This piece was written for the Cabrini Communicator, the occasional publication of St. Frances Cabrini parish.
I learned this summer that Angelo Amato,
with whom I spent a summer at a language camp in 1972, has become a cardinal,
an archbishop, an unofficial candidate for Pope, and the Prefect for the
Secretariat on the Causes of Saints at the Vatican – the person who oversees
the investigations leading to canonization. Angelo was a good guy, a
hard-working historian on holiday, when I met him in 1972. Thinking of him in
this exalted office humanized the saint-making enterprise for me. Here are
three short meditations on saints.
I.
As a confirmation sponsor to someone
interested in engineering, I went hunting for a helpful saint, and came up with
nothing useful. That seemed important. Did this mean that, in the view of the
Roman Catholic Church, engineering is not a path to fulfillment or perfection?
To explore the issues of “which lives matter, religiously?”
I started a group, “Engineering and Christian Values.” We began by reading
David McCullough’s book The Wright
Brothers, trying to understand how values and engineering might come together.
McCullough does a selective biography of the Wrights, concentrating on their
early lives, on their glider experiments at Kitty Hawk, and on the demonstration
flights that established their claim as the founders of modern aviation. In his
story, there is much to admire: the health and encouragement of the Wright
family, the entrepreneurial spirit of Dayton, Ohio, the bond between the brothers,
the good humor and good will that allowed Wilbur and Orville to persevere with
their experiments and to prevail in negotiations with corporations and
governments. However, one opinion, expressed after a few sessions of
discussion, seemed to capture a consensus in the group: there are not values IN
engineering. Engineering is neutral; it creates tools. People use those tools
according to values they bring to the enterprise. Fun loving people fly for
pleasure; warlike people figure out how to make airplanes big enough to drop
bombs.
This is surely a respectable position. Some people love to
make things. Their values determine how they apply that impulse. They decide to
work on missile navigation systems or irrigation equipment or computer games, depending
on what they think is important. That’s surely part of the story. It is perhaps
incomplete.
Wilbur writes about the experience of flying, “More
than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an
excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such
a combination.” As McCullough tells the story of the brothers’ experiments, they
were after an experience like that of the birds. They took years to go from
very short flights to flights lasting an hour or longer. Flying was an art for them: the plane was
controlled by the pilot shifting his weight in a harness while distorting the
wings with ropes – a three dimensional counterpart to riding a bicycle. They
were trying to experience physics in their own bodies, to be up close to the
forces that determine what world we live in.
This reminds me of the most
under-reflected piece in the Christian gospel: “You shall love the Lord your
God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind and your whole
strength.” This is pretty extreme, especially for Minnesotans. There are,
occasional extravagant love affairs like that. Our dogs model such devotion
constantly. It is, in my experience, not the Christian norm. We might strongly
approve of God, on principle, but that doesn’t seem to be what the commandment
calls for.
For many of us, whatever we feel about
God is made up in large part of what we feel about the world, which everyone
agrees is quite a mess, though it also has some very good parts. We know that
the way the world is made allows both horrors and wonders. If we respond to the
world based on the locations available to human beings, our response cannot be
entirely positive. The harder thing: to respond to the worldiness of the world, to the way
it makes life possible, to the particular universal constants that determine
what actions we can do, how hard it is to know things, at what speed time
flows, the relationships between our senses and the independent objects that
provoke them. We live within a context that sets a level of difficulty for us,
that allows certain kinds of achievement, that privileges some spatial and
temporal relationships over others. It is possible to approve or disapprove of
this set-up, quite separate from approving or disapproving our accidental place
in it. The interest of the Wright
brothers seems to me to lie in their attitude toward the world – toward physics
-- their desire to celebrate what the basic facts and relationships of this
world make possible. (Reading about them, I think of my dogs rolling endlessly
in something that smells good. That’s the relation they were seeking. It feels
like the right sort of engagement to fit the words of the commandment: whole
mind, whole heart, whole soul, whole strength.)
The airplanes that the Wrights
initially designed had limited military potential; they carried at most two
people, and navigation depended on the strength of the pilot. Within a few years,
warplanes, and the massive enterprise of military aviation, became possible.
From one value standpoint, one wants to go back and tell the Wrights to stop
their experiments at Kitty Hawk, to let the less promising Smithsonian research
carry aviation, so that possibly only dirigibles would have been available for
World War I. With airplanes, as with most technology, it is hard to foresee how
it will be used. Surely, in any canonization proceeding for Wilbur and Orville
Wright, the Devil’s Advocate would have a lot of material.
