Denver Catholic

23 DENVER CATHOLIC | MARCH 12-25, 2016 Blasting holes through the bu ered self L ast week, during the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, I had the enormous privilege of sharing a breakfast with§Fr. Robert Spitzer, the inter-galac- tically smart Jesuit, who once served as president of Gonzaga University and who now directs the§Magis Center§on matters of faith, reason, and science. I had just fi nished Spitzer's latest book entitled "The Soul's Upward Yearning" and delighted in discussing it in some detail with him. This text is, in my judgment, the best challenge to what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the "bu¬ ered self," that is to say, a self isolated from any sense of the transcendent. Taylor observes that, prior to 1500, almost everyone believed in God and held that life would be meaningless apart from some reference to goods lying beyond our ordinary experience. But today, at least in the West, one can fi nd armies of people who both deny God and a® rm that the goods of this world are su® cient to make us happy. This bu¬ ered existence makes evangelization nearly impossible, for it closes a listener to the proposal that true fulfi llment and God are tightly linked together. Spitzer's strategy is to show from literature, philosophy, the popular arts, theoretical physics, and epis- temology that the human soul yearns for and is in fact already linked to a transcen- dent or transphysical dimension. By the sheer accumulation of evidence from this wide variety of sources, he punches hole after hole in the bu¬ er that surrounds the modern self. §§§ There is a brilliant idea on practically every page of "The Soul's Upward Yearn- ing," but I will focus simply on three. First, Spitzer draws our attention to the remarkably universal sense of the transcendent described by philosophers, mystics, and seekers across time and cultures. Limiting ourselves to some key Western fi gures, Rudolf Otto, for example, speaks of the experience of the§mysterium tremendum et fascinans§(the mystery at the same time fearsome and compelling). This numinous reality overwhelms us and simultaneously draws us into itself, and in its presence we intuit that we are more than physical, that there is a dimension of ourselves that links us to the realm where this mysterious reality dwells. We can fi nd echoes of Otto's speculation in Paul Tillich's "ultimate concern" and in Karl Rahner's "absolute mystery" and in C.S. Lewis's "longing for joy." Now we might imagine the skeptic wondering whether this is just so much fantasy and subjective projection. Spitzer's answer is that the properly numinous puts us in touch with the good and the true and the holy in their unconditioned form, and this implies that the experience cannot be sequestered within subjectivity alone, for such an experience would be-ipso facto§a condi- tioned one. A second major connection to the tran- scendent is in the very dynamic of human knowing, an idea articulated by myriad philosophers across the centuries—Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Newman, etc.—but given particularly clear expression by the twentieth century Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan maintained that each particular act of knowing takes place within the heuristic context of what can be further known. In any fi eld of intellectual endeavor, every answered question gives rise to a dozen more questions, precisely because the mind is never satisfi ed with anything less than total knowledge. It wants, in Lonergan's language, "to know everything about everything." This means, Spitzer explains, that the mind is always already in posses- sion of an, at least, inchoate awareness of what is completely and radically intelligible, that which, in itself, provides answers to every possible question. But this is none other than the unconditioned reality, that which is utterly real, for a conditioned thing, by defi nition, would beg the question of its own existence and hence would not be utterly intelligible. All of this is to argue, in a word, that the mind is ordered to God, or as Thomas Aquinas put it, "in every particular act of knowing, God's existence is implicitly co-known." § If these last two arguments seem too abstract, consider a third route of access that Spitzer presents, namely, the phe- nomenon of near death experience. Such experiences have been studied carefully for the past forty years, and most of us are well aware of their characteristics: moving out of the body and seeing its surroundings clearly, passing through walls and ceilings, following a tunnel toward a bright light radiating love and compassion, often meeting deceased loved ones along the way. Those who have had such experiences usually swear by them and remain utterly convinced that there is a dimension of the self that survives physical death. Never- theless, as Spitzer acknowledges, critics have emerged, arguing that these can be explained as hallucinations produced by the brain as it is deprived of oxygen, or