"THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT": SOME REFLECTIONS ON EXCUSES, PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, AND CATECHETICS

BY FATHER BENEDICT AUER, O.S.B.


Today you can walk into almost any United States Roman Catholic parish and what you see masquerading as religious education is often craft creation and poster slogans, but there seems to be a movement away from such an approach to catechetics. I believe that this change is coming about very slowly because the American approach to education has been dominated by an ancient philosophical debate between nature and nurture. And this debate touches on probably the most imporant issue facing the United States today namely are we responsible for our actions. If we are not responsible for our actions then our catechetics programs should roll up their mats and go home for this infers the ultimate cop out that we are born into a world impossible to change and we are victims of ourselves.

The academic world is encountering an intellectual firefight with the publication of a book claiming that intelligence is largely inherited and cannot be changed significantly by external influences. The authors are the late Harvard psychologist, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, a conservative political analyst.The book is entitled The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life . It is once again the nature versus nurture argument. It claims among other things that blacks are of a lower order of intelligence by birth or nature. I am sure that many people that I know buy into this theory and adherrents of this genetic theory if not in practice at least in agreement. Yet the ramifications theologically, philosophically and educationally are devastating for the teaching of catechetics if the theory is followed to its natural conclusion.

This argument that some people are by nature prone toward violence, alcohol, fatness, or lack of intelligence is as ancient as the dividing mark between Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Are we predestined by our genetic composition to sin or not? St. Augustine would buy into the predetermined part, and certainly Calvin and Knox would too. We are predestined and therefore genetic composition predisposing us to such a life of sin or violence with our birth is a possiblity. Thomas Aquinas would disagree and say that humans have free will and can choose the life they decide to live, although it may be moderated by the environment in which we find ourselves. Much of today's world accepts the genetics theory without even thinking. When we view TV we often see crime on a daily basis and our reaction is one of bewilderment because the world seems out of control and in a tail spin. Yet most of us have become victims of the genetic theory even in our spirituality - excuses abound of every kind of lifestyle and for everything we do. Sin is now a dirty word - and often we say well what can be expected with a background like that or look at his mother and father, or looks at our mothers and fathers.

Recently I attended a Washington State ESD 113 workshop on ADHA (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) given by Dr. Michael Valentine. As part of this workshop. he modeled some of the arguments used by teachers in their classrooms - for instance, Johnny is possessed, if this is really true then the teacher is exonerated from responsibility in the classroom for only a priest could chase the devil our of the kid, but other arguments are much more subtle for instance, "He is just like this Dad," may mean that he is a genetic reproduction of his father, and there is nothing that can be done to change the kid. When a kid does something bad, many teacher just shrug and say "Well, what can one expect from a black or Chicano or native American...." This past summer, I heard that argument used in New England against the French Canadians, and for first time felt the prejudice against part of me since my mother is French Canadian in ancestry. "Nothing can be done" is the built-in American excuse - we are a society unwilling any longer to take responsibility for our actions, and this is most evident in classrooms throughout the country. We label kids and ourselves. Of the four million special education kids in the country, 3 million are black males, and you often here teachers say "What can one expect." We can expect a lot , and for many of us those expectations years ago by someone who cared produced much good in us.

We find that scripture argues against such a thesis - Mark 12:29-31. In this scriptural quote Jesus addresses this very issue. He challenges us to make a difference in our lives and the lives of those around. How ? By giving us the reverse order of a method which is infallible. Love God. Love Neighbor. Love ourselves. But no one ever seems to notice the reversal of the order. Most of us can do the first two. An abstract and distant God I can love as long as that God stays afar off . I can love a neighbor especially if they don't live next door to me or in the next room or maybe even monastic cell. BUT love myself. Our whole Christian upbringing denies this concept - self-love. Yet true love of self must exist if we are to do the other two types of love. If we don't love ourselves, and I use love not like the media where we love everything from mouthwash to cereal, but true love - a love based in truth and reality. We cannot love our neighbor or for that matter God if we are not truthful with our selves. That is why so many people who attend churches throughout the world are "gimme-gimme" Christians. I want this and that, and seldom commit themselves to the cross of Jesus Christ. Being a Christian is hard work - most learning experiences are, something I find parents and teachers often forget, loving as a Christian is even harder. No one said it would be easy, yet we have free will and can make choices even if modified by our environments. Today we are reminded of this. The answer to the man who says yes to the two commandments of Jesus is "You are close to the kingdom of God." God's kingdom is not perfection but rather struggle. It is, using Jesus' own words, weeds, yeast, and other ugly and often discarded things. It is not a kingdom of excuses, but a kingdom of choices and free will. America is now a country of excuses - as one of my professors this past summer at Harvard University said, 'We are a country in denial." We may be born genetically an alcoholic, and there is no real proof that we are, but we choose to drink or not drink. And so with most other choices in our lives. In the end, the result of Herrnstein's book may be that people are going to say enough is enough. Let us stop making excuses and go on with our lives. The kingdom of God is not for lazy and excuse making persons - it is for the strong of heart. And therefore a catechetics program that is based on non-content, and only on feelings seems to fail. Young Catholics without substance are left to sink into a world of fundamentalists and secular humanists without any tools to combat the real issues. Brain and heart must both be united to face the world of today.

