PERANAN TOKOH AGAMA DALAM MENINGKATKAN PARTISIPASI POLITIK MASYARAKAT PADA PILKADA BUPATI 2010DI KABUPATEN HALMAHERA SELATANOleh : DEMIANUS AYANIM : 080814020ABSTRAKTokoh agama mempunyai peran yang sangat penting dalam rangka menggerakan partisipasi masyarakat dalam sebuah pilkada. Keberhasilan tokoh agama dalam rangka menggerakan partisipasi masyarakat dalam pilkada di wilayah kabupaten Halmahera Selatan sangat ditentukan oleh kemampuan atau gaya dari tokoh agama dalam memberikan orasi politiknya dalam kampanye, himbauan dan sarannya dalam mempengaruhi warga masyarakat atau juga sangat ditentukan oleh cara tokoh agama dalam menggunakan kewenangan sebagai pemimpin agama. Dengan demikian, maka peran tokoh agama dengan partisipasi politik publik mempunyai hubungan yang sangat erat dan tidak bisa dipisahkan, sebab apabila peran dari tokoh agama semakin baik maka partisipasi politik juga akan semakin meningkat. Hal ini sangat menarik untuk dielaborasi lebihlanjut, sehingga untuk melihat keterkaitan tersebut mendorong penelitian ini dilakukan.Penelitian ini berlokasi di Halmahera Selatan disaat pilkada pada tahun 2010 berlangsung. Dan metode yang dipakai dalam melakukan penelitian ini adalah melakukan wawancara mendalam kepada beberapa informan yang dianggap mempunyai pengetahuan yang komprehensif tentang informasi yang terkait dengan topic penelitian.Berdasarkan hasil penelitian di Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan, tokoh agama berperan aktif dalam memberikan nasihat, ceramah atau khotbah politik terhadap masyarakat ketika menjelang pilkada bupati. Peranan tokoh agama ini didasari dengan tanggung jawab iman terhadap masyarakat dalam rangkah membina, memotivasi dan mengarahkan masyarakat dalam rangka turut aktif untuk berpartisiapsi pada pilkada.Bentuk partisipasi masyarakat masih menggunakan unsur primodialisme sebagai factor utama dalam menentukan pilihannya, maka suku terbesarlah yang menjadi pemimpin terpilih di daerah tersebut yang dalam hal ini adalah suku Togale (Tobelo-Galela).Kata Kunci : Peranan, Tokoh Agama, Partisipasi, Masyarakat2I. PENDAHULUANPemilihan langsung Kepala Daerah menjadi consensus politik nasional, yang merupakan salah satu instrument penting penyelenggaraan pemerintahan setelah digulirkannya otonomi daerah di Indonesia. Sedangkan Indonesia sendiri telah melaksanakan Pilkada secara langsung sejak diberlakukannya Undang-undang nomor 32 tahun 2004. tentang pemerintahan daerah. Hal ini apabila dilihat dari perspektif desentralisasi, Pilkada langsung tersebut merupakan sebuat terobosan baru yang bermakna bagi proses konsolidasi demokrasi di tingkat lokal. Pilkada langsung akan membuka ruang partisipasi yang lebih luas bagi masyarakat dalam proses demokrasi untuk menentukan kepemimpinan politik di tingkat lokal. System ini juga membuka peluang bagi masyarakat untuk mengaktualisasi hak-hak politiknya secara lebih baik tanpa harus direduksi oleh kepentingan-kepentingan elite politik, seperti ketika berlaku sistem demokrasi perwakilan. Pilkada langsung juga memicu timbulnya figure pemimpin yang aspiratif, kompeten, legitimate, dan berdedikasi. Sudah barang tentu hal ini karena Kepala Daerah yang terpilih akan lebih berorientasi pada warga dibandingkan pada segelitir elite di DPRD. Akan tetapi Pilkada tidak sepenuhnya berjalan mulus seperti yang diharapkan. Semua pihak-pihak yang ikut andil dalam pelaksanaan Pilkada, harus memahami dan melaksanakan seluruh peraturan perundangan yang berlaku secara konsisten. Pada dasarnya Pilkada langsung adalah memilih Kepala Daerah yang profesional, legitimate, dan demokratis, yang mampu mengemban amanat otonomi daerah dalam wadah Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia (NKRI). Selayaknya Pilkada di Indonesia dilaksanakan dengan efektif dan tetap menjunjung tinggi asas demokrasi dan hukum.Masyarakat di Halmahera Selatan telah melakukan pemilihan kepala daerah dan wakilnya dalam hal ini daerah kabupaten yaitu Bupati dan Wakil Bupati, pada tanggal 10 Oktober 2010 dengan enam calon pasangan Bupati dan wakilnya. Halmahera Selatan dulunya kabupaten Maluku Utara tetapi kemudian diberlakukannya Undang-undang Otonomi Daerah kabupaten Maluku Utara dengan ibu kotanya Sofifi berkembang menjadi daerah provinsi Maluku Utara dan dibagi menjadi enam kabupaten yaitu halmahera Utara, Halmahera Selatan, Halmahera Tengah, Halmahera Barat, Halmahera Timur dan Kepulauan Sula, serta dua kota yaitu kota Ternate dan kota Tidore.Dalam proses pilkada langsung tentunya sangat dibutuhkan peran dari para tokoh agama dalam meningkatkan partisipasi politik masyarakat, karena sesungguhnya tanpa disadari dimata masyarakat tokoh agama merupakan sosok yang paling disegani dan patut untuk diteladani. Realita yang terdapat di masyarakat, Tokoh agama punya kharisma tersendiri yang dapat dan mampu3merubah sifat, cara pandang bahkan tingkah laku seseorang untuk menjadi yang lebih baik. Dalam kaitannya dengannya pilkada langsung yang dilakukan di Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan partisipasi politik masyarakat tidak terlepas dari peranan para tokoh agama dalam mengoptimalkan masyarakat untuk turut aktif dalam berpartisipasi terhadap pilkada langsung yang dilakukan.Salah satu tujuan terpenting dalam pilkada adalah memilih pemimpin yang berkualitas. Kualitas pemimpin itu dpat diukur oleh berbagai instrumen seperti tingkat pendidikan dan kompetensi. Keberhasilan pilkada langsung tidak hanya diukur oleh penyelenggaranya yang lancar dan damai tetapi juga outcomes (manfaat/hasil) yang yang diperoleh apakah telah menghasilkan pemimpin yang berkualitas, terutama dari sisi manajerial dan kompetensi. Tetapi bisa saja pilkada langsung dilakukan hanya untuk ajang perebutan kekuasaan melalui mekanisme "voting" dari suara pemilih, sehingga dikhawatirkan akan menghasilkan pemimpin yang hanya populer dan diterima secara luas, namun tidak mempunyai kecakapan dan kemampuan dalam mengolah daerah, sekalipun kepala daerah jabatan politis dan tidak menuntut keahlian khusus, namun kemampuan manajerial dan kompetensi sangat penting. Abdul (2005, 116).Namun pilkada langsung hanya dijadikan ajang perebutan kekuasaan, sehingga berbagai upaya dilakukan untuk merebut suara pemilih. Ada indikasi kuat masing-masing kandidat segalah cara termasuk yang dilarang seperti "money politic" untuk mendapat dukungan. Mereka juga tidak segan-segan mengeksploitasi masyarakat dan sentimen primordial untuk menarik simpati meskipun disadari bahwa cara itu kontraproduktif terhadap perkembangan demokrasi. Banyak indikator yang menunjukkan bahwa pendekatan yang digunakan para kandidat untuk mendekat masyarakat lebih menonjolkan primordialisme. Hal itu tercermin dari ajakan untuk memilih dengan memakai sentimen kesukuan, agama, golongan, dan wilayah tertentu. Dari berbagai spanduk dan poster yang dipampangkan juga tergambar sebuah klaim dukungan terhadap calon tersebut dengan memakai bendera komunitas tertentu. Rozali (2005, 130).Partisipasi masyarakat, pilkada langsung yang sudah beberapa kali diselenggarakan di Indonesia masih tetap memerlukan upaya sosialisasi yang intensif agar potensi konflik yang membayanginya dapat diredam atau diminimalesir. Sejurus dengan upaya itu dibutuhkan partisipasi masyarakat agar sosialisasi itu berjalan optimal dan efektif, sehingga pada gilirannya masyarakat daerah dapat menggunakan hak memilih kandidat kepala daerah secara lebih rasional dan obyektif. Kegiatan seorang dalam partai dalam partai politik merupakan suatu bentuk partisipasi politik. Partisipasi politik mencakup semua4kegiatan sukarela melalui mana seorang turut serta dalam proses pemilihan pemimpin-pemimpin politik, dan turut serta secara langsung atau tidak langsung dalam pembentukan kebijakan umum. Kegiatan-kegiatan ini mencakup kegiatan memilih dan pemilihan umum; menjadi anggota golongan politik seperti partai, kelompok penekan, kelompok kepentingan; duduk dalam lembaga politik seperti dewan perwakilan rakyat, atau mengadakan komunikasi dengan wakil-wakil rakyat yang duduk dalam badan itu, berkampanye dan menghadiri kelompok diskusi dan sebagainya. Daniel dan Alvian (2002, 115).Berdasarkan pra observasi di lokasi penelitian, menunjukkan kecenderungan bahwa tingkat partisipasi politik masyarakat di desa atau kecamatan tertentu relatif tinggi, dan ada desa dan kecamatan yang tingkat partisipasi politiknya relatif rendah. Masalah tersebut di atas besar kemungkinan salah satu faktornya adalah peran dari tokoh agama di desa dan kecamatan tertentu cukup tinggi dan di desa atau kecamatan tertentu relatif rendah. Hal ini dapat dilihat oleh perbedaan dari peran tokoh agama di desa dan kecamatan tertentu lebih tinggi dibandingkan dengann desa dan kecamatan lainnyaII. KERANGKA KONSEPTUALA. Konsep PerananPeranan berasal dari kata peran. Peran memiliki makna yaitu seperangkat tingkat diharapkan yang dimiliki oleh yang berkedudukan di masyarakat. (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, 2007: 845) "peranan adalah bagian dari tugas utama yang harus dilksanakan".Soekanto (1984: 237) "Peranan merupakan aspek yang dinamis dari kedudukan (status)". Apabila seseorang yang melakukan hak dan kewajiban sesuai dengan kedudukannya, maka dia menjalankan suatu peranan.Nasution (1994: 74 ) menyatakan bahwa "peranan adalah mencakup kewajiban hak yang bertalian kedudukan". Lebih lanjut Setyadi (1986 : 29 ) berpendapat "peranan adalah suatu aspek dinamika berupa pola tindakan baik yang abstrak maupun yang kongkrit dan setiap status yang ada dalam organisasi".Usman (2001 : 4 ) mengemukakan " peranan adalah terciptanya serangkaian tingkah laku yang saling berkaitan yang dilakukan dalam suatu situasi tertentu serta berhubungan dengan kemajuan perubahan tingkah laku.Berdasarkan beberapa pendapat diatas dapat disimpulkan bahwa peranan adalah suatu pola tindakan yang dilakukan oleh seseorang yang dalam hal ini adalah tokoh agama baik secara individual maupun secara bersama-sama yang dapat menimbulkan suatu peristiwa.5B. Konsep Tokoh AgamaTokoh agama termasuk kekuatan politik dalam system politik, yaitu kita bisa melihat dalam struktur poilitik.Dilihat dari tugas dan fungsi dari tokoh agama, bisa dikatakan sebagai pemimpin, kepemimpinan (leadership) adalah