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My most precious possession

9/9/2015

My trip back to Michigan was uneventful...and that is a good thing. I packed all my possessions (with the gracious help of many of you!) into a 12' trailer. I was anxious on how my Rav4 was going to haul such a load 1700+ miles over 5 days. I was also concerned about traveling through Tornado Alley. Happily, all went well and I arrived at my dad's place with no problems of a mechanical nature. I then spent the next couple weeks unpacking my stuff in my dad's barn and house.

An insight occurred to me while I was traveling through Oklahoma. (I drove the entire trip in complete silence, and so, there was plenty of time to think.) I asked myself what was my most important possession in the trailer? I thought of my bike, telescope, books -- but none of them I could identify as my "most important possession." Rather, the insight I had was this: "my most important possession is my mind, the capacity to reflect and to remember." I always knew that my mind was important, but it had a different hue in my understanding. What I put "into" my mind, or what is seen through the eyes, eventually flows "into" the heart and consequently through the harmonious movements of the body. Mind-heart-body unity is my most valued possession. My material possessions serve to enhance this unity.

I guess this is one of the reasons why I am now at Boston College finishing the fellowship. To study Lonergan is certainly an effort in the study of human understanding and the the dynamics of the mind. The more one understands how understanding works, the more transparent the dynamics of progress and decline underlying economics, politics, and religion become. Take for example the refugee crisis and the vast movements of populations. Last week a friend sent me this video clip on children in Syria, a crisis that is "over there."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSIpARmq2WI&app=desktop

How much do I know what is happening in the Middle East and Central Asia? Not much. So I decided I needed to learn more about what is happening in that part of the world. A couple weeks ago I picked up a copy of "Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia" by Ahmed Rashid, who is also the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller "Taliban." Rashid is one of the finest authors I have read; I cannot put the book down and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get a grasp of post 9/11 events and the fertile ground for the emergence of the ISIS phenomenon. The book helped me realize that I need to search for other sources of information other than CNN and FOX NEWS. The question continues to haunt me: What does it mean "to be informed"? Is this not a question about the function of the mind? I think it is about asking and answering questions.

Einstein once said: "I am not a genius; I just stay with the questions longer than most people."

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42nd Lonergan Workshop at BC

6/15/2015

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June 14 - 18, 2015, a series of presentations will be given on topics related to Lonergan's thought.
A schedule can be accessed here: open page.

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An Essay on Religious Life

4/5/2015

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I just finished writing an essay entitled "Religious Life in the Post-Vatican II Era." The essay will be published as a chapter in a forthcoming book. In this reflection, I incorporated many of Lonergan's ideas on the cognitional process of knowing and the functional specialties of "Foundations" and "Dialectic" in analyzing the Vatican II/Eucharistic paradigm and the "reform of the reform" paradigm. The role of religious orders is to provide what the German theologian J. B. Metz describes in "Followers of Christ" as "shock therapy" to the church institution when it fails to live the radical demands of the Gospel. Are religious orders fulfilling this prophetic role or have they become "domesticated" to such a degree that they have lost their voice? Are serious questions being asked? Access the essay here.

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Holy Week

3/31/2015

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We enter Holy Week knowing that Jesus is already risen from the dead. We carry within ourselves the promise of life, a life that is meant to be shared, especially with the poor. This is not a fantasy because we sense the flooding of God in our hearts (Rom. 5:5) and we can trust the testimony of the Gospels. Often, this God is experienced as a kind of absence or darkness of knowing. Holy Week can be a time to experience God's presence as absence. We sense the absence when we see the negative reports against community on the TV news. How does the Christian pray with the news? Do we let our hearts to be moved when we see a tragedy reported? What desires and feelings are emerging when we see the news? As Christians, we believe the Gospel of John which says that "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, not to condemn the world, but to save it." This is the core message of Christianity. "God so loved the world . . . ."

An exercise this week is to see the world as God sees it (St. Ignatius in the "Spiritual Exercises"). Let our eyes be God's eyes. We turn the TV channel to see the news, to contemplate the implications, to monitor our feelings and desires, to pray. Holy Week is the time to pray "the news." After all, the world lives in the shadow of the Cross.

