This past week I attended the “Zoolights” festival at the Smithsonian National Zoo. A friend’s niece was performing with her school choir, and this seemed a good opportunity to partake in one of those delightful but decidedly child-oriented activities without the awkward out-of-place feeling that accompanies a single person on this sort of outing.
I found myself disappointed when the choir began its performance with a song praising a generic “holiday season.” They followed up with a tune about the “mysteries of snow.” To be sure, perhaps nothing else should be expected in a public school setting, but as a Catholic educator, I felt the not-uncommon sense that Christmas was again being sanitized before my eyes.
Then the choir began singing “Silent Night.” As the children “blew out” their battery powered candles, a friend and I exchanged surprised looks. “Silent Night” was followed with a Chanukah medley before a return to more secular numbers. Afterwards, my friend and I shared our similar reactions to the performance—initial distaste for the kitschy holiday tunes and later delight at the inclusion of religious music. It seemed that perhaps public education could leave room for the transcendent after all, that the religious dimension of the human experience might not be curtailed in the right environment.
After some reflection, however, it seems that this model of education poses a different danger. To present man’s desire for the transcendent without proposing a claim to a particular method in which man meets the divine is almost certainly an abandonment of the religious project. Without a claim to “the Way,” or by denying that this claim can even be made, faith becomes an abstraction. We become anthropologists, not devotees, and certainly not lovers. Like Ahaz, who refused to ask God for a sign, we deny God’s predilection, his mercy in granting us a concrete path in His Son.
The greatest sin, according to the dominant cultural mentality, appears to be this claim to particularity. As Pope Benedict XVI has said, a claim to truth is now seen as a violence. To affirm one path out of many is interpreted as an affirmation of oneself, of one’s intellectual or perhaps spiritual superiority, and is an implied affirmation of others’ inferiority. The man who professes knowledge is set up as an intolerant, self-important ideologue. In arranging such an epistemological landscape, the culture in fact reverses the dynamic of Christ’s pedagogy. Emmanuel—“God with us”—comes to man. The truth is given, not taken. In the pope’s words, “We never really have it; at best it has us.”
Why does modernity have this visceral reaction to religious particularity? We often hear an explanatory narrative involving coexistence in a pluralistic society or the sad truth that religious differences have sparked violent conflict. I would propose another explanation—that our humanity is often subject to an aversion to particularity, especially as regards the deepest questions of the heart. In the eyes of modern man, completely inculcated with the Baconian assumption that “knowledge is power,” for the truth to take us is frightening. The realization of particularity is terrifying, for it implies a commitment. It implies that my freedom and affections be moved toward an object that is totally other and therefore beyond my control.
We can imagine a romantic who, in his search for an ideal lover, is in a certain way content with his unfinished quest. He is certain that his love exists in the abstract, and that he will find her eventually. But when she does appear, he is paralyzed. No longer can his comfortable preconceptions hold sway. The appearance of the true referent to the desire of his heart means that his life must change, and in a way he might not choose or predict. Indeed, the romantic is taken, and taken outside himself. This is in a way the experience of the shepherds of the field, who are terrified at the realization that God is real, and his actions will not only change the course of history (as an abstraction), but their history. Certainly the angels’ admonition— “be not afraid” —is a necessary comfort in this state of shock.
This shock, this scandal, is precisely what we celebrate at Christmas. As Hans Urs von Balthasar writes in A Theology of History, Christ is, “in his uniqueness, raised to become the norm of our being and the norm of our concrete history, both that of the individual and that of the race.” This is the law of the universe—that in the particularity of Christ we find the fulfillment of all our abstracted desires—for truth, for beauty, for goodness, for justice, and for love. It is precisely in his particularity that Christ is attractive. I cannot reduce him to my measure, to my whims or preferences. The Way refuses to be coopted into a simple anthropological phenomenon.
Christ’s insistence on destroying our conceptions may elicit a certain reactionary aversion from modern man, but this is exactly why he is lovable. As Fr. Julian Carron writes, “In the fact that he is irreducible lies our hope; it angers us, but it is the source of our hope.” During Christmas we celebrate this hope—that “the dawn from on high will break upon us”—shattering our ideas about reality and about our circumstances. Indeed, it is our only chance for happiness. We simply ask for the grace to be confronted with an irreducible Love and to allow ourselves to become lovers.
Brett Bertucio teaches at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School, Olney, Maryland.
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Comments:
The practice of religions has been progressively choked off as a result of our government acquiring a greater and greater share of our public spaces and entities. Years ago, during a walk through the the Maryland woods, I asked a past head (Secretary) of the Smithsonian whether the Smithsonian was a public or private institution. He replied that it was both, a hybrid funded by both public and private means. There was a lot to say. The alliance was uneasy but has been made to work somewhat by employing generous allowances for individualistic views.