kemampuan seseorang (yaitu pemimpin atau pengikut-pengikutnya) sehingga orang lain tersebut bertingkah laku sebagaimana dikehendaki oleh pemimpin tersebut, Soejono Soekanto (2000 ; 318) menurutnya kepemimpinan dibagi atas 2 bagian yaitu :a. Kepemimpinan yang bersifat resmi (formal leader) yaitu kepemimpinan yang tersimpul di dalam suatu jabatan.b. Kepemimpinan karena pengakuan masyarakat akan kemampuan seseorang untuk menjalankan kepemimpinan (informal leadership).Kedua contoh kepemimpinan di atas maka kita bisa melihat tokoh agama termasuk pada informal leadership. Kepemimpinan ini mempunyai ruang lingkup yang tanpa batas-batas resmi, karena kepemimpinan demikian didasarkan atas pengakuan dan kepercayaan masyarakat.Peranan dan fungsi dari tokoh agama sangat penting dalam mengendalikan ketegangan sosial yang terjadi di masyarakat dalam iklim yang semakin demokrasi ini. Tokoh agama berperan sangat penting dalam menciptakan atau membentuk opini publik atau pendapat umum yang sehat. Oleh karena itu isu-isu yang menyesatkan dan kabar bohong yang tersebar bisa ditangkal masyarakat bila selalu berada dibawah bimbingan tokoh agama.Tokoh agama atau pemimpin adalah orang yang menjadi pemimpin dalam suatu agama, seperti : para kiay, ulama, pendeta, pastor dan lain-lain. Keberadaan tokoh agama di masyarakat seringkali lebih di dengar perkataan-perkataannya dari pada pemimpin-pemimpin yang lain.C. Konsep Partisipasi PolitikDewasa ini istilah partisipasi selalu muncul dan ramai dibicarakan baik itu pejabat pemerintah, kaum politisi maupuan kelompok ilmuan ketika mereka berbicara mengenai politik. Partisipasi politik menurut Nelson dikutip Ndraha (1987:102), mengatakan bahwa partisipasi ada dua jenis, yaitu :1. Partisipasi horizontal, adalah partisipasi sesama warga atau anggota suatu perkumpulan.2. Partisipasi vertikal, adalah partisipasi yang dilakukan oleh bawahan dengan atasan. Antara klien dengan patron atau antara masyarakat sebagai perkumpulan dengan pemerintah.6Dalam menemukan makna yang lebih kengkap, maka yang hampir sama dengan pendapat di atas adalah tindakan sosial atau seperti yang disebut oleh Weber sebagai sosial-action. Istilah ini dikemukakan oleh Weber untuk perbuatan manusia yang mempunyai arti subjektif. Dengan ini dimaksudkan setiap orang dalam mencapai tujuan terdorong oleh motivasi yang menguntungkan.Miriam Budiarjo (1982, 1) memberikan pengertian tentang partisipasi politik adalah kegiatan seseorang untuk ikut serta aktif dalam kehidupan politik, yaitu dengan jalan memilih pimpinan negara dan secara langsung mempengaruhi kebijan pemerintah (Pubclic Policy), kegiatan ini mencakup seperti memberikan suara dalam pemilihan umum, menghadiri rapat umum atau menjadi anggota suatu partai atau kelompok kepentingan, mengadakan hubungan kontanting dengan pejabat pemerintah atau anggota parlemen dan sebagainya.H. NU dan Sidney Verba dikutip Miriam Budiarjo partisipasi politik adalah kegiatan pribadi yang legal, sedikit banyak bertujuan untuk mempengaruhi seleksi pejabat-pejabat negara dan tindakan-tindakan yang diambil oleh mereka. Yang teropong utama adalah tindakan-tindakan yang bertujuan untuk mempengaruhi keputusan-keputusan pemerintah, sekalipun fokus sebenarnya lebih luas, tetapi abstrak yaitu usaha-usaha untuk mempengaruhi alokasi nilai secara otaratitatif masyarakat.Sementara Herbert Mc. Closky mengemukakan bahwa partisipasi politik adalah kegiatan sukarela dari warga masyarakat melalui mana mereka mengambil bagian dalam proses pembentukan kebijakan umum. Menurut Hoogerwerf (1985:189) mengatakan bahwa partisipasi politik adalah keikutsertaan pada kebijaksanaan pemerintah dan pada terwujudnya kebijaksanaan itu. Dari berbagai pendapat di atasa terlihat bahwa partisipasi politik mencakup aspek-aspek yang sangat luas termasuk juga tingkah laku politik dan pemilihan penguasa di dalam suatu kegiatan politik yang disebut pemilihan umum.Pengertian umum mengenai partisipasi ini biasanya sederhana yaitu keikut sertaan suatu kelompok masyarakat dalam kehidupan politik, misalnya : memilih pemimpin negara, menghadiri rapat umum, menjadi anggota suatu partai dan lain-lain. Alfian (1986, 70).7III. METODOLOGI PENELITIANPenelitian ini difokuskan pada Bagaimana peranan Tokoh Agama dalam meningktakan partisipasi politik masyarakat dalam pilkada 2010 di Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan.Yang dimaksud dengan peranan tokoh agama dalam penelitian ini adalah suatu pola tindakan yang dilakukan oleh seseorang yang dalam hal ini adalah tokoh agama baik secara individual maupun secara bersama-sama yang dapat menimbulkan suatu peristiwa.Adapun dalam hal ini indikator dari tokoh agama adalah sebagai berikut:a. Himbauan atau saran dari tokoh agama kepada masyarakat dalam menghadapi pilkada.b. Politik para tokoh agama dalam menghadapi pilkada seperti pidato/kampanye.c. Nasehat, misalnya masyarakat harus hati-hati agar tidak terpengaruh dengan money politic dalam memberikan suaranya.d. Petunjuk atau perintah agar masyarakat dapat aktif dalam pemilihan kepala daerah.Sedangkan partisipasi politik masyarakat merupakan kegiatan-kegiatan sukarela dari masyarakat dalam kegiatan politik dengan mengambil bagian dalam proses pembentukkan kebijakan umum oleh pemerintah kabupaten, dalam kegiatan ini antara lain, seperti memberikan usul, saran, pendapat dalam mempengaruhi kebijakan pemerintah di kabuten Halmahera Selatan.Adapun indikator dari partisipasi politik masyarakat adalah:a. Memberikan suara dalam pemilihanb. Menghadiri rapat umumc. Menjadi anggota salah satu kelompok kepentingand. Mengadakan hubungan (contacting) dengan pejabat pemerintah atau anggota parlemen.Dengan demikian yang akan dilakukan dalam penelitian ini adalah mencari informasi yang jelas, akurat dan terpercaya baik berupa pernyataan, keterangan atau data-data yang dapat membantu dalam penyelesaian penulisan ini.Penelitian kualitatif tidak dimaksudkan untuk membuat generalisasi dari hasil penelitiannya. Oleh karena itu, pada penelitian kualitatif tidak dikenal adanya populasi dan sampel (Suyanto, 2005 : 171). Subjek penelitan yang telah tercermin dalam fokus penelitian ini ditentukan secara sengaja. Subjek penelitian informan yang akan memberikan berbagai informasi yang akan diperlukan selama proses penelitian. Informan adalah seorang yang benar-benar mengetahui suatu persoalan atau permasalahan tertentu yang darinya dapat diperoleh informasi yang8jelas, akurat, dan terpercaya baik berupa pernyataan, keterangan atau data-data yang dapat membantu dalam memenuhi persoalan/permasalahan.Adapun informan yang digunakan penulis dalam penelitian ini adalah Tokoh Agama dan Masyarakat.IV. PEMBAHASANA. Peran Tokoh Agama Dalam Menigkatkan Parisipasi Politik Merupakan Sosialisasi Politik Dalam Pilkada Bupati di Kabupaten Halmahera SelatanAgama merupakan lembaga yang menawarkan kebahagiaan dan keselamatan melalui pengajaran dan pelaksanaan ajaran-ajaran yang disampaikan oleh para peletak dasar agama, dimana ajaran tersebut kemudian dituliskan dalam Kitab Suci masing-masing. Agama sebagai sebuah lembaga tentu menuntut adanya suatu susunan hirarki atau kepengurusan yang mendampingi dan melayani jemaat dalam usahanya mencapai kebahagiaan dan keselamatan. Para pengurus atau pimpinan jemaat dalam agama inilah yang kemudian disebut sebagai tokoh agama. Jadi tokoh agama adalah orang yang karena kualitas pribadinya dipercaya dan diberi tugas khusus untuk memimpin umat beragama.Para tokoh agama memiliki tugas dan peran yang khas yaitu: Menjadi panutan atau memberi teladan bagi umatnya, khususnya di tengah situasi daerah yang diperhadapkan dengan pilkada langsung, menyejahterahkan umat Tuhan, Mendampingi umat dalam persatuan dengan Tuhan, dan memimpin ibadat, mengajar, mempersatukan, serta mendampingi dalam perwujudan iman.Tokoh agama tampak antara lain dalam upaya pengarahan dalam sejumlah besar orang oleh golongan elite tertentu untuk mendengarkan pidato-pidato politik dalam suatu rapat umum atau kampanye.Dalam wawancara langsung dengan inisial D. N, tokoh agama bahwa:Menjelang pilkada bupati di Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan, tokoh agama selalu memberikan ceramah/Khotbah kepada jemaat/masyarakat dengan tujuan bahwah masyarakat harus turut aktif untuk berpartisipasi dalam pilkada bupati.Adapun pendapat dari insial T. H, tokoh agama bahwa : Ya, pada prisnsipnya telah menjadi tugas dari pada tokoh agama dalam memberikan ceramah/dakwah terhadap masyarakat dalam menyambut pilkada, mengingat sebagian besar masyarakat kurang terlalu memahami tentang pentingnya pilkada yang mengakibatkan masyarakat tidak memberikan dukungannya terhadap kandidat yang ada atau yang kita kenal dengan namanya golput.9Pendapat lain yang dikemukakan oleh inisial R. S, tokoh agama, yaitu : Masalah pilkada sebenarnya bukanlah menjadi urusan tokoh agama, karena sesungguhnya ketika berbicara tentang pilkada secara tidak langsung kita berbicara tentang politik. Berbicara politik tentunya tidak terlepas dari unsure masyarakat. Nah, masyarakat inilah yang kemudian merupakan urusan dari tokoh agama. Merupakan tanggung jawab iman terhadap masyarakat dalam rangkah mengarahkan dan perlu juga diberikan gambaran tentang pilkada dengan tujuan masyarakat tidak asal memilih setiap calon yang ada dan terlebih lagi dapat menggunakan hak pilihnya sebagai warga negara yang baik.Dari berbagai pernyataan yang dikemukakan di atas, menggambarkan bahwa ceramah, dakwah, khotbah atau peasan politik yang dilakukan oleh tokoh agama terhadap masyarakat didasarkan pada tanggung jawab iman. Tanggung jawab inilah yang kemudian mendorong tokoh agama untuk memberikan ceramah, dakwa atau khotbah kepada masyarakat untuk turut aktif dalam pilkada bupati yang dilaksanakan di Kabupaten Halamahera Selatan.Peranan dari tokoh agama tersebut di atas secara tidak langsung telah melakukan sosialiasi politik. Karena sesungguhnya sosialisasi politik merupakan suatu proses yang memungkinkan seorang individu bisa mengenali sistem politik, yang kemudian menentukan sifat persepsi-persepsinya mengenai politik serta reaksi-reaksinya terhadap gejalah politik.B. Tanggapan Responden Terhadap Peran Tokoh Agama Dalam Meningkatkan Partisipasi PolitikAda pun tanggapan respoden terhadap peran (ceramah, dakwah, khotbah, pesan politik) tokoh agama dalam meningkatkan prtisipasi politik yang dikemukakan oleh inisial L. A, mahasiswa, bahwa:Ya, selalu ada ceramah, khotbah atau pesan politik yang disampaikan kepada masyarakat menjelang pilkada. Dan menurut saya, apa yang disampaikan oleh tokoh agama itu baik karena untuk kepentingan masyarakat kabupaten Halmahera Selatan pada umumnya. Dengan adanya himbauan, ceramah atau khotbah politik kepada masyarakat, saya yakin masyarakat akan lebih aktif lagi dalam berpartisipasi pada pilkada.Pernyataan ini pulah dijawab oleh inisial H. B, warga, yang mengatakan: Sudah menjadi tugas dan tanggung jawab tokoh agama dalam membina dan mengararahkan masyarakat ke hal-hal yang baik dalam hal ini adalah turut aktif dalam pilkada bupati. Oleh karena tugasnya dalam membina dan mengarahkan masyarakat maka selalu ada nasihat, ceramah atau khotbah politik kepada masyarakat ketika menjelang pilkada dilaksanakan. Namun dalam penyampaian10pesan politik atau ceramah kepada masyarakat, tokoh agama tidak pernah menyuruh untuk berpartisipasi pada salah satu calon tertentu. Dalam penyampain ceramah, khotbah atau pesan politik kepada masyarakat selalu netral. Hal yang sama disampaikan oleh inisial T. N, warga bahwa :Ya, tokoh agama selalu memberikan ceramah, khotbah atau pesan politik kepada masyarakat ketika menjelang pilkada Bupati di kabupaten Halmehera Selatan. Dan menurut saya apa yg disampaikan tokoh agama itu patut dituruti karena itu merupakan kepentingan masyarakat pada umumnya. Tetapi dalam penyampaian tersebut, tokoh agama selalu netral dan tidak menentukan calon mana yang harus dipilih. Tokoh agama memberikan kehendak bebas kepada masyarakat untuk memilih. Kemudian inisial T. A, warga, juga mengemukakan pendapatnya bahwa :Ya, benar tokoh agama berperan aktif dalam memberikan ceramah, dakwa pesan politik kepada masyarakat menjelang pilkada. Sejauh ini yang saya tahu tokoh agama dalam menjelangkan tugasnya sebagai pemuka agama, selalu netral dalam mengarahkan masyarakat untuk menyambut pilkada dan tidak memihak kepada salah satu calon tertentu. Walaupun dalam kenyataannya ada salah satu calon Bupati yang membantu kami lewat bantuan dana untuk pembangunan fisik gedung Gereja, tetapi tokoh agama tidak menuntut kepada kami selaku jemaat/masyarakat untuk memilih calon Bupati yang telah membantu kami. Tokoh agama memberikan kehendak bebas untuk memilih calon bupati sesuai dengan pilihan kami.Dari jawaban responden di atas dapat disimpulkan bahwa menjelang pilkada Bupati di Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan tokoh agama berperan aktif dalam mengarahkan masyarakat untuk berpartipasi aktif pada pilkada. Adapun dalam mengarahkan masyarakat untuk berpartispasi aktif pada pilkada, tokoh agama selalu bersifat netral dan tidak menentukan calon mana yang harus dipilih. Tokoh agama memberikan kehendak bebas kepada masyarakat untuk memilih. Mengingat hak untuk memlih merupakan hak asasi manusia.Adapun dalam pemberian ceremah, nasihat, khotbah atau pesan politik merupakan hal yang penting untuk dilakukan oleh para tokoh agama. Hal ini disebabkan karena sebagian kecil masyarakat tidak terlalu perduli dengan adanya pilkada bupati yang menurut mereka hanya membuang waktu dan tidak menghasilkan sesuatu apapun, demikian kata inisial D. B, warga. Tetapi ada juga yang mengatakan bahwa dalam menjelang pilkada masyarkat perlu diberi ceramah, khotbah, atau pesan politik untuk menghindari hal-hal yang tidak diinginkan seperti golput dan money politic. Oleh bebrapa responden berikut11mengatakan sangat penting pemberian ceramah, khotbah atau pesan politik kepada masyarakat ketika menjelang pilkada, diantaranya adalah inisial N. K, mahasiswa yang mengatakan bahwa :Merupakan hal yang sangat penting ketika tokoh agama memberikan cermah, dakwa, khotbah, atau pesan politik kepada masyarakat menjelang pilkada. Pada umumnya masyarakat yang ada di kabupaten Halmahera Selatan merupaka masayakat awam yang masih kurang pemahaman tentang politik maupun partisiapasi. Oleh karena itu sangat penting memberikan ceramah, dakwah, khotbah atau pesan politik kepada masyarakat dengan tujuan agar masyarakat mengerti dan mau berpartisipasi dalam pilkada. Mengingat di mata masyarakat tokoh agama merupakan seorang individu yang patut diteladani dan dicontohi. Jadi apapun yang dikatakana para tokoh agama, pasti akan dituruti.Pernyataan ini pulah dijawab oleh inisial Y. A, tokoh masyarakat, bahwa :Ya, penting sekali bagi masyarakat untuk diberi ceramah, dakwa, khotbah atau pesan politik kepada masyarakat menjelang pilkada. Dengan adanya ceramah, dakwah khotbah atau pesan politik dari tokoh agama, masyarakat dapat mengerti pentingnya pilkada bagi kehidupan masyarakat. dan ketika masyarakat mengerti pentingnya pilkada, maka dengan sendirinya masyarakat akan turut aktif untuk berpartisipasi dalam pilkada. Dalam waktu bersamaan inisial H. D, warga mengatakan bahwa : Menurut saya, selagi ceramah, khotbah atau pesan politik yang disampaikan oleh para tokoh agama selagi masih bersifat netral itu penting untuk dilakukan atau diikuti. Dan selama ini tokoh agama dalam pemberian ceramah tersebut masih bersifat netral, dan itu merupakan hal yang penting bagi masyarakat dalam memasuki pemilihan kepala daerah yang dalam hal ini adalah pemilahan bupati.Berdasarkan jawaban dari responden di atas dapat menggambarkan bahwa betapa pentingnya peranan tokoh agama dalam mengarahkan masyarakat untuk berpartisipasi aktif pada pemilihan kepala daerah yang dalam hal ini adalah pemilihan bupati dan wakil bupati. Karena dengan adanya ceramah, khotbah politik atau bahkan pesan politik dari tokoh agama dapat menimbulkan kesadaran dari tiap jemaat/masyarakat untuk berpartisipasi dalam pilkada bupati.C. Partisipasi Politik Masyarakat Dalam Pemilihan Kepala Daerah di Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan12Pemilihan kepala daerah menjadi consesnsus politik nasional, yang merupakan salah satu instrument penting penyelenggaraan pemerintah setelah digulirkan Otonomi Daerah di Indonesia yang kemudian dituangkan dalam Undang-Undang (UU) No. 32 Tahun 2004, tentang pemerintah daerah. Hal ini jika dilihat dari perspektif desentralisasi, pilkada tersebut merupakan terobosan baru yang bermakna bagi proses konsolidasi demokrasi di tingkat lokal. Pilkada akan membuka ruang partisipasi yang lebih luas bagi masyarakat dalam proses demokrasi untuk menentukan kepemimpinan di tingkat lokal.Pada dasarnya pilkada merupakan pememilihaan kepala daerah yang profesional, legitimate dan demokratis, yang mampu mengemban amanat otonomi daerah dalam wadah Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia (NKRI). Salah satu tujuan terpenting dalam pilkada adalah memilih pemimpin yang berkualitas. Kualitas pemimpin dapat diukur oleh berbagai intrumen seperti tingkat pendidikan dan kompetensi.Masyarakat di Halmahera Selatan telah melakukan pemilihan kepala daerah dan wakilnya dalam hal ini adalah daerah kabupaten yaitu Bupati dan wakil Bupati, pada tanggal 10 Oktober 2010 yang diikuti enam pasangan calon Bupati dan wakilnya, yang kemudian dimenangkan oleh pasangan Dr. H. Muhammad Kasuba, MA dan Drs. Rusdan I. Haruna, M.Si.Bertolak dari hasil observasi menunjukkan bahwa dalam pemilihan kepala daerah yang dalam hal ini adalah pemilihan Bupati dan Wakilnya cenderung di warnai dengan beberapa alasan masyarakat untuk memilih calon tersebut, diantaranya adalah alasan karena kesamaan etnis, karena kedekatan keluarga, karena kemampuannya, karena kesamaan agama, karena partai politik, karena nasihat dari para tokoh agama dan karena ada jaminan masa depan yang diberikan. Dari hasil observasi ini kemudian penulis melakukan penelitian di lapangan dan melakukan wawancara langsung dengan beberapa orang masyarakat untuk dijadikan responden, diantaranya adalah inisial R. B, warga bahwa:Kalau saya memilih seorang calon bupati, hal yang paling utama ialah karena calon tersebut sama suku dengan saya, kemudian calon tersebut seiman juga dengan saya. Lebih dari itu calon tersebut memiliki visi dan misi yang jelas. Kemudian menurut inisial H. Y, warga bahwa :Kalaupun saya memilih seorang calon Bupati itu karena visi misi yang jelas, kemudian suku dan agama. Menurut saya ini penting karena ketika calon tersebut berhasil, maka hal yang utama dia akan memperjuangkan suku dan agama terlebih dahulu. Kemudian persoalan tokoh agama yang memberikan dorongan13kepada masyarakat untuk terlibat dalam pemilihan itu benar, tetapi tokoh agama pada umumnya memberikan kehendak bebas kepada masyarakat untuk memilih calon bupati. Dan saya pikir, apa yang disampaikan oleh para tokoh agama itu benar, persoalan pilihan itu hak masyakat yang tidak bisa dipaksakan oleh siapa pun. Tokoh agama hanya mengarahkan dan memberikan pandangan kepada masyarakat dan selanjutnya merupakan hak dari masyarakat calon mana yang menurutnya patut untuk dipilih. Di tempat berbeda juga dikemukakan oleh inisial L. A, Mahasiswa, bahwa :Dalam menentukan pilihan kepada salah satu calon tertentu saya melihat dari sudut pandang kemampuan untuk memimpin yang dimiliki oleh setiap calon tertentu dan kemudian jaminan masa depan yang diberikan. Era sekarang ini, menurut saya ketika memilih seorang bupati janganlah kita melihat karena dia memiliki kekuatan financial yang memadai tetapi tidak mempunyai kemampuan untuk memimpin dan terlebih lagi tidak mampu membawa daerah ini ke tujuan yang sesungguhnya yakni kesejahteraan masyarakat pada umumnya.Pernyataan ini juga dikemukakan oleh inisial N. T, warga yang mengatakan bahwa : Alasan untuk saya memilih seorang bupati itu karena dilihat dari kemampuan untuk memimpin dan punya visi misi yang jelas untuk membawa daerah ini mampu bersaing dengan daerah lain. Disamping itu juga saya melihat latar belakang kehidupan calon tertentu apakah mempunyai gaya hidup yang terpuji atau tidak. Karena latar belakang kehidupan yang terpuji dapat menunjang untuk melakukan hal-hal terpuji juga dalam membangun daerah ini dan mampu memperjuangkan apa yang menjadi hak dari masyarakat pada umumnya.Kemudian inisial A. G, tokoh masyarakat juga mengatakan bahwa: Alasan utama ketika saya memilih seorang bupati itu yaitu karena latar belakang suku dan agama