June 17, 2004
Nonsense
St Augustine of Hippo apparently did such a good job originating original sin that nobody has thought up one since. Religion keeps working at the progeny, of course, all the while talking about conversion, but rarely ever itself taking part in it.
Religion is always trying to give a reason for things. This is what makes it seem so, shall we say, rational. But nothing in the beatitudes suggests that “blessed are the religious.” For generally, the more religious we are, the fewer risks we take, and the beatitudes are more or less about risk. Like any other process of arrested growth, this keeps us in spiritual adolescence.
The church’s vocation in all this is least of all, if at all, to preserve religion. Neither is it to preserve faith as doctrinal system or to propagate it (in the sense of making more of it), but truly to be a sanctuary, a safe house, in which one can explore the mystery of what it means to be created in the image of God, that is, faithfully to become the human being God imagines us to be. This is why the faithful always have more questions than answers, and the religious have more answers, especially to questions fewer and fewer are asking. This is probably what it means to mature spiritually (aka “to get a life”), to move from attachment to detachment, to become more loving, more faithful, more willing.
So what is conversion? What about the end run around pretense to nonsense?