What McCullough’s book tries to get at,
in telling this story, is the experience
of inventing, the motive or intention or attitude that drove their work. If the
Wright brothers are some kind of saints, it is because their desire to
physically understand and appreciate the basic forces of the world is some
version of the love of God.
So far, the Catholic Church, the major saint-maker, has not
seen fit to acknowledge this kind of motive or impulse as a path to sanctity.
The patron saint of engineers is St. Patrick, who introduced some useful Roman
technology into Ireland. This gives engineers encouragement to be useful, and a
special reason to celebrate on March 17, but it doesn’t hold out any particular
ideal for them.
Does it matter whether we have enough saints? Does it matter
whom we call saints? This might be seen as going along with a kind of
spirituality carried on in side altars and pilgrimage churches, something
honorable but not quite contemporary. I think
we should not dismiss saint-making as outmoded. The identified saints
crystalize kinds of goodness that we might otherwise miss. It seems a tragedy
to miss a possibility of goodness in life through sheer ignorance. Lewis
Mumford writes about this in a piece from Values
for Survival, a book written to think through the next steps after World War
II:
If we are to express the love in
our own hearts, we must also understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint
Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti,
to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately
exposed themselves to yellow fever. These historic manifestations of love are
not recorded in the day's newspaper or the current radio program: they are
hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds. Virtue is not a chemical
product, as Taine once described it: it
is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we
cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded
values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to
which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own
lifetime.” (Emphasis mine.)
If we lose track of the celebratory, immersive, affirmative
potential in science and engineering, they will become simply means to our ends,
located outside of what we care about. McCullough’s The Wright Brothers is interesting primarily as a hagiography –
that is, as an attempt to hold on to a specific flavor of human goodness.
It also makes me wonder what other neglected varieties of
goodness might be lurking at the edges of vision.
II.
At a library book sale the other day, I heard someone say,
as she browsed among thousands of books jumbled in heaps, “I am not quite sure
what is next.” This is said so often now, and I am saying it too, as retirement
and redirection by age and energy become gradual realities. If one can’t jump
straight from child-raising to grandchild work or to the demands of home-care
for elderly relatives, there’s a gap of possibilities, a rather long scene in
the play without much script, like those parts in musical compositions where
Mozart tells the violinist, “Here, just make something up for awhile.” The
situation of being in reasonable health, with reasonable energy, with some
experience of how the world works, but without a job or any real need to get
one – as a mass phenomenon, that maybe hasn’t happened as much as it is
happening now, ever before.
Of course, one can find things to do. That’s not the
problem. But what kind of good is it possible to be, in this trough, this
middle period between the end of one set of necessities (career, child-raising,
civic engagement) and the beginning of next set, (determined by the increasing
demands of one’s body). And who are the patron saints for this interval? Where are
the lives that do justice to this peculiar second adolescence?
III.
I always try to sell Cabrini first off as a place to stay
ethical. It is valuable to think about being decent because (a) being decent is
complicated, and (b) when we stop thinking about being decent, we fall pretty
quickly into that other thing. So,
most of the time, we preach ethics, and our liturgy reflects a myriad of
concerns that would be intelligible to educated Jews and Muslims and Sikhs and
disciples of Confucius. We are part of grand human consensus about decency,
holding off darkness, about which there is also consensus.
Then there’s the spooky part: the healings and floatings and
multiplyings and transformations and – all those things that happen suddenly,
and all that stuff that doesn’t make sense. Moses hits the rock one too many
times, and he doesn’t get to go into the promised land. Abraham is offered a
son he didn’t expect, then commanded to give him back.
The odd thing about an awake Catholic parish is that it is a
place for reflection on both ordinary ethics and extraordinary other stuff. The
saint stories are generally the place where the other stuff comes spurting up:
the bodies that don’t decay, the levitating nuns, the statues that cry real
tears, the piles of crutches at Lourdes. We could write this all off as a
legacy from primitive times, except that almost everybody has a story that’s
odd in that sort of way, that doesn’t fit, that doesn’t make sense, that popped
up suddenly – suggesting that something outside of us personally has a more
than general interest in our doings. We have sometimes, in addition to all that
normal pressure to be decent, the distinct feeling of being nudged along, in
some quirky direction.
That’s one of the things we get to talk about at
Cabrini. There aren’t very many other
places where it’s safe to go beyond the obvious.