yang sama dengan saya. Setelah itu mempunyai visi dan misi yang jelas untuk mampu membawa daerah ini sesuai dengan harapan masyarakat pada umumnya dan terlebih lagi amanat UUD 1945 itu dapat terealisasi dengan baik, yakni mensejahterahkan kehidupan yang berbangsa dan bernegara.Dari pernyataan responden tersebut di atas, menunjukkan bahwa partisipasi politik berbeda-beda dari masyarakat yang satu ke masyarakat yang lain. Kadar partisipasi politik pun bervariasi. Hal itu dapat dilihat dari alasan respoden dalam memilih calon bupati, yang pada umumnya unsur SARA (suku, agama dan ras) yang menjadi prioritas utama untuk memilih calon bupati. Ini disebabkan karena daerah kabupaten Halmahera Selatan pada umumnya berpenduduk yang menjungjung tinggi nilai-nilai sukuisme. Adapaun suku Togale (Tobelo-Galela) merupakan suku terbesar yang menduduki kabupaten Halmahera14Selatan, kemudian disusul suku-suku kecil lainnya yakni suku Makian, suku Bajo dan Buton. Hal ini dapat dibuktikan dengan terpilihnya Dr. H. Muhammad Kasuba, S.Ag, MA sebagai bupati kabupaten Halmahera Selatan dalam dua periode berturut-turut yang notabene adalah suku Togale. Kemudian agama dan ras yang selalu mendominasi untuk dijadikan alasan dalam memilih seorang bupati. Hal ini diyakini bahwa siapan pun dia ketika disinggung soal agama, semua pasti akan membelah agamanya.Setelah unsur SARA, kemampuan serta visi dan misi merupakan alasan untuk memilih seorang bupati. Ini disebabkan karena cara berpikir masyarakat yang mulai berkembang dan pendidikan yang sudah meningkat. Kemudian jaminan masa depan yang diberikan oleh para kandidat. Ini berarti ada janji-janji politik dari kandidat dalam berkampanye.Kesimpulan yang ditarik dari uraian tersebut di atas adalah bahwah pemilihan kepala daerah di kabupaten Halmahera Selatan unsure SARA yang mendominasi partisipasi masyarakat untuk memilih serta tidak terlepas dari peran tokoh agama dalam memberikan ceramah, khotbah politik atau bahkan pesan politik kepada masyarakat. Sehingga realita yang terjadi suku terbesarlah yang memipin daerah kabupaten Halmahera Selatan, yakni suku Togale (Tobelo-Galela) yang dalam hal ini adalah Dr. H. Muhammad Kasuba, S.Ag, MA yang notabena adalah suku Togale telah memenangkan pilkada dua kali secara berturut-turut.Dengan adanya pelaksanaan pilkada Bupati di Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan akan membawa harapan baru bagi segenap elemen masyarakat untuk kiranya dapat tercipta suatu kehidupan sosial politik dan ekonomi yang lebih baik. Menurut inisial H. B, warga : Ya, ketika pilkada Bupati terlaksana menurut saya akan terciptanya suasana kehidupan sosial politik dan ekonomi yang lebih baik. Begitu pun dengan inisial T. N, LSM, yang mengatakan bahwa :Dalam pelaksanaan pilkada Bupati tentunya akan berdampak pada perubahan yang nantinya akan tercipta kehidupan sosial politik dan ekonomi yang lebih baik, mengingat perkembangan pengawasan pemerintah pusat terhadap pemerintah daerah selalu ketat dalam menjalani roda pemerintahan.Hal ini juga disampaikan oleh inisial L. A, mahasiswa yang mengatakan bahwa : Terlaksananya pilkada di Kabupten Halmahera Selatan akan tercipta suasana kehidupan sosial politik dan ekonomi. Dimana dapat memudahkan hubungan kinerja pemerinta pusat dan pemerintah daerah, dan pemerintah daerah terhadap masyarakat khusunya di kabupaten Halmahera Selatan.15Hal ini karenakan masyarakat yakin bahwa calon yang jadi nanti mampu membawa masyarakat ke dalam suasana yang demikian. Pelaksanaan Pilkada Bupati merupakan hal yang penting untuk dilaksanakan di Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan. Menurut berinisial L. A, warga, bahwa :Penting sekali bagi masyarakat untuk dilakukannya pilkada Bupati, karena secara tidak langsung dapat memudahkan akses masyarakat terhadap pemerintah danBertolak dari jawaban responden di atas hasil penelitian menunjukan masyarakat menyatakan penting untuk dilakukannya pilkada langsung di Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan. Hal ini sisebabkan oleh berbagai alasan yang dikemukakan, antara lain :- Merupakan upaya mewujudkan demokrasi local dimana masyarakat diberikan hak untuk memilih pemimpin menurut keinginannya- Pengambilan atau wujud dari pada kedaulatan rakyat pada tingkat local- Mendidik masyarakat menentukan pimpinannya, sesuai dengan hati nuraninya- Untuk memilih pemimpin yang mampu merubah daerah yang lebih baik- Karena menurut UU masa jabatan Bupati hanya 5 tahun, jadi setelah itu haarus dipilih kembali- Karena tidak mungkin terus hidup dalam kekosongan (tanpa pemimpin) dan oleh karena itu harus secepatnya mengisi kekosongan itu untuk mengatur dan menentukan Halmahera Selatan ke depan- Agar terciptanya kesejahteraan, kemakmuran, dan kedamaian masyarakat Halmahera Selatan- Karena daerah pemekaran harus ada kepala daerah oleh karena itu pilkada harus ada- Secara umum adalaha menjalankan amanat UU- Secara khusus adalah menjadi jaminan terciptanya kehidupan sosial politik dan ekonomi yang lebih baik- Pilkada merupakan sarana dalam pelaksanaan prinsip-prinsip demokrasi dalam menghargai hak-hak dari pada rakyat tanpa adanya intervensi apapun dengan kepentingan terselubung.Dalam pencalonan kepala daerah selalu saja dilakukan kampanye oleh para kandidat untuk mensosialisasikan setiap visi dan misi mereka guna menarik perhatian dan simpatisan dari pada masyarakat. Di dalam masa kampanye para kandidat calon kepala daerah dan masyarakat berkesempatan bertemu langsung dan saling berdialog tentang visi dan misi yang ditawarkan oleh calon kandidat dan harapan dari masyarakat.16Sebagian besar masyarakat Halmahera Selatan senang mengikuti rapat umum, dialog atau kampanye karena mereka ingin mendengar langsung setiap visi dan misi yang disampaikan oleh calon tertentu, namun ada juga yang mengaku tidak senang mengikuti rapat umum, dialog atau kampanye karena kesibukan mereka yang sebagian besar adalah petani. Jadi mereka berpikir dari pada mereka harus duduk-duduk diam mendengarkan para calon bupati tanpa mendapat sepeserpun uang, lebih baik mereka bekerja di kebun yang bisa menghasilkan sesuatu yang bermanfaat bagi kelanjutan hidup mereka. Kata inisial E. N, warga Desa Sayoang, Kecamatan Bacan Timur, Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan. Dan kemudian pernyataan ini dibenarkan oleh inisial A. S, kepala Desa Sayoang, Kecamatan Bacan Timur, Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan.V. PENUTUPA. Kesimpulan1. Para tokoh agama mempunyai peran dalam pilkada langsung di Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan, itu kita bisa lihat dari ceramah, dakwah, khotba yang diberikan oleh tokoh agama dalam sebulan menjelang pilkada. Adapun peran dari Para tokoh agama ini dilakukan atas dasar tanggung jawab iman terhadap masyarkat sehingga merasa penting untuk memberikan nasihat politik kepada masyarakat agar tidak tepengaruh pada money politic dan golput.2. Tidak ada nasihat yang diberikan tokoh agama kepada masyarakat cenderung pada calon tertentu.3. Partisipasi masyarakat kabupaten Halmahera Selatan dalam pemilihan kepala daerah, unsur SARA menjadi prioritas utama untukk dijadikan alasan memilih seorang bupati, sehingga mengakibatkan suku terbesarlah yang menjadi pemimpin di daerah tersebut yang dalam hal ini adalah suku Togale (Tobelo-Galela). Akan tetapi disamping unsure SARA, tokoh agama juga turut berperan dalam mempngaruhi masyarakat untuk menggunakan hak suaranya dalam pemilihan melauli ceramah, dakwah, khotbah politik atau nasihat politik.B. Saran1. Perlu adanya pemberdayaan politik masyarakat, misalnya dengan melakukan penyuluhan dan pendidikan politik, melaluli event-event politik dalam lingkup yang lebih kecil.172. KPUD dan pemerintah harus berupaya agar kesadran dan pengetahuan masyarakat pemilih akan hak-haknya berdemokrasi dapat ditingkatkan kualitasnya sehingga masyarakat turut aktif dalam berpartisipasi dalam pemilihan eksekutif maupun legislatif.3. Kepala daerah yang terpilih pada pemilihan dalam bekerja jauhkanlah korupsi dan bangun Kabupaten Halmahera Selatan dengan penuh tanggung jawab4. Melalui pemelihan langsung Bupati dan wakil Bupati, aktivitas-aktivitas politik mengalami perubahan, dari elemen masyarakat dari tingkat bawah samapai tingkat atas kini semakin giat dalam aktivitas politik, dengan berbagai macam perilaku politik yang terkadang bisa membawa dampak bagi proses politik atau bagi kehidupan masyarakat. Disarankan agar melalui pemilihan langsung Bupati dan wakil Bupati , kemampuan dan kualitas para calon terus ditingkatkan pemahaman tentang peraturan pilkada langsung dan sistem politik yang dibangun dalam kehidupan bermasyarakat, berbangsa, bernegara serta dapat memberikan pendidikan politik dalam pemilihan langsung.DAFTAR PUSTAKABudiarjo, Miriam, 2008, Dasar-Dasar Ilmu Politik, PT. Gramedia Pustaka Utama, Jakarta.Huntington, P. Samuel dan Nelson Joan, 1986, Partisipasi Politik di Negara Berkembang, Rineka Cipta, Jakarta.Kantaprawira, Rusadi, 2004, Sistem Politik Indonesia, suatu Model Pengantar, Sinar Baru, Bandung.Merdalis, drs. 2006. Metode Penelitian. Bumi Aksara, JakartaMerson H.E 1976. Adminitrasi Pemerintahan dalam Pembangunan Nasional. Jakarta : Gramedia Pustaka.Naptilu, Paimin.DR, M.Si. 2007. Menakar Urgensi Otonomi Daerah. Alumni, BandungPoerwadarminta 1996. Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia. Balai Pustaka Utama. Jakarta18Prof. DR. Toha, Mifta, MPA. 2006. Birokrasi dan Politik di Indonesia. Jakarta : PT. Pustaka Indonesia PressSarudajang, S. Harry, Dr. 2012. Pilkada Langsung. Kata Hasta Pustaka, Jakarta.Simangunsong, Bonar. Ir. Drs, MSc. SE dan Sinuraya, Daulat. Ir, MM. 2004. Negara, Demokrasi dan Berpolitik Yang Profesional. Kharisma Virgo Print, Jakarta.Soekanto, Soerjono. 2003. Sosiologi Suatu Pengantar. Raja Grafindo Persada, Jakarta.Sugiyono, 2007. Metode Penelitian Kuantitatif Kualitatif R&D. Bandung: Alfabeta.Sumber-Sumber Lain :Skripsi : Kinerja DPRD di Bidang Pengawasan Pembangunan, Oleh Jeklin Gorab, Fisip Unsrat 2008Peraturan Pemerintah RI No. 6 Tahun 2005, Tentang Pemelihan, Pengesahan, Pengangkatan dan Pemberhentian Kepala Daerah dan Wakil Kepala DaerahUndang-Undang No. 32 Tahun 2004, Tentang Pemerintah DaerahInternet, google@www.maluku utara.