There is a tale which is told that "Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk saw to it that his Hasidim disciples wore nothing around the neck while praying. "For," he said, "when we speak to God, there must be no break between the heart and the brain." A spirituality that can heal woundedness and pull fractured selves together into some kind of whole necessarily involves both brain and heart, thought and emotion, vision and feeling - but each in its proper role, each acting in a way that fits into that larger whole. Ancient wisdom and modern insight join in assigning priority to vision: the essential thing, the great spiritual teachers constantly remind us, is to see oneself in the proper perspective. "Pay Attention to yourself!'

In teaching a graduate course in Philosophy of Education, I grapple with the epistemology of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and lately Rousseau, the French author of Emile , a work of fiction on the ideal of natural inclination. To Rousseau the child is a noble savage untouched by civilization, and should be left to follow his or her natural inclination unsoiled and unspoiled by society and church. For Rousseau who modeled his philosophy on fifteenth century native Americans eventhough he had never left Paris or seen a native American, and even refused to raise his own kids, setting the twelve or so children out for adoption. The premise is that there is no original sin, or fatal flaw. Humankind is flawless. William Golding did a good job of reputing this in his novel, Lord of the Flies , in which he pointed out that evil, sin, and violence are part of the human condition. You scratch of human and there is a savage often not so noble. So what does all this have to do with catechetics and theories of education.

True conversion, and real catechetics hopefully aims toward that goal, is acceptance of oneself. It has to start there. We must attend to ourselves. This approach was imprinted irrevocably on the Christian spiritual tradition by Evagrius Ponticus, one of the more influential of the Egyptian monks, who died near the end of their heyday, in the year 399. Evagrius, like his brother and sister contemplatives in the desert, emphasized honest self-knowledge. He set himself the task of detailing the different traps and temptations that can distort understanding by imposing on the mind some false perspective. Evagrius called these traps logismos - thoughts that bewilder and befog the mind so that slowly, bit by bit, we drift away into a world of self-destructive fantasy. The problem, Evagrius took care to point out, lay not in "bad thoughts" but in a process of bad thinking that is real wrong vision - seeing things from the perspective of our fears and fantasies rather than seeing things truly. Logismos are the arch-enemies of the soul, the demons from within that destroy proper perspective on the world and thus prevent us from concentrating on the actual reality of our life, leading us further and further from our actual condition, making us try to solve problems that have not yet arisen and need never arise. This is a way of seeing that Evagrius let's us see ourself for what and who we are, it shatters the false image, and makes us face up to what we truly are. It is truly the seven deadly sins.

For instance, gluttony is defined as :"anxiety about one's health or about becoming ill." Be realistic in what you eat, he counseled; modify your diet when necessary, for example, and don't waste time and energy on something that has not happened yet and may never happen. Another is fornication, about which Evagrius says, that the problem is not real people, but our imaginary entanglements through fantasy, and we should cope with what is before us. Another sin is Avarice or love of money, for Evagrius, it is not materialism, but futile planning for an unreal future. Envy is the sin of the past as a haunting remembrance of the Old days and for a future that has not happened. Anger is clinging to emotion - the resentment that refuses forgiveness. The next is acedia, a kind of listlessness or boredom where nothing engages our interest or appeals to us. When we say "Nothing matters, anyway." And finally pride and vainglory, where we daydream about our own magnificence and imagined glory and that we can do it without God.

All these sins are caused by not living in the present, but the past or future. So we must be attentive. But we must be "honest" as well. True catechetics needs to address the issues of attentiveness and honest in as many ways as possible. Stories help us attend to ourselves. And "attending," in a setting of storytelling and story listening, helps us to remember, which means more than just to "recall." As Wendell Berry reminds us remembering means to be "re-membered", the opposite of dis-membered. We need to teach young people to "re-member" themseves. We must retell and share out stories - our own, their stories, and the stories of the Church through time and history. How can we do this? Simply, although nothing ever is, by trying to live more in the NOW. Understanding, acceptance, even of ourselves, commitment will follow. The Sufi tell a story:

"Past the seeker, as he prayed, came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten. And seeing them, the holy one went down into deep prayer and cried, "Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?

And out of the long silence, God said, "I did do something about them. I made you."

This new year through selfawareness we might come to be present, a modern term might be to give quality time, to those around us. In the now, we cannot bemoan the past and continually live for the future. NOW is the reign of God, the present moment, the time which is called kairos, God's time. Simple: yes. Easy: No. Thomas Merton saw this some years back. Once he visited a Zen novice who had just finished his first year of living in a monastery. Merton asked the novice what he had learned during his novitiate, half expecting tales of enlightenment, but the novice answered, "I learned to open and close doors." "Learned to open and close doors.' The quiet disciplines of not acting impetuously, of not running around slamming doors, of not hurrying from one place to another was where this novice had to being (and perhaps end) in the process of spiritual growth. Merton loved the answer and often retold the story, for it exemplified for him "play" at its very best - doing the ordinary, while being absorbed in it intensely and utterly.

We should not throw out what we are doing in the area of catechetics, but rather add to it. If we are buying into the Augustine/Hernstein/Rousseau package of genetic determination as well as spiritual determination then we should give up any pretext of educating our youth in the faith. In thousands and thousands of classrooms across the nation public and private schoolteachers have bought into this theory. "They are kids and therefore you can't expect anything from them." This thesis I am afraid has permeated some religious education classrooms throughout the United States as well. I believe that we have to stop making excuses and look instead to the words of Jesus. True belief requires commitment. We should not take for granted that the youth of today are unwilling to make commitments but rather approach catechetics as a "life-giving and faith-giving" experience. Only then will we be able to counter the effects of the world and secularism, and catechetics will not be excuse giving, but responsibility giving experience for the youth under our guidance.


The Priest (1995)