There is no such alliance in public schools in which the somewhat invisible “religion” of secular humanism has been a bully. This has led to the extermination of other philosophies from the course of study and school activities. It may be that public schools. with their pretense of neutrality, were always a bad idea.
After the sectionalism of the Civil War, Ulysses Grant wanted to create public schools to indoctrinate the young in one viewpoint, that of the government. He got his wish posthumously and, following the lesson of many an old folktale, the granting of his wish has proved to be a curse. As in The Emperor’s New Clothes everyone shuts down their perception rather than witness the crippling and malfunctioning reality being enacted in our public schools.
For example, teaching history without the acknowledging the central role of the Christian religion in the reduction of barbarity, such as slavery, is to teach inaccuracies by teaching half of the truth.
I was one of three friends who bought a small boat to share in common, against the advice of older wiser heads. Our adventure in foolish idealism taught us a painful lesson. I soon saw more clearly the wisdom of enacting the greatest feasible degree subsidiarity. The adventure ended with the loss of the friendships and the boat.
The public schools have long taught an amoral world view (for the most part) but in the past twenty years they have gone even further and begun to teach positively immoral "lessons" such as how to put condoms on cucumbers and the moral equivalence of "Heather having two mommies" with traditional marriage. IOW, the public schools are continuing their long-time role of Anti-Catholicism in a new and more triumphalistic way. Senator Blaine would be very happy that his anti-Catholic enterprise continues to hold sway in this land.
I believe that Mary's scandalous behavior, which implicated her in the murder of her husband (James VI's father), may have had something to do with their decision to evict her and send her into her cousin Elizabeth's tender embrace.
"One may see the Blaine Amendment as rooted in anti-Catholic prejudice, but it points to something valuable--namely, that believers should not be forced to provide via taxation support for religious institutions they do not favor."
Put that way, might one infer that they [the citizenry] can be forced to pay taxes for institutions, religious or otherwise, that they do favor? That, after all, seems to have been a major point to Mr. Sarfield's post: no one discerned ANY unconstitutionality in aid to religious schools for quite some time before large-scale Catholic immigration. Simply appealing to the fact that they were all Protestants so no one cared is quite unsatisfying. Among the FIRST religious "heretics" in New England to be killed for their beliefs, as I recall, were Quakers executed in the 16302 and '40s by the Puritans. Nor was Roger Williams willing to depend on the sympathies of "fellow Protestants" when he decamp[ed from Massachusetts to Rhode Island in 1631.
That is the only thing that I can add to your truly wonderful and beautiful Christmas meditation.
Reading your essay, I kept thinking to myself, Mr. Bertucio must be with Communion and Liberation and then I smiled when I read the quote Fr. Carron, affirming my intuitive recognition.
Blessed Nativity and a Blessed Christmas season,
Andrew
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I believe that Mary's scandalous behavior, which implicated her in the murder of her husband (James VI's father), may have had something to do with their decision to evict her and send her into her cousin Elizabeth's tender embrace.
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The lairds were betraying their liege while she was still Queen Consort of France 7 years+ before her allegedly scandalous behavior. They were in the pay of the English queen as early as 1559 when Elizabeth waged her first foreign adventure under a religious pretext. The casket letters are at best of questionable provenance and in the eyes of many were fraudulent.
The event described was merely a provocation for me to think about the nature of education and better, how Christ presents himself to us. I certainly would not want the state to endorse a particular religion (what a nightmare!). Rather, I would ask whether the state can provide an authentic education? Giussani writes that a true education must present a concrete, particular explanation of reality for a student to verify. To fail to give preference to a particular truth claim implicitly endorses a subjectivist or relativist understanding (as several commenters have noted). The question of "public education" is an interesting one for me, and one that needs to constantly be asked.
Peace to all and to your families this Christmas season!
1. Brett Bertucio has a point: Arguably modern social norms seek to by avoid provoking conflicts among followers of various religions by embracing a secular neutrality. And arguably, this has the effect of undermining all religious practices. Adherents to any given religious practice may well feel dissatisfied.
As Bertucio listened to the brief Christian carol among the secular, he ponders why public education could not leave more room for the transcendent. While Bertucio did not specify his own religious persuasion, did anyone have difficulty identifying it as Christian?
