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Starting
Point The
honest solitary voice behind the truth in we
By JAMES STEPHEN
BEHRENS
She told me, many years ago, how she
had left institutionalized religion -- in her case it was the Roman Catholic
church -- because it did not address the dilemma of human suffering. She was a
scholar whose discipline was the sociological study of religion. I thought she
was brilliant. I admired her and respected her.
I enjoyed talking with her. She prized the capacity of the human
mind to raise questions and challenge comfortable but shortsighted views. She
championed the cause of those on the fringe of society -- poor people, those
dispossessed, those excluded from the categories of the normal, the
acceptable. I found her insights fascinating and refreshing. We
lost touch over the years, but I find that I still think of her often.
Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, once wrote that
there is no such thing as an ism. By this she meant the enormous
collectivities that go by so many names -- socialism, capitalism,
Republicanism, Catholicism and so on. In the essay, she appealed for a look at
the personal and individual lives that move, choose, suffer, rejoice and simply
live behind each of these words. The ism words are abstractions.
They do not exist save for a means of referring to systems. They
are handles to play with enormous shifts on the ever-elusive tables of history.
But, she suggested, up close the players on that imaginary table are
individuals of flesh, blood and spirit, speaking with each other in singular
and creative terms. History is the ongoing accumulation of the small. History
is the welter made up of so many singular choices, choices that amass to form
the deceptive collective we.
My friend was a woman who kept a steady gaze on the I
-- the singular voice, the uniqueness of the person, the cry of the individual,
the plight of the solitary.
Admittedly we are social creatures. We need structures,
institutions, programs and creeds for our survival. To ensure that these are
inclusive, to insure that these embrace the fully human and even nonhuman, to
ensure that our structures are open and responsive to the good -- these
assurances do not come automatically. Revisions and critiques are called for.
There is a constant need to look again, to listen, to admit failure and affirm
goodness, to weigh alternatives and look beyond what we may think we know to
what may yet be said, thought of, hoped for. And for this, the solitary voice
is needed. We need people who risk the loneliness of thinking things through
and who in doing so opt out of the collective and point out in a stumbling or
faltering way what needs to be said in a search for truth.
Wherever she is, I hope she has found a home in a system. Systems
need hearts and voices like hers. And I hope that system is of a transcendent
nature -- one that points beyond itself to something it cannot fully grasp but
only yearn for, reach for, hope for. We hunger for the good and truthful and
need visionaries and prophets to speak the way to what we truly need but cannot
find or even say. I miss her honesty and yet know that wherever she is, the
best of what the church hopes for and needs speaks through her. n
Trappist Fr. James Stephen Behrens lives at Holy Spirit
Monastery in Conyers, Ga. His e-mail address is
james@trappist.net
National Catholic Reporter, August 11,
2000
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