Tuesday, October 05, 2004
(8:36 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Time for Reflection
I'll admit it: tonight at the Adult Education Committee Meeting, I was negative. My criticism was perhaps not constructive. Maybe it's my upbringing holding me back as always, but when I heard the suggestion that the educational program for Advent be a series of "reflections" on the nativity stories, alarm bells went off in my mind. The idea that I associate with "reflection" is that of people sitting in a small group, perhaps reading a text aloud, then spewing out whatever thoughts happen to pop into their heads. Apparently in our event, this would be done in a prayerful manner. No exegesis or hermeneutics need to be attempted. It would be a valuable time for prayerful reflection.So I asked, "How is this supposed to be education?" I'm young. I'm brash. I daresay I'm arrogant. And I'll admit that I skipped the last meeting without letting anyone know ahead of time -- I was offered free dinner in Chicago (for another committee meeting, as it turns out), and I didn't give it much thought. I'll confess that lately I haven't really gone to church as often as I have customarily gone. I have no experience with parish work or with planning events that people will actually want to attend. I know no one in the parish aside from a few of the high school kids I subbed for and the people on the parish staff. I continued, "What we're going to do is extract a couple paragraphs out of a larger text with its own history and audience and purpose, and we're going to just have people saying whatever comes to mind."
Turns out that that is exactly the way education happens! The people attending these events are not ignorant of the texts at hand -- they have heard them read a million times (in the similarly extractive setting of the liturgy), and in any case, these people bring their own unique experience and perspectives. The education comes in when you hear someone saying something about the text that you hadn't ever thought of before. And isn't it the case that the problem with the church is that they haven't listened to the experience of the people? (The priest on the committee named a theologian; everyone else nodded; I had no clue who he was talking about.)
I held my peace. Except that I'm a passive-aggressive SOB, so I'm posting about it on my blog. I see no harm in holding devotional events like that. I am sure that people will be edified, and honestly, there are not enough settings where people can speak their minds like they can in a reflection group. For a lot of people, such a setting may be the only place where they can feel like their voice is being taken seriously. That's a valuable thing. It just seems to me that there is more that can be done.
It's true that the hierarchy has not always listened to the voice of the people, but it's also true that the hierarchy has often conspired to keep people ignorant, especially about the scripture and about the history of how beliefs have developed over time -- that is, they have presented doctrine mainly, and also scripture, as something that just fell out of the sky. The point of the "return to Scripture" in Catholicism seems to me to be intended in large part to open up the gates to historical knowledge and perhaps then to critique, to the empowerment of the laity to lay claim to the history and tradition of which they are a part. Treating the Bible as yet another object of acontextual devotion -- or, what amounts to the same thing, as an abstract "eternal truth" that relates immediately to the individual's context -- seems to me to veer dangerously close to the very techniques that opening the scripture to the laity was supposed to subvert. I'm not saying that devotional events shouldn't happen or that I'm now boycotting the committee or anything of the sort -- I'm just saying there's more that could be done.
People are going to think this is some kind of Christian blog if this keeps up.