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Ash Wednesday from another perspective

2/18/2015

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    Happy Ash Wednesday! The word "happy" might be unusual sounding, especially at the beginning of Lent when the people "of the light" tend to be gloomy, when Catholics and Christians reflect on the meaning of sin in their lives, when one finds the need for reparation. In a time when the Churches are emptying out and their membership dwindle, it is amazing the draw that Ash Wednesday has. Churches are filled. Some ministers even reach out and give ashes on street corners and at the shopping malls. Something deep in the human psyche is touched with Ash Wednesday. Perhaps it has something to do with our collective unconscious that goes back to the time when primitive man lived in caves and huddled around campfires for protection against marauding saber-toothed tigers. (Remember: humans didn't live in a "Jurassic Park" venue with Raptors and the big T-Rex, for they were "turned to ashes" by a meteor-fireball that hit the Yucatan, a thousand miles from El Paso, and 58 millions years before the emergence of man homo erectus.) Ashes have something to do with deep memory as well as an "invitation" to do something with this ritual gesture.

    Rituals can become empty of meaning. We do certain things but don't know why we do them. It is like buying provisions in a food store and not knowing the product's origin. For children, this usually means knowing that eggs come from a chicken, bacon from a pig, and anchovies from the sea. We can go further in our inquiry and reflect that many products come not from nature, but from a laboratory, a genetically-modified product, with food coloring and other sorts of preservatives to make the product look attractive for purchase and profit. If we continue our habit of asking questions in the local supermarket, we might find that something else is lurking under profit-driven motives. Ethics might call into question and give new meanings to the mechanisms of profit-making. The single minded profit motive is like roaming saber-toothed tiger in the fresh organic meat aisle that is nothing like a cute pussy-cat!

    Meaning is what gives our rituals "fire." Rituals exist to make connections, relationships, applications, and decisions. Rituals integrate our lives with the Sacred. If the ritual lacks meaning, then there is a tendency toward magic and superstition. We sit before the Blessed Sacrament, or have ashes mark our foreheads, or say the Rosary because "something magical" is going to happen. Or if we do the action of the ritual, we might think it will act as a sort of spiritual bank deposit for future needs. So many of our rituals have become empty of meaning because of the loss of connection between symbols with ordinary experiences. The Cross is an example. So too is the practice of fasting.

    Nevertheless, Ash Wednesday is a good starting place to fuel our rituals with new sense of meaning and vital application to our lives. It is our right to ask questions about our rituals and symbols. Ask the question 'Why?' When we ask questions, new connections are made, and new connections give birth to new meanings and new applications in the practical dimensions of the every day. We have precedents for examining our spiritual practices: Jesus talks about the old and new treasures (Mt. 13:51-52); Augustine is famous for the expression "ever ancient, ever new;" Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council with its purpose that the "deposit of faith is the same, but the way it is expressed, is different;" and Lonergan takes as his motto the saying of Leo XIII - vetera novis augere et perficere (to add to and perfect the old by means of the new)(Insight, xvi). We are in good company when we ask questions about things that matter most.

    This introduction to Lent is longer than I anticipated. So I am going to cut it short and leave this blog with a few points for reflection.

    What new meaning can we give to Ash Wednesday? For me, ashes mean there was a fire, and the fire ceased to blaze, it went cold, and died. Ashes represent a sort of "death" to a source of energy. Or is this "death" a kind of transition phase, a transformation, a "transubstantiation" of primary elements? Whatever it is, something happened. I like to think that Ash Wednesday is the opening of a Story about newness and change. And Ash Wednesday is like the Preface to a book that "invites" the reader into a deeper exploration of the self, for that is what the Story is about. Everyone loves a story. This story is about Everyone.

    The opening page begins with ashes on the forehead. This element of transition is marked on our minds, our brains, where thoughts, images, feelings, emerge and are processed. The forehead is the doorway into the inner self, to the sanctuary of thinking, insight, knowledge/wisdom, sacred space, a sanctuary of conscience, a place for encounter, the big Story. Ash Wednesday is an invitation to see the human side as distinct from all other living forms of life: the species that self-reflects on that fact that it is reflecting. The human is evolution coming to the realization that it is evolving. The human has the capacity to be "intelligent." It thinks and is moved by wonder and awe. Such wonder invites the human into deeper questioning - "Why?" In that questioning a "You" runs across the field of conscious awareness like a deer in the forest. One moment it is here, then it disappears. It is gone; I'm left with the memory. "What did I see?" "Was it real?" "Nah, it was a figment of my imagination; don't trust it." Hence, the beginning of sin.

    Ash Wednesday reminds us that somewhere along the way we put on the breaks to evolution. We stopped thinking and wondering. We are not intelligent. Violence exists because humans do not know how to think. Lent can be an invitation into thinking about thinking, understanding, and insights. Lent helps us to see prejudice, bias, and short-sightedness as blockages to thinking, understanding, and insights. These blockages that Lonergan calls "flight from understanding" (I call it sin) affect the entire community or social fabric in society. Decisions made with clear-thinking have consequences, and so too, do muddled and self-centered thinking have consequences; one builds up the community and the other diminishes it.