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John M. Hobson on Eurocentrism, Historical Sociology and the Curious Case of Postcolonialism
International Relations, it is widely recognized, is a Western discipline, albeit one that claims to speak for global conditions. What does that mean are these regional origins in and by themselves a stake in power politics? This Eurocentrism is often taken as a point of departure for denouncing mainstream approaches by self-proclaimed critical and postcolonialist approaches to IR. John Hobson stages a more radical attack on Eurocentrism, in which western critical theories, too, are complicit in the perpetuation of a dominantly western outlook. In this extensive Talk, Hobson, among others, expounds his understanding of Eurocentrism, discusses the imperative to historicize IR, and sketches the outline of possible venues of emancipation from our provincial predicament.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
In my view, there are two principal inter-related challenges that face IR. The first is the need to deal with the critique that the discipline is constructed on Eurocentric foundations. This matters both for critical and conventional IR. The latter insists that it works according to value-free positivistic/scientifistic principles. But if it is skewed by an underlying Western-centric bias, as I have contended in my work, then the positivist mantra turns out to constitute a smokescreen or veil behind which lies the dark Eurocentric face of conventional IR. And of course, if Eurocentrism in various forms infects much of critical IR, then it jeopardizes its critical credentials and risks falling back into problem-solving theory. For these reasons, then, I feel that the critique of Eurocentric IR and international political economy (IPE) poses nothing short of an intellectually existential challenge to these disciplines.
The second inter-related challenge is that if we accept that the discipline is essentially Eurocentric then we need to reconstruct IR's foundations on a non-Eurocentric basis and then advance an alternative non-Eurocentric research agenda and empirical analysis of the international system and the global political economy. This is a straightforward challenge vis-à-vis conventional IR/IPE theory but it is more problematic so far as critical IR/IPE is concerned (which is why my answer is somewhat extended). The more postmodern wing of the discipline would view with inherent skepticism any attempt to reconstruct some kind of (albeit alternative) grand narrative. And the postmodern postcolonialists would likely concur. It is at this point that the thorniest issue emerges in the context of postcolonial IR theory. For however hard this is to say, I feel that simply proclaiming the Eurocentric foundations of the discipline does not hole its constituent theories deep beneath the waterline; a claim that abrades with the view of most postcolonialists who view Eurocentrism as inherently illegitimate either because it renders it imperialist (which I view as problematic since there are significant strands of anti-imperialist Eurocentrism and scientific racism) or because they conflate Eurocentrism with the unacceptable politics of (scientific) racism (which I also find problematic notwithstanding the point that there are all manner of overlaps and synergies between these two generic Western-centric discourses, all of which is explained in my 2012 book, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics). The key point—one which will undoubtedly get me into a lot of trouble with postcolonialists—is that I feel we need to recognize that in the end Eurocentric IR (and IPE) theory constitutes a stand-point approach, just like any other, and its merits or de-merits can ultimately only be evaluated against the empirical record, past and present (notwithstanding the points that I find Eurocentrism to be deeply biased and that what I find so deeply galling about it is its dismissive 'put-down' modus operandi of all things non-Western, wherein all non-Western achievements are dismissed outright, alongside the simultaneous (re)presentation of everything that the West does as progressive and/or pioneering).
So the second principal challenge facing the discipline—one which will no less get me into trouble with many postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers—is the need to reconstruct an alternative non-Eurocentric set of disciplinary foundations, which can then generate fresh empirical narratives of the international system and the global political economy. For my view is that only by offering an alternative research agenda and empirical analysis of the world economy can IR and IPE be set free from their extant Eurocentric straitjackets and the Sisyphean prison within which they remain confined, wherein IR and IPE scholars simply re-present or recycle tired old Eurocentric mantras and tropes in new clothing ad infinitum. For if nothing else, the absence of an alternative reconstruction and empirical analysis means that IR and IPE scholars are most likely simply to default to, or retreat back into, their Eurocentric comfort zone. Accordingly, then, the battle between Eurocentrism and non-Eurocentrism needs to be taken to the empirical field and away from the high and rarified intellectually mountainous terrain of metanarratival sparring contests.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?
Another way of asking this question would be: what influenced you to become a non-Eurocentric thinker? I get asked this question a lot, especially by non-white people. A good deal of this is related to my life-experience, much of which is sub-conscious of course and both too personal and too detailed to openly reflect upon here (sorry!) More objectively, the initial impetus came around 1999 when I came across a book on Max Weber by the well-respected Weberian scholar, Bryan Turner, in which he argued inter alia that Weber's sociology had Orientalist properties; none of which had occurred to me before. Following this up further I became convinced that Weber was indeed Eurocentric, as was Marx. More importantly, I came to see this as a huge problem that infected not just Marx and Weber but pretty much all of historical sociology (which was reinforced in my mind when I came to read James Blaut's books, The Colonizer's Model of the World (find it here), and Eight Eurocentric Historians). So I set out to develop an alternative non-Eurocentric approach to world history and historical sociology as a counter (which resulted in my 2004 book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation).
Two further key IR texts that I became aware of were L.H.M. Ling's seminal 2002 book, Postcolonial International Relations and Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney's equally brilliant 2004 book International Relations and the Problem of Difference, both of which led me to explore further the Eurocentric nature of IR and later IPE. But it would be remiss of me not to mention the influence of Albert Paolini; a wonderful colleague whom I had the pleasure to know at La Trobe University in Melbourne back in the early 1990s before his exceedingly unfortunate and premature death (and who, I must say, was way ahead of the game compared to me in terms of developing the critique of Eurocentrism in IR (see his book, Navigating Modernity (1997)). However, it would be unfair to the many others who have influenced me in countless ways to single out only these books and writers, though I hope you'll forgive me for not mentioning them so as to avoid providing yet another overly extended answer!
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
This is an excellent but very challenging question and I want to try and make a succinct answer (though I shall build on it in some of the answers I will provide later on). The essential argument I make about 'thinking inter-culturally' is that while the more liberal side of the discipline thinks that its cosmopolitanism does just this, its Eurocentrism actually prevents it from fulfilling this. Because ultimately, cosmopolitanism wants to impose a Western standard of civilization upon the world, thereby advancing cultural monism rather than cultural pluralism. And this is merely the loudest expression of a spectre that haunts much of the discipline. But I guess that in the end, to achieve genuine cultural pluralism and to think inter-culturally requires us to take seriously how other non-Western peoples think of what their cultures comprise and what it means to them, and how their societies and states work along such lines. Dismissing them, as Eurocentrism always does, as inferior, backward and regressive denies this requirement outright. Interestingly, my great grandfather, J.A. Hobson flirted with this idea in his book, Imperialism: A Study (though this has largely escaped the notice of most people since few have read the more important second part of that book where all this is considered). But this is merely a first step, for as I will explain later on in the interview, ultimately thinking inter-culturally requires an analysis of the dialogical inter-connections and mutual co-constitutive relations between West and non-West which, in turn, presupposes not merely the presence of Western agency but also that of non-Western agency in the making of world politics and the global political economy.
All of which is clearly a massive challenge and I am certainly not advocating that the discipline of IR engage in deep ethnographical study and that it should morph into anthropology. And in any case I think that there are things we can do more generally to transcend Eurocentrism while learning more about the other side of the Eurocentric frontier without going to this extreme. I shall talk about such conceptual moves later on in this interview. One such theoretical move that I talk about later is the need to engage historical sociology (albeit from a non-Eurocentric perspective) or, more precisely global historical sociology. Again, though, I'm not advocating that the discipline should morph into historical sociology. And I'm aware that one of the biggest obstacles to IR making inroads into historical sociology is the sheer size of the task that this requires. It has always come naturally to me because that is where I came from before I joined the IR academic community. But there is quite a bit of historical sociology of IR out there now so I do think it possible for new PhD students to enter this fold. All of this said, though, I'm unsure if I have answered your question adequately.
The west is often seen as the source of globalization and innovation, which have historically radiated outwards in a process without seeming endpoint. What is wrong with this picture, and, perhaps more interestingly, why does it remain so pervasive?
In essence I believe this familiar picture—one which is embraced by conventional and many critical IR/IPE and globalization theorists—is wrong because this linear Western narrative brackets out all the many inputs that the non-West has made (which returns me to the point made a moment ago concerning the dialogical relations that have long existed between West and non-West). In my aforementioned 2004 book I argued that the West did not rise to modernity as a result of its own exceptional rational institutions and culture but was significantly enabled by many non-Western achievements and inventions which were borrowed and sometimes appropriated by the West. In short, without the Rest there might be no modern West. Moreover, while the West has been the principal actor in globalization since 1945, the globalization that preceded it (i.e., between 1492 and c.1830) was non-Western-led (as was the process of Afro-Eurasian regionalization that occurred between c.600 and 1492 out of which post-1492 globalization emerged). And even after 1945 I believe that non-Western actors have played various roles in shaping both globalization and the West, all of which are elided in the standard Eurocentric linear Western narrative of globalization.
But why has this image remained so persistent? This is potentially a massive question though it is a very important one for sure. Conventional theorists are most likely to disagree outright with my alternative picture in part because they are entirely comfortable with the notion that the 'West is best' and that the West single-handedly created capitalism, the sovereign inter-state system and the global economy. Critical theorists are rather more problematic to summarize here. But one that springs to mind is the type of argument that Immanuel Wallerstein (Theory Talk #13) made in a1997 article, in which he insisted that it be an imperative to hold the West accountable for everything that goes on in the world economy so that we can prosecute its crimes against the world. Arguments that bring non-Western agency in, as I seek to do, he dismisses as deflecting focus away from the West and thereby diluting the nature of the crimes that the West has imparted and therefore serves merely to weaken the case for the critical prosecution. I fundamentally disagree with him for reasons that I shan't go into here (but will touch upon below). But in my view it is (or should be) a key debate-in-the-making not least because I suspect that many other critical theorists might agree with him and, more importantly, because it brings fundamentally into question of what Eurocentrism is and of what the antidote to it comprises. Either way, though, critical theorists, at least in my view, often buy into the Western linear narrative, albeit not by celebrating the West but by critiquing it. All of which means that both conventional and many critical IR scholars effectively maintain the hegemony of Eurocentrism in the discipline though for diametrically opposed reasons; and which, at the risk of sounding paranoid, suggests a deeply subliminal conspiracy against the introduction of non-Eurocentrism.