the fruit of endorphins released by the dying brain. But how can such reductive accounts begin to explain the fact that those who have exited their bodies can describe their environments with such remarkable accuracy? Indeed, in one extraordinary case, a woman left her body on the operating table, travelled through a variety of corridors in the hospital, left the building on the far side of the operat- ing room and saw a single tennis shoe on the ledge. Afterward, the shoe was found, just as she had described it. And how can the physicalist theories possibly explain how people, blind from birth, correctly see objects and colors in the environs of the sites where they died? Is it not far more likely, Spitzer speculates, that these expe- riences demonstrate the existence of a transphysical dimension to the self? As you have undoubtedly guessed by now, I would enthusiastically endorse Fr. Spitzer's book. And I might suggest that, after you've read it, you pass it along to a bright young person who has soaked too long in the acids of postmodern skepticism and materialism and who has lived too long in the musty confi nes of the bu¬ ered self. Bishop Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles. He is the creator of the award winning documentary series "Catholicism." Guest Column BISHOP ROBERT BARRON Don't wait until they are 16 for "the talk" I am so over lame television parent/ teen sex talks. My current Netfl ix binge is Friday Night Lights. It's a good show about high school football in a small fi ctional Texas town of Dillon. Although, I have to say that, as I fi nish season two, I'm get- ting a little tired of all of the teen sex storylines. Which brings us to the topic of this column. Back in season one, Coach Eric Taylor's daughter Julie was dating the quarter- back, Matt Saracen. One day, Coach's wife Tami happened upon young Matt shop- ping for condoms. She confronted Julie who confi rmed that, yes, she and Matt were contemplating having sex. It was at this point that Tami Taylor began talking to her sixteen-year-old daughter about premarital sex. Loudly. Telling her it's not a good idea. Telling her about the risks. And Julie did what any sixteen year old who doesn't know any better would do. She rolled her eyes. And I was thinking that Tami had gone about it all wrong. That the time to start talking to your daughter about sex is not after you have spotted her boy- friend in the Trojan section at the Piggly Wiggly. That conversation should have started ten years earlier. Granted, I'm not a mother. But I was a teenager. And I spent about 20 years of my life—the same 20 years that most women spend raising children— traveling around the world talking to teenagers about this very subject. I've written a book, Real Love, answering their questions. And here is what I know: Kids face a lot of pressure to be sexually active. And the way to counteract it is to start talking to them when they are very, very young. No, don't talk to your fi ve year old about sex. Talk about love, about respect. Talk about their incredible dignity as image and likeness of God. Talk about the di¬ erence between loving and using (between "real love" and "pizza love", as I used to explain it.) Tell them that real love means always looking out for what is best for the other person, instead of using that person to get something we want without caring what happens to them. Tell them that respecting our- selves means refusing to tolerate others using us. Tell them that their bodies are sacred, and that the instinct to cover the private parts is not because they are bad, but because they are especially sacred and important, and thus merit special respect and protection. And when the time comes to teach them about sex, apply all of those truths you've been drilling into their little brains since they were fi ve. Teach them about more than the plumbing. Teach them about what sex has to do with love. Help them understand the meaning—to know, on a very deep level, that sex speaks the language of self-donation between a husband and a wife. I'm not a big fan of scaring kids. They need to understand the consequences, of course. They need to know about disease and unwed pregnancy and the misno- mer of "safe" sex. But all of that needs to be wrapped in the context of the beauty of God's creation of human sexuality. All of those consequences don't tell us that sex is bad, but rather that it is sacred and beautiful and powerful and created for the committed expression of marital love between a husband and a wife. The consequences come from taking some- thing beautiful and removing it from the context in which it belongs. And they need to understand that someone who would expose them to those consequences doesn't really love them. Mary Beth Bonacci is available to give talks to parents and other adults in the Denver area on sex, love, chastity and the Theology of the Body. She can be reached at www.reallove.net. Guest Column MARY BETH BONACCI

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