindness to such things as the evil of the exclusion of women as equal participants in the governance of the church, or the dehumanization of LGBTQ+ people to whom we say, “You are welcome to be among us, even though you’re ‘intrinsically disordered’ . . . And, by the way, I’m not.” Or the imposition of restrictions on the capacity for loving parents to make personal and responsible choices around birth control—which the church, in what seems a bizarre twist of moral logic, embraces when accomplished by mathematical prediction but condemns when accomplished by chemistry? Or a church whose own moral teachings from Albertus Magnus through Thomas Aquinas and into the 20th century horrifically deduced that rape was more “in accordance with nature” than masturbation, given the resultant placement of semen into a “fit vessel” and therefore less morally culpable? Carrying a suitable portion of collective guilt in this regard has left me at times with suitable discomfort when I have been invited to accompany a rape victim in her healing. Again, the list is as long as it is abhorrent.

I suppose the final point is for me the most significant of all. If we are created in the image and likeness of God, then what quality within the mystery of the Blessed Trinity do we see that tells us what is most required in order to become fully human and fully alive?

The heart of it is, I believe, the relationality of the Blessed Trinity: three Divine Persons in a relationship of love, longing that all of humanity “may be one,” united in a community of love with God and one another, and with the created universe. Ignatius offers a deeply moving contemplation at the very beginning of the second week of the Spiritual Exercises. The image of God portrayed by Ignatius is profoundly attractive:

I try to enter into the vision of God—the mystery of divinity shared by three divine persons—looking upon our world: men and women being born and being laid to rest, some getting married others getting divorced, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the happy and the sad, so many people aimless, despairing, hateful, and killing, so many undernourished, sick, and dying, so many struggling with life and blind to any meaning. With God, I can hear people, laughing and crying, some shouting and screaming, some praying, others cursing.

This, of course, describes a reality: not as a past historical moment, but a cyclical unfolding over the course of 2,000 years and beyond. And what is the Trinity’s response to all of this, in Ignatius’s vision? Judgment, condemnation, rejection? Not so!

“The leap of divine joy” is what Ignatius envisions. “God knows the time has come when the mystery of salvation, hidden from the beginning of the world, will shine into human darkness and confusion.” The response of the Trinity moves from the seeming distance of transcendence to the kenotic generosity of the Incarnation and the unfolding of the Paschal mystery: conception, birth in poverty and political powerlessness, a life of human struggle and evolving self-understanding, self-giving passion and suffering, ignominious death at the hands of religious authorities, and, finally, the pièce de resistance: Christ overcomes death itself, and death and evil no longer have dominion. Christ in whom there is neither “Jew nor Greek, free nor slave, male nor female” (Gal 3:28). A young girl, Palestinian and Jewish, is somehow invited into the narrative and responds in trust with a (perhaps somewhat hesitant) “Yes.” Clearly, this is a God who longs for relationship with us, and longs for us to be in loving relationship with one another. Relationship characterized by intimacy, risk, power with and never over. Love.

So how do our theology, our doctrine and canonical systems of governance, and our seminaries prepare our clergy to reflect this relational God in their preaching and in their lives? Those of us who have experienced formation in seminaries and religious houses know all too well the historical tentativeness that undergirded much of the formation regarding interpersonal relationships, let alone human sexuality. We remember the cautions around “particular friendships” and the fearful distrust regarding a concept like “intimacy.” I will say that in my own formation, my superior was psycho-spiritually mature and deeply integrated, and my experience is something for which I am grateful. Perhaps this was the case for many. But within that environment 50 or 60 years ago, nonetheless, was a dualistic compartmentalizing of body and spirit, a kind of Manichaeistic overshadowing of the sacred gift which is the body, which was to be viewed with an objective suspicion and the single goal of its subjugation, with primacy given to the spirit—as if the spirit could somehow be engaged as separate from the body, once its dominance was established. The holy message of the Incarnation itself, the enfleshment of our God, was lost in this maelstrom of toxic psychology and anthropology. The precious reality of the story of the fully human and fully divine Jesus Christ was overlooked and misunderstood, and so often replaced with a narrative which became its very antithesis. I believe that too often it still is.

I do know many clerics today who have somehow found their own maturation and integration along the way, and have a lived capacity for healthy relationship. Many of them are dear friends of mine and I couldn’t be more grateful for each of them and for the ways in which they live out their priestly call. But others have not lived into similar maturity and integration, and surely this is a culprit in the etiology of the epidemic of sexual abuse, which is revealing its ugly face day by day by day. The pain of primary and secondary victims pleads constantly with us that we see them, that we hear them, that we affirm the horrific truth of their experience, and that we offer ourselves in whatever ways might be helpful to them for their restoration and healing. And that we change!

But what are seminarians being taught today, and what is being modelled for them by the younger clergy who are their teachers and mentors, relative to this relationality which is at the heart of becoming fully human and fully alive? Are seminarians being guided to develop into a person called to a life of humility and servanthood, or to be someone who is “special,” ontologically different from those to whose care he (always “he,” sadly!) is to become committed? One who is always shepherd and never sheep, blaspheming the only one who is our true Shepherd? Are seminarians taught that so much of what we know as permanent church structures were shaped during centuries when the clergy held a virtual monopoly on education, but that women and men today to whom they will minister are sometimes more educated (even philosophically and theologically) than they? And that this truth can serve to further the reign of God as they embrace laypeople as collaborators in service to the people of God, and in providing care and support to them? Are they taught to learn how to relate to such people with respect and a desire to mutually empower, and not to retreat into their own fears and insecurities that manifest as feigned arrogance to avoid the burden of “imposter syndrome”? Can they learn to treasure and respect the gifts of the people whom they serve, and not be intimidated by them nor retreat into an isolated “specialness” or separateness? Are they invited to take on the identity of one who is a member of an exclusive group within which he must also exclusively discover and nurture most of his personal relationships?

What is the prevailing self-understanding of “priesthood” of young priests coming through seminary today, especially on an affective as well as on an intellectual level? How do we help seminarians mature to a capacity, within their lived experience, for healthy interpersonal relationships—with suitable boundaries of safety and respect—with both women and men who are not clerics? To embrace “intimacy” within their lives in a way that is not sexualized? To live in intimate relationships in which their sexuality is “simply” an albeit significant and powerful part of their humanity, but befriended and lived within relational boundaries of prevailing respect for the dignity and safety of the other, as well as of oneself? To reclaim the scriptural assurances that, from the very beginning of Genesis, tell us that God’s creation, including the human body, “is very good”; to be informed by the constancy of Sacred Scripture, given to us through millennia of “awake” Jewish and Christian witnesses, which is not obsessed with mankind’s sin, but rather is in constant awe at God’s loving faithfulness: these are the goals of a balanced and well-rounded seminary education.

Ged Ayotte is grateful for almost 80 years formed by the sacramental life of the church. He has served as a prison chaplain and a therapist (private practice), and continues to offer Ignatian spiritual direction. Decades of service in an archdiocesan advisory role has him continuing to accompany victim/survivors of clergy sexual abuse in their search for healing and wholeness. Part III of this essay will appear in a subsequent edition of Today’s American Catholic.

Image: The Holy Face, Church of St. Bartholemew of the Armenians, Genoa.