Nevertheless one final but rather obvious point remains. For the biggest reason why Eurocentrism persists is because it makes Westerners feel good about themselves. And at the risk of sounding like sour grapes (notwithstanding very decent sales for my non-Eurocentric books), I have been struck by the fact that there seems to be an insatiable appetite—particularly among the Western public readership—for high profile Eurocentric books that celebrate and glorify Western civilization; though, to be brutally frank, many of these rarely add anything new to that which has been said countless times in the last 50 years, if not 200—notwithstanding Ricardo Duchesne's recent avowedly Eurocentric book The Uniqueness of Western Civilization as constituting a rare exception in this regard. All of which means that writing non-Eurocentric books is unlikely to get your name onto the bestseller list (though granted, the same is true for many of the Eurocentric books that have been written!)
International theory and political theory originates mainly from Europe, but makes universal claims about the nature of politics. How does international theory betray its situated roots and how do these roots matter for how we should think about theory?
I'm not sure that I can answer this question in the space allowed but I'll try and get to the broad-brush take-home point. I guess that when thinking about modern IR theory we can find those theorists who in effect advocate a normative Western imperialist posture even if they claim to be doing otherwise. Robert Gilpin's work on hegemonic stability theory is perhaps the clearest example in this respect. Anglo-Saxon hegemony, he claims, is non-imperialist because it always seeks to help the rest of the world, not exploit it. But the exercise of hegemony, it turns out, returns us to the old 19th century trope of the civilizing mission where Western practices and principles are transferred and imposed on non-Western societies in order to culturally convert them along Western lines. And this in turn issues from the assumption that the British and American interests are not selfish but are universal. This mantra is there too in Robert Keohane's (Theory Talk #9) book, After Hegemony, where cultural conversion of non-Western societies to a neoliberal standard of civilization by the international financial institutions through structural adjustment is approved of; an argument that is developed much more expansively in his later work on humanitarian intervention. And this trope forms the basis of cosmopolitan humanitarian interventionist theory more generally, where state reconstruction, which is imposed once military intervention has finished, is all about re-creating Western political and economic institutions across the world. I don't doubt for a moment the sincerity of the arguments that these authors make. But they can make them only because they believe that the Western interest is truly the universal. In such ways, then, IR betrays its roots.
Ultimately, Western IR theory constructs a hierarchical conception of the world with the West standing atop and from there we receive an image of a procession or sliding scale of gradated sovereignties in the non-Western world. For much of IR theory that has neo-imperialist normative underpinnings, it is this construction which legitimizes Western intervention in the non-Western world, thereby reproducing the legal conception of the (imperialist) standard of civilization that underpinned late 19th century positive law. Nevertheless, there has been a significant strand of anti-imperialist Eurocentrism within international theory (and before it a strand of anti-imperialist scientific racism, as in the likes of Charles HenryPearson and LothropStoddard). But once again, as we find in Samuel Huntington's famous 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations—which comprises a modern equivalent of Lothrop Stoddard's Eugenicist texts, The Rising Tideof Color (1920) and Clashing Tides of Color (1935)—the West is held up as the highest expression of civilization, with non-Western societies viewed as socially inferior such that the West's mandate is not to imperially intervene across the world but to renew its uniquely Western civilized culture in the face of regressive and rampant non-Western regions and countries (particularly Middle Eastern Islam and Confucian China). Hedley Bull's anti-imperialist English School argument provides a complementary variant here because, he argues, it is the refusal of non-Western states to become Western wherein the source of the (unacceptable) instability of the global international society ultimately stems. All of which, as you allude to in your question, rests on the conflation of the Western interest with the universal. It is for this reason, then, that the cardinal principle of critical non-Eurocentrism comprises the need to undertake deep (self) reflexivity and to remain constantly vigilant to Eurocentric slippages.
In turn, this returns me to the point I made before: that IR theory does not think inter-culturally because it denies the validity of non-Western cultures. Because it does so, then it ultimately denies the full sovereignty of non-Western states. For one of the trappings of sovereignty is what Gerry Simpson usefully refers to as 'existential equality', or 'cultural self-determination'. It seems clear to me that the majority of IR theory effectively denies the sovereignty of non-Western states because it rejects cultural pluralism and hence cultural self-determination as a function of its intolerant Eurocentric monism. The biggest ironies that emerge here, however, are two-fold; or what I call the twin self-delusions of IR. First, while conventional IR theory proclaims its positivist, value free credentials that sit comfortably with cultural pluralist tolerance, nevertheless as I argued in my answer to your first question, this positivist mantra turns out to constitute a smokescreen or veil behind which lies the face of intolerant Eurocentric cultural monism. And second, it means that while IR proclaims that its subject matter comprises the objective analysis of the international system which focuses on anarchy and the sovereign state, nevertheless it turns out that what it is really all about is narrating an analysis of Western hierarchy and the 'hyper-sovereignty' of Western states versus the 'conditional sovereignty/gradated sovereignty' of non-Western states.
Linking your work to Lizée's as a critique of extrapolating 'universals' on the basis of narrow (Western) experiences, Patrick Jackson (Theory Talk #44) wrote as follows: 'Perhaps the cure for the disease that Hobson and Lizée diagnose is a rethinking of what "theory" means beyond empirical generalizations, so that future international theorists can avoid the sins of the past.' What is your conception of what theory is or should be?
As noted already, I am all in favor of developing non-Eurocentric theory. To sketch this out in the most generic terms I begin with the proposition that Eurocentric IR/IPE theory is monological, producing a reductive narrative in which only the West talks and acts. It is essentially a 'winner/loser' paradigm that proclaims the non-West as the loser or is always on the receiving end of that which the West does, thereby ensuring that central analytical focus is accorded to the hyper-agency of the Western winner. And its conception of agency is based on having predominant power. We find this problem particularly within much of critical IR theory, where because the West is dominant so it qualifies as having (hyper) agency while the subordinate position of the non-West means that it has little or no agency. In turn, particularly within conventional IR and IPE we encounter a substantialist ontology, where the West is thought to occupy a distinct and autonomous domain. From there everything else follows. And even in parts of critical IR and IPE where relationalism holds greater sway we often find that the West still occupies the center of intellectual gravity in the world.
My preference is for a fully relationalist approach which replaces the monologism of Eurocentrism and its reification of the West with the aforementioned conception of dialogism that brings the non-West into the discussion while simultaneously focusing on the mutually constitutive relations between Western and non-Western actors. It also allows for the agency of the non-West alongside the West's agency (even though clearly after c.1830 the West has been the dominant actor). This in effect replaces Eurocentrism's either/or problematique with a both/and logic, enabling us to reveal a space in which non-Western agency plays important roles without losing focus of Western agency, even when it takes a dominant form as it did after c.1830. In this way then, to reply to Wallerstein's argument discussed earlier, one does not have to dilute the critique of the West when bringing non-Western agency in for both can be situated alongside each other. While I could of course say much more here, these conceptual moves are paramount to me and inform the basis of my empirical work on the international system and the global political economy.
All in all, IR theory needs to take a fully global conception of agency much more seriously; structuralist theory in its many guises is necessary but is ultimately insufficient since it diminishes or dismisses outright the prospect or existence of non-Western agency. Moreover, I seek to blend materialism and non-materialism, which means that neither constructivism nor poststructuralism can quite get us over the line. Even so, blending materialism and non-materialism is not an especially hard task to achieve though IR's preferred ontologically reductionist stance certainly makes this a counter-intuitive proposition.
You combine historical sociology with international relations. What promises does this interdisciplinary approach hold? Why do we need historical sociologies of IR?
Following on from my previous answer I argue that a relationalist non-Eurocentric historical sociology of IR is able to problematize the entities that IR takes for granted—states, anarchy (as well as societies and civilizations)—in order to reveal them, to quote from the marvelous introduction that Julian Go and George Lawson have written for their forthcoming edited volume Global Historical Sociology, as 'entities in motion'. Indeed such entities are never quite complete but change through time. Here it is worth quoting Go and Lawson further, where they argue that
'social forms are "entities-in-motion": they are produced, reproduced, and breakdown through the agency of historically situated actors. Such entities-in-motion, whether they are states, empires, or civilizations often appear to be static entities with certain pre-determined identities and interests. But the relational premise, and perhaps promise, of GHS is its attempt to denaturalize such entities by holding them up to historical scrutiny'.
It is precisely this global historical sociological problematique that underpins the approach that I develop in a forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Reorient International Political Economy where inter alia, I show how many of the major processes of the global economy are never complete but are constantly mutating as they are shaped by the multiple interactions of Western and non-Western actors. To take the origins of capitalism or globalization as an example, I show how these have taken not a Western linear trajectory but a highly discontinuous path as West and non-West have interacted in complex ways.
A good number of IR historical sociologists have focused specifically on particular historical issues—especially that of the rise of the sovereign state in Europe. Such analyses have in my view proven to be extremely valuable because they allow us to puncture some of the myths that surround 'Westphalia' that populate standard or conventional IR reportage (particularly that found in undergraduate text-books). But ultimately I feel that the greatest worth of the historical sociology of IR project lies in using history (understood in historical-sociological terms rather than according to traditional historians' precepts) as a means of problematizing our understanding of the present international system and global political economy. Thus, for me, historical sociology is ultimately important because it can disrupt our understanding and explanations of the present. And I believe that this kind of inter-disciplinarity can bear considerable fruit (notwithstanding the difficulty that this task poses for IR scholars).
You famously criticized IR's Eurocentrism and argued for the need for inter-cultural thinking. What is inter-cultural thinking and how can it benefit IR?
As I already discussed what inter-cultural thinking is a bit before, I shall consider how it might benefit IR and indeed the world in various ways. First, if the rise of the West into modernity owes much of this achievement to the help provided by non-Western ideas, institutions and technologies, then acknowledging this debt could go a long way to healing the wounds that the West has inflicted upon the non-West's sense of self-esteem. Moreover, the hubristic claim ushered in by Eurocentrism, that the West made it to the top all by itself and that the very societies which helped it get there are then immediately denounced as inferior and uncivilized, significantly furnishes the West with the imperialist mandate to intervene and remake non-Western societies in the image of the West. So in essence, the help that the once-more advanced non-Western societies that the West benefited from is rewarded by 150 years of imperial punishment! Of course, IR scholars do not really study the rise of the West, but it is implicit in so much of what they write about. So acknowledging this debt could challenge the West's self-appointed mandate to remake the world in its own image as well as problematize many of the historical assumptions that lie either explicitly or implicitly within IR.
Second, and flowing on from the previous point, thinking inter-culturally means recognizing the manifold roles that the non-West has played in shaping the rise of Western capitalism and the sovereign state system as well as the global economy, as I have just argued, but also appreciating their societies and cultures on their own terms rather than simply dismissing them as unfit for purpose in the modern world. Less Western Messianism and Western hubris, more global understanding and empathy, is ultimately what I'm calling for. But none of this is possible while Eurocentrism remains the go-to modus operandi of IR and IPE. And this is important for IR not least because significant parts of it have informed Western policy, most especially US foreign policy.
