Tough Decisions

         Anthony Ruff, O.S.B. is a Benedictine monk and a professor of liturgy.  He recently sent an open letter to the United States Catholic Bishops on some forthcoming liturgical changes to be implemented next Advent within the United States.  Ruff wrote:

 “Your Eminences, Your Excellencies: With a heavy heart, I have recently made a difficult decision concerning the new English missal.  I have decided to withdraw from all of my upcoming speaking engagements on the Roman Missal. …After much prayer I have concluded that I cannot promote the new missal with integrity….I love the church; I love the sacred liturgy…but… my observation of the Holy See’s handling of scandal has gradually opened my eyes to the deep problems in the structures of authority of our church…The forthcoming missal is but a part of a larger pattern of top down impositions by a central authority that does not consider itself accountable to the larger church.  When I think about how secretive the translation process was, how little consultation was done…how this text was imposed on national conferences of bishops…how much deception and mischief have marked this process…I weep…I am sorry for the difficulties I am causing others by my withdrawing, but I know this is the right thing to do. Peace in Christ, Father Anthony Ruff, O.S.B.”

            When I read this open letter I was reminded of Martin Luther in his confrontation with the church for selling indulgences that promised freedom from punishment for sin by giving the church money.  Luther expressed his disagreement with this church practice, largely popularized by Dominican priest, John Tetzel.  For his stand, he was excommunicated by the Pope and declared an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.  At a trial that he had to endure, Luther said this: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise.  Help me, God. Amen.” Anthony Ruff and Martin Luther are examples of people who know that sometimes we must make important decisions, important choices. 

         I was touched recently by an admission made by ex-FOX News anchor Laurie Dhue at a prayer dinner last week.  Dhue, who has appeared on CNN as well as FOX News, admitted to the audience that she was a recovering alcoholic.  Though she frequently performed very well on the air, she admitted, “Yes, I would drag myself into work, deeply hung over.  I was cheating my employer and God. I thought I had to drink myself into oblivion several times a week…I really thought I had to live that way.  I suffered in silence.  I lived in constant fear.  On the inside I was dying…I lived with shame and guilt and a lot of terror.”  She admitted that one day she looked in the mirror, “I did not recognize the woman who was looking back at me.”  She knelt down and prayed, “It’s over God; but I need your help.”  Dhue told the audience, “God takes care of me because He loves me just as He loves all of you.  God brought me back to life.  Prayer, to me, is like breathing.”  She admitted in her address and her talk that times are rough, and that she has lost two jobs since getting sober.  Laurie Dhue is an example of a person who knows and has experienced how important choices and decisions are as our lives unfold.

            Monsignor Ken Velo has been a friend of mine since we were fourteen years old at Quigley Preparatory Seminary South at 77^th and Western on the southside.  Ken is a great priest, a great administrator, who now works for DePaul University and the Big Shoulders Campaign.  He also was executive assistant and secretary to Cardinal Bernardin.  He witnessed how Cardinal Bernardin, who did his best to be a balanced, reconciling leader, was ridiculed in his dying days by his fellow bishops and cardinals for being too progressive.  Before he died, the Cardinal asked Ken to preach the homily at his funeral.  As part of the homily, Ken looked at the gathered bishops and cardinals and encouraged them to learn from the life example of Jesus, John XXIII, and Cardinal Bernardin.  He added, “Stop trying to lead the church by always looking in the rear view mirror.”  Spontaneously there was an ovation interrupting his homily.  I felt so proud of Ken that day.  He had made a decision.  Ken could have been, should have been, a bishop; but in confronting the restorationist authoritarianism of the hierarchy present at Cardinal Bernardin’s funeral, he made a decision that his career in the institutional church ascendancy had come to an end.  We frequently talk.  Ken is a happy man of great integrity.

            I lead with these examples because what strikes me from the 1^st reading from the Book of Sirach, chapter 15, is the emphasis on choice, the emphasis on decision.  The writer says, “If you choose, you can keep the commandments.  They will save you. (God) has set before you fire and water; to whichever you choose, stretch forth your hand.  Before man are life and death, good and evil.  Whichever he chooses will be given him.” 

