Advent and the Catholic imagination

Catholic New Times, Dec 14, 2003 by Jack Costello

Back in the early 1960's, we Jesuit "scholastics" were being exposed to articulations and ritual expressions of that wonderful and elusive thing, then called "The Catholic Imagination."

It's hard to define the "Catholic imagination", but in fact we were in no real doubt about what it meant. It was a way of seeing life as a whole, in which every particular part of the whole mattered. The universe, everything that lived, and everything in our own personal life were penetrated by the infused light of God's intelligence and love. In the Catholic imagination, this light penetrated the universe and our souls and made them together an intelligible and love-filled (often lovely) whole.

All were subject, as well, to forces that struggled against the light, trying perversely and fearfully to distort and even extinguish it. In other words, there is pain, suffering and real evil in the world, and the Catholic imagination insisted on acknowledging we shared in it. It described vividly its hidden workings and shameless pomps. But it also insisted on seeing our darkness and evil as finally and firmly subject to divine compassion, to the mysterious and truly infinite power of God's love for each one--and for all of creation on its way, with our consent, to becoming a whole.

It wasn't preached all that much. But the liturgies expressed it. Our formation taught it. And we were--without anyone making us do it--reading some of the finest Catholic authors whose art was to convey the contours of grace and our human efforts to receive or resist it, to acknowledge or deny it--or both at once. Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac, Sigrid Undset, and Shakespeare (crypto-Catholic!) wrote in large and in small about people hoping, despairing, struggling, lying, loving, living and dying within the scope of this view of the world and the human wrapped round by constant compassion. It was grand. It was--and is, I believe--true.

So why am I going on about this on a wet day in November 2003? It was facing, as though for the first time, the amazing spiritual chutzpah of the Church's liturgy as it brings one year to an end with the Feast of Christ the King and opens a new liturgical year with the weeks of Advent.

The end of the year throws in our face the power of God over all the universe. God is the first and last word, the one who holds the whole world in his hands, knows every thought and act, and brings it all to a wild and incredible conclusion in justice and love. We are effectively being asked as Martha was in the very portal of her stinking brother's grave: "Do you believe this?"

Barely have we squeaked--or shouted out--with her: "Yes, Lord, I believe he shall rise on the last day ..." and thereby affirmed God's power over all things, than we are thrust by Advent back into our human smallness, into our longing, and hoping for one to save us from our sin and weakness, to save us by love and care because we know we cannot save ourselves. And we are thrust into knowing again the need of our world for "saving grace," for a healing that will never come from just our politics, economics or individual striving.

The switch is almost violent. And yet we are invited to go through it every year from God's power back to our weakness. And then on Christmas Day, miracle of miracles, from God's weakness to our empowerment. Here, we take our shoes off. Here, we are dwelling in huge and deeply intimate mystery.

I believe some form of the Catholic imagination is being regenerated again. The new wisdom for us embedded in our awakening to the public role of the feminine, the vistas opened to us by caring for the earth and the new eco-spirituality, the global attentiveness to the poor given by NGOs, believers and unbelievers, working together for the new world that Arundhati Roy said she could hear breathing. Perhaps it is now a "catholic" imagination that is coming to birth more than a Catholic Imagination. But I find it real. And I find it hopeful.

Jack Costello is a former CNT editor. He hopes in Toronto.