Third, a key benefit that inter-cultural thinking could bring to IR is that while the discipline presumes that it furnishes objective analyses of the international system, the upshot of my claim that the discipline is founded on Eurocentrism is that all the discipline is really doing is finding ways to reaffirm the importance of Western civilization in world politics, defending it and often celebrating it, rather than learning or discovering new things about the world and world politics. I believe that only a non-Eurocentric approach can deliver that which IR thinks it's doing already but isn't.
You've said that 'what makes an argument [institutionally] Eurocentric…lies with the nature of the categories that are deployed to understand development. And these ultimately comprise the perceived degree of 'rationality' that is embodied within the political, economic, ideological, and social institutions of a given society.' In order to think inter-culturally, does IR needs new conceptions of rationality, or standards other than rationality altogether?
What an extremely interesting and perceptive question which has really got me thinking! Again, it's something that I've been aware of in the recesses of my mind but have never really thought through. Certainly the essence of Eurocentrism lies in the reification of Western rationality (or what Max Weber called Zweckrationalität) and its simultaneous denial to non-Western societies. But what with all the revelations that have happened in Britain in the last decade, where a seemingly never ending series of fraudulent practices have been uncovered within British public life—whether it be MPs' expenses scandals, banking scandals, newspaper scandals and the like—then one really wonders about the extent to which the West operates according to the properties of Zweck-rationality that Weber proclaimed it to have. Corruption and fraud happen in the West but clearly they are much more hidden than in those instances where it occurs in non-Western countries (notwithstanding the revelations mentioned a moment ago). But if one were to open the lid of many large Western companies, for example, and delve inside one might well find all sorts of 'rationality-compromising' or 'rationality-denial' practices going on. To mention just two obvious examples: first, promotions are often tainted by personal linkages rather than always founded on merit; and second, managers often mark out and protect their own personal position/territory even when it (frequently) goes against the 'rational' interests of the said organization.
To return to your question, then, one could conclude that many Western institutions are far less rational than Eurocentrism proclaims, which in turn would challenge the foundations of Eurocentrism. Of course, corruption and fraud are not unique to the West, but it is the West that proclaims its unique 'rational standard of civilization'. Whether, therefore, we need to abandon the term (Zweck) rationality on the grounds that it is an impossibly conceived ideal type remains the question. Right now I don't have an answer though I'll be happy to mull over this in the coming years.
You've written that engaging with the East 'creates a genuinely global history' and articulate a 'dream wherein the peoples of the Earth can finally sit down at the table of global humanity and communicate as equal partners'. Do you consciously operate with an 'ontology' of 'peoples' and 'civilizations' as opposed to 'individuals'? How do you conceive of the relationship between global humanity and plural peoplehood? Is there an underlying philosophical or anthropological view that you are drawing on in these and similar passages?
Certainly I prefer to think of peoples and even of civilizations rather than individuals and states, though I'll confess right now that dealing theoretically with civilizations and articulating them as units of analysis is extraordinarily challenging. At the moment I leave this side of things to better people than me, such as Peter Katzenstein (Theory Talk #15) and his recentpioneering work on civilizations. The term 'global humanity' concerns me insofar as it is often a politically-loaded term, particularly within cosmopolitanism, where its underbelly comprises the desire to define a single civilizational identity (i.e., a Western one) for 'global humanity'. In essence, cosmopolitanism effectively advances the conception of a 'provincial (i.e., Western) humanity' that masquerades as the global. So I prefer the notion of plural peoplehood, so as to allow for difference. I wouldn't say that I am operating according to a particular philosophical view although it strikes me that such a notion is embodied in Johann Gottfried Herder's work which, on that dimension at least, I am attracted to. But to be honest, this is generally something that I have not explored though it is something that I've thought that I'd like to research for a future book (notwithstanding the point that I'll need to finish the book that I have started first!).
In your reply toErik Ringmar, you draw on psychoanalytic metaphors to discuss the benefits of overcoming Eurocentrism, writing that, 'Eurocentrism leads to the repression and sublimation of the Other in the Self. Thus, doing away with Eurocentrism can end the socio-psychological angst and alienation that necessarily occurs through such sublimation.' How do you envision what we now call the West (or Europe) after its socio-psychological transformation? What does a world after angst and alienation look like? Is it possible, and is that the goal you think IR theory should aim at?
Another massively challenging and fascinating question, let me have a go. Since you raised the issue of socio-psychological/psycho-analytical theory (though it is something that I am no expert on), it has always struck me that Eurocentrism itself is not simply a construct designed to advance Western power and Western capitalist interests in the world. This seems too mechanistic. For recall that it was a series of largely independent sojourners, travel-writers, novelists, journalists and others rather than capitalists who played such an important role in constructing Eurocentrism. Something more seems to be at play. One can think of the battles between 'Mods and Rockers' or Skinheads and heavy metal fans in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, who detested each other simply because they held different identities and prized different cultural values. Most importantly, I feel, the constant need to denounce, put down and dismiss the Other as inferior seems reminiscent of those kinds of people we sometimes meet who, in constantly putting down others to falsely elevate themselves to a position of superiority, ultimately reveals merely their own insecurities. The same issues, of course, underpin racism and Eurocentrism. The West rose to prominence in my view as a late-developer and having got to the top it very quickly came to view its duty as one of punishing all others for being different – all done, of course, in the name of helping or civilizing the very 'global humanity' that had done so much to help the West rise to the top in the first place! And to want to culturally convert everyone in the world according to the Western standard of civilization seems to be symptomatic of a deeply insecure mindset. A secure person or society for that matter does not feel threatened by, but openly embraces, difference.
Can we move beyond this stand-off given that such a mentality has been hard-wired within Western culture for at least three centuries? And ten if you count the sometimes terse relations between Europe and Middle Eastern Islam that emerged after 1095! We need to move beyond an identity that is based only on putting others down. It's 'bad karma' and, like all bad karma, damages the Western self, not just the non-Western other. But to transcend this identity-formation process requires us to do away with logocentrism; clearly a very big task. Nevertheless, that is exactly what my writings are all about. And it is something that I think IR theory needs to strive to achieve. Because IR theory is to an extent performative then I live in the hope, at least, that such a mentality might, just might somehow seep into international public life, though if it were to happen I strongly suspect that I would not be around to see it. Still, your question—what would a world beyond Eurocentrism look like?—though very important is nevertheless perhaps too difficult to answer without seeming like a hopeless idealist… other than to say that it could be rather better than the current one.
You write that 'IPE should aim to be an über-discipline, drawing on a wide range of disciplines in order to craft a knowledge base that refuses to become lost in disciplinary over-specialization and the depressing academic narcissism of disciplinary methodological differentiation and exclusion.' Why do you prefer that IPE should be the überdiscipline, instead of IR (or something else altogether), with IPE as a subset?
My degree was in Political Economy, my Masters in Political Sociology and my PhD in Historical Sociology and (International) Political Economy. Despite the fact that the majority of my academic career to date has been in IR research, I have always returned at various points to my old haunting ground, IPE (as I have most recently). I have always found IR a little alienating for its reification of politics, divorced from political economy. I'm not a Marxist, but I share in the view that political economy, if not always directly underpinning developments and events in the international system is, however, never far away.
The quote that you took for this question came from the end of my 2-part article that came out in the 20th anniversary edition of Review of International Political Economy. This was partly responding to Benjamin Cohen's (Theory Talk #17) 2008 seminal book, International Political Economy: A Intellectual History. One of the challenges that I issued to my IPE readership, echoing Cohen, is the need for IPE to return to 'thinking big' (in large part as a reaction to the massive contraction of the discipline's boundaries that has been effected by third wave American IPE, which labors under the intellectual hegemony of Open Economy Politics). In that context, then, I argued that IPE needs to expand its boundaries outwards not only to allow big or macro-scale issues to return to the discipline's research agenda but also to incorporate insight from other disciplines. For in my view IPE has the potential to blend the insights of many other disciplines that can in turn transcend the sometimes myopic or tunnel-vision-based nature of their particular constituent specialisms.
One of the implications of 'thinking big' is that IPE should be able to cover much of that which IR does… and more. Like Susan Strange, who expressed her exasperation with IR for its exclusion of politico-economic matters, so I feel that the solution lies not with IR colonizing IPE (which is not likely for the foreseeable future!) but with IPE expanding its currently narrow remit. If it could achieve this it could become the 'über-discipline', or the 'master discipline', of the Social Sciences, notwithstanding the point that my postcolonial and feminist friends will no doubt upbraid me for using such terrible terms!
Final question. Beyond the East outside the West, Greece is now being remade as the 'East' within the West, with a range of measures applied to it that had hitherto been the preserve for the 'East' or Global South. How can your work help to make sense of the stakes?
Your question reminds me of a similar one that I was asked in an interview for Cumhurieyet Strateji Magazine concerning Turkey's ongoing efforts to join the EU, the essence of my answer comprising: 'be careful what you wish for'. One of the things that I have felt uneasy about is the way, as I see it (and I might not be quite right in saying this), that European Studies (as a sub-discipline) sometimes appears as rather self-affirming, thereby reflecting the core self-congratulatory modus operandi of the EU. I am not anti-European or in any way ashamed to be Western (as some of my critics might think). But I'm deeply uneasy about the EU project, specifically in terms of its desire to expand outwards, not to mention inwards as we are seeing in the case of Greece today. For this has the whiff of the old civilizing mission that had supposedly been put to rest back at the time of the origins of the European Economic Community. Although Greece is a member of the EU (notwithstanding its non-European roots), it seems clear that what is going on today is a process of intensified internal colonization under the hegemony of Germany, wherein Greece is subjected to the German standard of civilization. All of which brings into question the self-glorification of the self-proclaimed 'socially progressive' EU project. And to return to my discussion of Turkey I recognize that candidate countries have their reasons for wanting to join the EU. But I guess that what my work is ultimately about is restoring a sense of dignity to non-Western peoples, in the absence of which they will continue to self-deprecate and live in angst in the long cold shadow of the West. All of which brings me back to the answers I made to quite a few of the earlier questions. So I would like to close by saying how much I have enjoyed answering your extremely well-informed questions and to thank you most sincerely for inviting me to address them.
Professor Hobson gained his PhD from the LSE (1991), joined the University of Sheffield as Reader and is currently Professor of Politics and International Relations. Previously he taught at La Trobe University, Melbourne (1991–97) and the University of Sydney (1997–2004). His main research interest concerns the area of inter-civilizational relations and everyday political economy in the context of globalization, past and present. His work is principally involved in carrying forward the critique of Eurocentrism in World History/Historical Sociology, and International Relations.
Related links
Faculty Profile at the University of Sheffield Read Hobson's The Postcolonial Paradox of Eastern Agency (Perceptions 2014) here (pdf) Read Hobson's Is critical theory always for the white West and for Western imperialism? (Review of International Studies 2007) here (pdf)
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The study of International Relations is founded on a series of assumptions that originate in the monotheistic traditions of the West. For Siba Grovogui, this realization provoked him to question not only IR but to broaden his enquiries into a multidisciplinary endeavor that encompasses law and anthropology, journalism and linguistics, and is informed by stories and lessons from Guinea. In this Talk, he discusses the importance of human encounters and the problem with the Hegelian logic which distorts our understanding of our own intellectual development and the trajectory of the discipline of IR.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
I don't want to be evasive, but I actually don't think that International Relations as a field has an object today. And that is the problem with International Relations since Martin Wight and Stanley Hoffmann and all of those people debated what International Relations was, whether it was an American discipline, etc. I believe you can look at International Relations in multiple ways: if you think of à la Hoffmann, as a tool of dominant power, International Relations is to this empire what anthropology was to the last. This not only has to do with the predicates upon which it was founded initially but with its aspirations, for International Relations shares with Anthropology the ambition to know Man—and I am using here a very antiquated language, but that is what it was then—to know Man in certain capacities. In the last empire, anthropology focused on the cultural dimension and, correspondingly separated culture from civilization in a manner that placed other regions of the world in subsidiarity vis-à-vis Europe and European empires. In the reigning empire, IR has focused on the management and administration of an empire that never spoke its name, reason, or subject.