    So Lent is a time to begin to ask questions. Lonergan again can help us with what he wrote in the opening pages of his masterpiece Insight:
At least we can make a beginning by asking what precisely it is to understand, what are the dynamics of the flow of consciousness that favors insight, what are the interferences that favor oversight, what, finally, do the answers to such questions imply for the guidance of human thought and action (p. 9; see p. 14).

    During this sacred time of year, let us concentrate not so much on my personal sins, but on the ripple-effect of those sins on others throughout the community, including the community of non-human life forms. The ripple-effect has its origin in our decisions, and our decisions emerge from how we think, or do not think. Such effects paralyze the whole, the opposite of St. Paul's notion of the living body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12f). Once we gain the vital insight into our own reasoning and judging, then we can say that these ashes we wear are burning embers in the inner self.

    That is why the ritual of Ash Wednesday is a cause for rejoicing. It is our Story.

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Introduction to Lonergan

1/20/2015

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Here is a very, very brief overview of Lonergan's main ideas. Read more.

Another resource I found is the book "Lonergan and Spirituality" by Tad Dunne. The book does a nice summary of Lonergan's complex ideas on human knowing. This might be a good text to read before plowing through "Insight" and "Method in Theology." Dunne's book can be accessed online.

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Ask Questions . . . and more questions

1/19/2015

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One of the things I appreciate about Bernard Lonergan is his stress on the value of inquiry, of asking questions until there are no more questions to ask. It seems to me that our education system does not encourage the act of asking questions with the students. They are told to memorize, repeat what the teacher says, and plan for the SAT's. There is no creative thinking which begins with inquiry.

Lonergan is known for his daunting 875-page masterpiece called Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957). The first paragraph in chapter 1 of this work serves as a summary of the text:

-- …Descartes was convinced that too many people felt it beneath them to direct their efforts to apparently trifling problems. . . Intellectual mastery of mathematics, of the departments of science, of philosophy is the fruit of a slow and steady accumulation of little insights. Great problems are solved by being broken down into little problems. The strokes of genius are but the outcome of a continuous habit of inquiry that grasps clearly and distinctly all that is involved in the simple things that anyone can understand.

. . . our first task will be to attain familiarity with what is meant by insight, and the only way to achieve this end is, it seems, to attend very closely to a series of instances all of which are rather remarkable for their banality.

Einstein said something similar to Lonergan:
I am not a genius; I just linger longer with the questions.

If one is following this blog and wants to capture something of Lonergan's spirit, then learn to ask questions. Ask questions about anything. Pick a topic: politics, economics, religious, culture, education. As you ask questions, be attentive to what goes on in your mind, your consciousness. Soon there will be an insight. Then ask more questions until there are no more questions to ask.

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Philosophy and Feelings

1/16/2015

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I started to take a course called "Phenomenology of Feelings." I am attracted to the subject because I want to review phenomenology as a methodology for my own research and feelings as another dimension of research, especially into symbols and human thinking. The course syllabus gives the description that the popular opinion of feelings are inner forces that disturb thinking and living and therefore need to be controlled or submerged deep into the subconscious. It will be interesting to see how other philosophers look at feelings as phenomena. Some of the philosophers that we will study will be Sartre, Husserl, Scheler, Edith Stein, Lonergan and Steinbock.

A question that has emerged from the first class is: Can one talk about feelings without first talking about the composition of a "self"? When philosophers talk about feelings, are they referring to feelings that emerge from the conscious ego only? Is there another part of the self that is not the ego? What of a transcendent self? Richard Rohr writes about a True and False Self in his book "The Immortal Diamond." The "false" self isn't bad, it is just wrong, in the sense that the ego, with its tendency to take and be in control, claims to be "immortal." The fact is, when I die, certain things will die with me, like my career, successes and failures, my projects and plans, all of which are products of ego operations.

That which makes up the True Self - the realization of who you are and whose you are - is part of the transcendent dimension of the self that reaches out to new horizons. True Self is about "depth." It is about a God-center. “My deepest ME is God” (St. Catherine of Genoa). “Late have loved you, O God…you were WITHIN, I was outside my self….” (Augustine, Confessions). Augustine also says that the self is an "abyss" and an "enigma."

The point I am trying to make is that a distinction must be made between self and feelings. The self is like a "container." Feelings are its "contents." When one talks about the "contents" of feelings, from which "container" (True self or the ego) are the feelings emerging?

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What does Buddha have to do with Lonergan?