        Decision making has always been a very important part of my spirituality and journey of conversion.  It has been my experience that I have never grown psychologically, in psychotherapy, spiritually, in spiritual direction, unless I have made some very intentional decisions.  For us to grow, for us to experience conversion, sometimes the decisions we make necessitate what I have come to know as “a will to discomfort”. Sometimes we must decide to make ourselves uncomfortable so that we can grow, change, convert, expand, live truth, grow in integrity.  Sometimes we resist tough decisions.  Sometimes we suffer from blind spots in which we do not see who we are or how we are living.  Sometimes we fall into a pattern of work avoidance when it comes to psychological, spiritual, relational growth.  The breakthrough to all of those realities is the ability to decide. 

         Sometimes I believe we live as if life just happens to us.  Sometimes we live as if God is sending good and bad things our way.  The fact is we have much more ability to shape and form our lives than we sometimes admit; and it is largely through the power of decision making and following through on decision making.  Are resistance, blind spots, or work avoidance keeping us from decisions that are crying out for us to make that we might be reborn, that we might grow?

            Often what we are being called to decide for is spoken of by St. Paul in his 1^st letter to the Corinthians this week.  We are being called to live God’s wisdom.  He describes this wisdom as a wisdom for those who are mature, a wisdom that is not of this age; but a wisdom that has been revealed to us through the Spirit, a wisdom that has been embodied and enfleshed by Jesus Christ.

        We experience some of the wisdom of God in Jesus’ teaching today from Matthew 5.  This passage is a continuation of the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus is presented as the new Moses giving a new interpretation of God’s law.  Obviously Jesus was a man who made difficult decisions and choices, as evidenced in his offering such a countercultural vision and way of life which he did in his preaching and teaching, and continues to do with us.  In today’s passage, Jesus tells us that he has not come to abolish the law; he has come to fulfill it.  He has not come to call people to some sort of loose, lax way of moral living.  Rather he is deepening and radicalizing the teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures.

         He makes four statements.  He equivalently says, “You have heard this in the past; well this is what I say as I try to teach you what truly is God’s will.”

        His first statement has to do with murder: “You have heard that you should not kill.” In his spirituality of the heart, Jesus challenges us to go more deeply into our heart and attitudes.  What is the forerunner or the cousin of violence?  It is the attitude of anger.  While not denying our emotions, he challenges us to never use anger in a hurtful, destructive sort of way. 

        In teaching us that we ought to leave our gift at the altar, if there is someone from whom we are alienated and go and reconcile with that person before we do worship, Jesus is emphasizing the importance of ethics and morality over cult, ceremony, or worship. 

        He goes on to say that you have heard in the past that adultery is wrong.  In his spirituality of the heart, he challenges us to penetrate our attitudes again and avoid lust, the interior use of another person in our imaginations, in our desires, for our own purposes, our own pleasure. 

        He goes on to say that you have been told that you can give your wife a bill of divorce.  Jesus, again, in his spirituality of the heart, calls us to a high ideal.  Sometimes divorce can be too easy an answer.  Jesus emphasizes an attitudinal ideal – work on your relationships.  Try not to walk away from each other.  While the Jesus in Matthew seems to be addressing Jewish men in this particular passage, Jesus, in Mark, speaking to a non-Jewish audience, places the same challenge on women.  Women also are to strive for the ideal of living the covenant of marriage. 

        Finally Jesus challenges the practice of taking oaths and swearing by God or sacred symbols.  Again, in his spirituality of the heart, he seems to suggest that by using powerful language involving the divine, sometimes people can cloak or hide deception or untruth.  He calls for a fresh clarity in our communication with one another.  We are to say “yes” when we mean yes; we are to say “no” when we mean no.  We ought not to obscure things with oaths or swearing by things. 

        A discussion we have been having at The Clare concerns Jesus’ stand toward religion and whether Jesus intended to initiate the church as we know it.  The consensus in the discussion groups that I have been part of has been that Jesus pretty much stood against what religion had become in his own day: compulsive observance of laws, often empty ritual, the manipulation of people by religious leaders.  While Jesus certainly intended people to gather in his name, while Jesus dreamt, I believe, of a worldwide oneness among people in and through God, our discussions at The Clare, have expressed conviction that he probably did not intend the institutionalization as we know it today.  Rather, he called people to follow him, to make decisions that are often difficult and counter-cultural, and to live in a new way that is quite different from the values and behaviors of the political, militaristic, and religious domination systems that surround us.

In Jesus,

 Pat Brennan