THE SANE CENTER

 

What care I for the number of your sacrifices? says the Lord. I have had enough of whole-burnt rams and fat of fatlings; In the blood of calves, lambs and goats I find no pleasure. Make justice your aim: redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow.

Isaiah 1:10-17

The prophet Isaiah is on a tear in our first reading. He portrays God as fed up with multiple tedious religious practices that have little to do with promoting justice and righting wrongs. It bemoans the fact that religious leaders have gone overboard in their religious practices while neglecting their responsibilities to the human community.

This is a good reading on the feast of St. Benedict (July 11) who was famous for introducing “the sane center” into monasticism. Until his time monasticism was known for its full-time fanatic religious practices in which some monks were engaged. I remember hearing about Simon Stylites who was a Syrian Christian ascetic who achieved notability by living 37 years on a small platform on top of a pillar. Several others later followed his model of spirituality. Benedict’s monasticism became known, even to this day, for its balance – expressed so notably in the Benedictine motto “ora et labora,” “prayer and work.”

The idea of balance in religion and politics, rather than fanaticism, is so much needed in our church and country. Personally, I am more than tired of all the extremists in politics and the Church. Instead of each side acknowledging that the other side has something to say, it seems both sides have dug their heels in with a “my way or the highway” attitude.

In politics, one party champions individual responsibility, while the other party champions communal responsibility. While these divergent views serve to complete each other, you would think it was merely a matter of one or the other. We do need to teach personal responsibility, but we also have social and communal responsibilities.

In the Church, one extreme emphasizes our past so much that you would think God quit being active in the world in 1950s, while the other extreme emphasizes today so much that you would think we have no history.

When we were renovating our Cathedral in the 1980s, I remember being pulled in two directions. We had one group who wanted to “put it back like it was,” while another group wanted another modern renovation. The “put it back like it was” people wanted to pretend that we had no future, while the “another modern renovation” people wanted to pretend we had no history. What we did was to ignore the extremists at both ends and choose “the sane center.” We chose as our mantra words from the Gospel of Matthew (13:52): "like a householder who brings forth from his storeroom things both new and old." We wove together the best of the old and the best of the new.

Today in politics, both in our country and in the church, it seems that both extremes are “tempted to subordinate an even-handed concern for the truth to the demands of a party spirit in which every action and statement is evaluated according to whether it supports one cause or the other. Opposed parties seek to discredit their opponents, often by acrimonious attacks that are uncharitable and even unjust.” (Cardinal Avery Dulles SJ)

Pope Paul VI, in his famous ecumenical document Ecclesiam Suam, talked about what became known as “the asceticism of dialogue.” He said that for unity, first we have to be clear about what is essential and what is not essential. Most fights are fights over trivial things that people try to make essential. Second, we must avoid arrogance, barbed words and bitterness. We must have individual patience with contradictions, exhibit an inclination toward generosity and magnanimity and accept the fact that divergent views often serve to complete each other and contain some truth. Third, we must come to a consensus on non-essentials that requires individual non-attachment to one’s preferences and points of view, engage in cooperative discernment and accept individual co-responsibility for directions to be taken and choices made and a workable and reasonable, even if imperfect, structure for the sake of unity.

Neither our Church nor our country can afford all this insane, destructive infighting. This is the time to pull together, rather than cutting each other’s legs off. It’s time to live the principle of St. Benedict’s “sane center.”