1/13/2015

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Where does one begin with a research task, besides having the proposal? What came to my mind was the need to read something about the background to the life of Bernard Lonergan. I picked up the book Bernard Lonergan. His Life and Leading Ideas by Pierrot Lambert and Philip McShane. I was struck by the fact that the book begins with two teachings of the Buddha. These teachings summarize Lonergan's ideas and contributions. These quotes are as follows:

(1) "Oh my mind! Why do you hover so restlessly over the changing circumstances of life? Why do you make me so confused and restless? Why do you urge me to collect so many things? You are like a plow that breaks in pieces before beginning to plow: you are like a rudder that is dismantled just as you venture out on the sea of life and death."

(2) Let us imagine a desert country lying in absolute darkness with many living things swarming blindly about in it.
Naturally they will be frightened and as they run about without recognizing one another during the night, there will be frequent squirming and loneliness. This is indeed a pitiful sight.
Then let us imagine that suddenly a superior man with a torch appears and everything around becomes bring and clear.
The living beings in the dark solitude suddenly find a great relief as they look about to recognize one another and happily share their companionship." (From The Teachings of the Buddha, 725th revised edition, 1992, Bukkyo Dendo Kyoya, 304 and 476.)

Lonergan tries to understand the operations of the mind, of moving from darkness into the light, from fear of the other to one of companionship. For me, life is a movement from a certain kind of darkness of mind into a region of clarity of meaning. Little insights are important.

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Beginning the Lonergan Fellowship

1/12/2015

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It might seem strange that I have temporarily left El Paso to do a fellowship at the Lonergan Institute at Boston College for the next six months. Grateful to Bishop Mark Seitz and my staff at the Tepeyac Institute, I am able to get away to think about new directions and better ways to serve the people in the diocese of El Paso.

One of the things I have been concerned about is the methodology we use in formation for ministry and in theology at the Tepeyac Institute. Methodology, the strategy used in teaching to reaching objectives, is often confused and directionless. However, over the years we have given shape to our methods of teaching. For example, adults learn better through sharing in small groups, rather than with lectures, a "sage on the stage" sort of approach. So where does one begin in improving such methods?

When talking about methodologies and ways of thinking and understanding, there is no one better than the study of the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan (d. 1984). His two monumental works are Insight: A Study of Human Understanding and Method in Theology. I was once told that Lonergan is about "thinking about thinking." I felt like a "deer in headlights of a car" when I first heard that expression. Then I realized I was "thinking," or trying to understand plain English. I also remember reading the Vatican II retreat notes of the Italian Jesuit Riccardo Lombardi who made the comment "There is violence in the world today because people do not know how to think." So, it is in this area I intend to dedicate time to study.

The entry point into this vast field begins with the fundamental problem. In the Catholic Christian tradition the Eucharist is the "source and summit" of the believing person and faith community. The Eucharist is the focal point for transformation of persons and for the world. But is it? Is there a disconnect between what we celebrate in our liturgies and sacraments with our every day life? Why is there still so much violence?

Last week the news media covered the terrible terrorist attack at the Charlie Hebdo offices. People were motivated around the world to demonstrate their solidarity with the ideals of free speech. A ripple effect of positive energy moved like a tsunami around the planet. I ask how does Eucharist have a similar ripple effect throughout the world? Is the Holy Spirit part of that effect? Does the Spirit, the "wind that blows wherever it feels," figure in?

The focus of this research is the disconnect between the transformative power of symbols (sacraments, Eucharist) and ordinary life. The specific symbol I will look at, along with others, is the liturgical year. My hypothesis is that if the community understands better the patterning of experience, rhythms, and symbols of the liturgical year, faith can develop, mature, and be the bridge of transformation with everyday life. But understanding the symbols is not sufficient; one must undergo a conversion and surrender to the Spirit who is the transforming, spiritual energy. For this reason, the title of this blog is "Symbol & Spirit."

This blog will mark out my progress and integration of this theme with the ideas of Lonergan. The first paragraph of Insight speaks about Descartes breaking down big problems into little parts. What I am doing here is one little part of a larger problem of decline in civilization. I end by quoting Lonergan:

So decline continues unabsashed. The intractable problem keeps growing. Rationalizations multiply, accumulate, are linked together into a stately system of thought that is praised by all who forget the adage: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make blind.
Can a people, a civilization, recover from such decline? To my mind the only solution is religious.

(Frederick Crowe, ed., A Third Collection. Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., 158.)

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Robert Dueweke

The purpose of this blog is to share with others my thoughts and experiences of my research at the Lonergan Institute.

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My most precious possession

42nd Lonergan Workshop at BC

An Essay on Religious Life

Holy Week

Ash Wednesday from another perspective

Introduction to Lonergan

Ask Questions . . . and more questions

Philosophy and Feelings

What does Buddha have to do with Lonergan?

Beginning the Lonergan Fellowship

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