In contrast, as the choir sang a Chanukah medley, I wonder how many Jewish people shared Bertucio’s reaction. I suspect many Jewish people listening to the singing would be fairly content to endure the problems of secular neutrality. As we review the list of nations that have managed to avoid the problems of secular neutrality – Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. – the problems of secular neutrality don’t seem so bad. I suspect few Jews are sufficiently privileged to harbor the illusion that leaving “more room for the transcendent” would conform to their particular view of the transcendent. Outside the confines of this website, popular secularism is the least of our religious problems.
2. I find it curious that these thoughts arise during this time of year in particular. Yes, some Christians feel the need to emphasize the “reason for the season.” Yet I am not aware of anything that makes this time of year more Christian than any other. Indeed, it’s my understanding that the early church chose to celebrate Christ’s coming at this time of year precisely because there were already celebrations occurring at this time (and, indeed, there had been solstice/harvest celebrations at this time since time immemorial), rendering their own celebrations less conspicuous.
In short, the “reason for the season” has long had to do with astronomical phenomena and material excess. Yes, these phenomena may be manifestations of the divine – but no more so than the manifestations arising at any other time of year.
In the transcendent words of Jimmy Durante, "And a very Merry Christmas to you, too."
Britain (England and Scotland) was faced with the possibility of a similar amalgamation of Protestantisms in 1603 when the Scot King James I succeeded Elizabeth on the throne of England. Elizabeth had faced a Calvinist/noble opposition in England throughout her reign (sponsored in large measure by her "favorite" Leicester) but the situation in Scotland had been far more problematic for royal control of the Kirk. The Scots "Lairds of the Congregation" had championed John Knox and Calvinism against the Catholic Mary Stuart and eventually forced her out in favor of her infant son James, whom they controlled through regents until he attained his majority. As a result, the King had little control over the Kirk which was dominated by the Scots nobles. James I and his son Charles I liked the Anglican Church system better and tried to impose that in Scotland but that led to the Two bishops Wars in the late 1630s which were the spark for the English Civil War which led to even more splits in British Protestantism (e.g., the Quakers, and the "Fifth Monarchy men"). Anglicanism was dethroned to be replaced at least in the hearts of the ruling rump parliament by a more Calvinist polity.
Once Cromwell died though, the English people showed their distaste for the near anarchy that ensued that they invited the son of Charles I back on the throne. Charles II and his close confidant and brother, James II, had, though, had a Catholic mother and spent so much time in Catholic Europe during their exile that they both eventually converted to Catholicism and sought to give their subjects the privilege of picking their own religion. Charles II's efforts at toleration led to ferocious resitance in Parliament and when he died (having converted to Rome on his deathbed) and was succeeded by his brother, the openly Catholic James II, Protestant opposition to even the King's right to pick his own religion took form. Eventually, after James II had his first born son baptized in the Catholic Faith, a rebellion spurred on by the Anglican bishops took place and James II was overthrown in favor of his Protestant daughter and son-in-law, William and Mary. However, the Anglicans would not have been able to pull off the coup d'etat without the support of the Calvinists and other Protestants in England and Scotland. Their reward, even after Anglicanism was officially restored was toleration for "dissenting" forms of Protestantism while Catholicism was officially banned for the next 162 years.
That toleration of dissenting Protestant sects enabled the Calvinists to retain their footholds in Scotland and the New England colonies (and the Quakers in Pennsylvania). So, when the American Revolution came along, the Calvinist New England colonies found themselves able to have open establishment of Calvinist churches. But when the US Constitution's Bill of Rights came along, a way had to be found to incorporate the disparate religious climates of thirteen states in a single federated republic. The solution was the Establishment Clause which prohibited Congress and not the states from legislating an established church.
And established protestant churches (and publicly supported Protestant schools) were still existent into the Nineteenth Century when Protestant America found itself receiving a large number of Catholic immigrants who wanted similar public support for their schools. The Protestant reaction was NOT welcoming or positive at all. Rather, the "Public School" movement (which taught a generic form of Protestanism, right down to use of the King James Bible), the Nativist party and the various states' so-called "Blaine Amendments" prohibiting aid to parochial schools ensued. Several of the First Amendment Precedents older than the 1960s dealt with efforts to ensure that Catholic schools never got a bit of public assistance.
So, it is in the peculiar circumstances of the British Isles' history of religious infighting that "modernity" framed its attitude toward religious particularity. The public schools in the US were able to craft a generic form of Protestantism in the 19th Century and Catholic particularity was opposed. Over time, of course, the anti-Catholics have found ways to dress up their anti-Catholicism in more acceptable guises, but even today a Catholic can't take the throne of England and Blaine Amendments would still prohibit aid to Catholic schools in the US even if the current interpretation of the First Amendment were abandoned.