Now you can believe all the stories about liberalism and all of that stuff, but although it was predicated upon different assumptions, the ambition is still the same: it is actually to know Man, the way in which society is organized, to know how the entities function, etc. If you look at it that way, then International Relations cannot be the extension of any country's foreign policy, however significant. This is not to say that the foreign policies of the big countries do not matter: it would be foolish not to study them and take them into account, because they have greater impact than smaller countries obviously. But International Relations is not—or should not be—the extension of any country's foreign policy, nor should it be seen as the agglomeration of a certain restricted number of foreign policies. International Relations suggests, again, interest in the configurations of material, moral, and symbolic spaces as well as dynamics resulting from the relations of moral and social entities presumed to be of equal moral standings and capacities.
If one sees it that way then we must reimagine what International Relations should be. Foreign policy would be an important dimension of it, but the field of foreign policy must be understood primarily in terms of its explanations and justifications—regardless of whether these are bundled up as realism, liberalism, or other. Today, these fields provide different ways of explaining to the West, for itself, as a rational decision, or a justification to the rest, that what it has done over the past five centuries, from conquest to colonization and slavery and colonialism, is 'natural' and that any political entities similarly situated would have done it in that same manner. It follows therefore that this is how things should be. Those justifications, explanations, and rationalizations of foreign policy decisions and events are important to understand as windows into the manners in which certain regions and political entities have construed value, interest, and ethics. But they still belong, in some significant way, to a different domain than what is implied by the concept of IR.
I am therefore curious about the so-called debates about the nature of politics and the proper applicable science or approach to historical foreign policy realms and domains, particularly those of the West: I don't consider those debates to be 'big debates' in International Relations, because they are really about how the West sees itself and justifies itself and how it wants to be seen, and thus as rational. For the West (as assumed by so-called Western scholars), these debates extend the tradition of exculpating the West and seeing the West as the regenerative, redemptive, and progressive force in the world. All of that language is about that. So when you say to me, what are the debates, I don't know what they are, so far, really, in International Relations. The constitution of the 'international', the contours and effects of the imaginaries of its constituents, and the actualized and attainable material and symbolic spaces within it to realize justice, peace, and a sustainable order have thus far eluded the authoritative disciplinary traditions.
Consider the question of China today, as it is posed in the West. The China question, too, emerges from a particular foreign policy rationale, which may be important and particular ways to some people or constituencies in the West but not in the same way to others, for instance in Africa. The narrowness of the framing of the China question is why in the West many are baffled about how Africa has been receiving China, and China's entry into Latin America, etc. In relation to aid, for instance, if you are an African of a certain age, or you know some history, you will know that China formulated its foreign aid policy in 1964 and that nothing has changed. And there are other elements, such as foreign intervention and responsibility to self and others where China has had a distinct trajectory in Africa.
In some regard, China may even be closer in outlook to postcolonial African states than the former colonial powers. For instance, neither China nor African states consider the responsibility to protect, to be essentially Western. In this regard, it is worth bearing in mind for instance that Tanzania intervened in Uganda to depose Idi Amin in 1979; Vietnam ended the Khmer Rouge tyranny in Cambodia in 1979; India intervened in Bangladesh in 1971—it wasn't the West. So those kinds of understandings of responsibility, in the way they are framed today in the post-Cold War period, superimposes ideas of responsibility that were already there and were formulated in Bandung in 1955: differences between intervention and interference, the latter of which today comes coded as regime change, were actually hardly debated. So our imaginaries of the world and how it works, of responsibility, of ethics, etc., have always had to compete with those that were formulated since the seventeenth century in Europe, as "international ethics", "international law", "international theory". And in fact that long history full of sliding concepts and similar meanings may be one of the problems for understanding how the world came into being as we know it today. And this is why actually my classes here always begin with a semester-long discussion of hermeneutics, of historiography, and of ethnography in IR and how they have been incorporated.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I came to where I am now essentially because of a sense of frustration, that we have a discipline that calls itself "international" and yet seemed to be speaking either univocally or unidirectionally: univocally in imagining the world and unidirectionally in the way it addresses the rest of the world, and a lot of problems result from that.
I had trained as a lawyer in Guinea, and when I came to the US I imagined that International Relations would be taught at law school, which is the case in France, most of the time, and also in some places in Germany in the past, because it is considered a normative science there. But when I came here I was shocked to discover that it was going to be in a field called Political Science, but I went along with it anyway. In the end I did a double major: in law, at the law school in Madison, Wisconsin, and in political science. When I came to America and went the University of Wisconsin, I first took a class called "Nuclear Weapons and World Politics" or something of the sort, it was more theology and less science. It was basically articulated around chosen people and non-chosen people, those who deserve to have weapons and those who don't. There was no rationale, no discussion of which countries respected the Non-Proliferation Treaty, no reasoning in terms of which countries had been wiser than others in using weapons of mass destruction, etc.: there was nothing to it except the underlying, intuitive belief that if something has to be done, we do it and other people don't. I'm being crass here, but let's face it: this was a course I took in the 1980s and it is still the same today! So I began to feel that this is really more theology and less science. Yes, it was all neatly wrapped in rationalism, in game theory, all of these things. So I began to ask myself deeper questions, outside of the ones they were asking, so my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics class was really what bothered me, or you could say it was some kind of trigger.
This way of seeing IR is related to the fact that I don't share the implicit monotheist underpinnings of the discipline. That translates into my perhaps unorthodox teaching style, unorthodox within American academia anyway. Teaching all too often tends to be less about understanding the world and more about proselytizing. In order to try to explore this understanding I like to bring my students to consider the world that has existed, to imagine that sovereignty and politics can be structured differently, especially outside of monotheism with its likening of the sovereign to god, the hierarchy modeled on the church, Saint Peter, Jesus, God, uniformity and the power of life (to kill or let live), and to understand that there have always been places where the sovereign was not in fact that revered. Think of India, for example, where people have multiple gods, and some are mischievous, some are promiscuous, some are happy and some are mean, so there are lots of conceptions and some of these don't translate well into different cultural contexts. The same, incidentally, goes for the Greek gods. Of course, we had to make the Greeks Christians first, before we drew our lineage to them. You see what I mean? Christianity left a very deep impact on Western traditions. Whether you think of political parties and a parallel to the Catholic orders: if you are a Jesuit, the Jesuits are always right; if you are a Franciscan, the Franciscans are always right. The Franciscans for instance think they have the monopoly on Christian social teaching. In a similar way, it doesn't matter what your political party does, you follow whatever your party says. The same thing happens when you study: are you a realist, are you liberalist, etc. You are replicating the Jesuits, the Franciscans, those monks and their orders. But we are all caught within that logic, of tying ourselves into one school of thought and going along with one "truth" over another, instead of permitting multiple takes on reality..
For me, as a non-monotheist myself, everything revolves around this question of truth: whether truth is given or has to be found and how we find it. Truth has to be found, discovered, revealed—we have to continuously search. The significant point is that we never find it absolutely. Truth is always provisional, circumstantial, and pertinent to a context or situation. We all want truth and it is always evading us, but we must look for it. But I don't think that truth is given. It is in the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah. And I am comfortable with that but I am not in the realm of theology. I dwell on human truths and humans are imperfect and not omniscient, at least not so individually.
If I had the truth, then I might be one of those dictators governing in Africa today. I was raised a Catholic by the way, I almost went to the seminary. If you just think through the story of the Revelation in profane terms, you come to the realization that ours are multiple revelations. Again in theology, one truth is given at a time—the Temple Mount, the Tablets, and all that stuff—but that is not in our province. I leave that to a different province and that is unattainable to me. The kind of revelation I want is the one that goes through observing, through looking, through deliberating, through inquiry—that I am comfortable with. There can be a revelation in terms of meeting the unexpected, for example: when I went to the New World, to Latin America for the first time, I said, 'wow, this is interesting'. That was through my own senses, but it had a lot to do with the way I prepared myself in order to receive the world and to interact with the world. That kind of revelation I believe in. The other one is beyond me and I'm not interested in that. When I want to be very blasphemous, even though I was raised a Catholic, I tell my students: the problem with the Temple Mount is that God did not have a Twitter account, so the rest of us didn't hear it—we were not informed. I don't have the truth, and I don't really don't want to have it.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I am not sure I want to make a canonical recommendation, if that's what you are asking me for. Let me tell you this: I have trained about eleven PhD students, and none of them has ever done what I do. I am not interested in having clones, I don't want to recreate theology, and in fact I feel this question to betray a very Western disposition, by implying the need to create canons and theology. I don't want that. What I want is to understand the world, and understanding can be done in multiple ways: people do it through music, through art, through multiple things. The problem for me, however, is actually the elements, assumptions, predicates of studies and languages that we use in IR, the question to whom they make sense—I am talking about the types of ethnographies, the ways in which we talk about diplomatic history, and all of those things. The graduate courses that I was talking about have multiple dimensions, but there are times in my seminars here where I just take a look at events like what happened in the New World from 1492 to 1600. This allows me to talk about human encounters. The ones we have recorded, of people who are mutually unintelligible, are the ones that took place on this continent, the so-called New World. And what this does is that it allows me to talk about encounters, to talk about all of the possibilities—you know the ones most people talk about in cultural studies like creolization, hybridization, and all those things—and all of the others things that happened also which are not so helpful, such as violence, usurpation, and so forth.
What that allows me to do is to cut through all this nonsense—yes I am going to call it nonsense—that projects the image that what we do today goes back to Thucydides and has been handed down to us through history to today. There are many strands of thought like that. If you think about thought, and Western thought in general, all of those historically rooted and contingent strands of thought have something to do with how we construct social scientific fields of analysis today—realism, liberalism, etc.—so I'm not dispensing with that. What I'm saying is that history itself has very little to do with those strands of thought, and that people who came here—obviously you had scientists who came to the New World—but the policies on the ground had nothing to do with Thucydides, nothing to do with Machiavelli, etc. Their practices actually had more to do with the violence that propelled those Europeans from their own countries in seeking refuge, and how that violence shaped them, the kind of attachments they had. But it also had to do with the kind of cultural disposition here, and the manner in which people were able to cope, or not. Because that's where we are today in the post-Cold War era, the age of globalization, we must provide analyses that are germane to how the constituents (or constitutive elements) of the historically constituted 'international' are coping with our collective inheritance. For me, this approach is actually much more instructive. This has nothing to do with the Melian Dialogue and the like.
All of the stuff projected today as canonical is interesting to me but only in limited ways. I actually read the classics and have had my students read them, but try to get my students to read them as a resource for understanding where we are today and how we were led there, rather than as a resource for justifying or legitimating the manner in which European conducted their 'foreign' policies or their actions in the New World. No. I know enough to know that no action in the New World or elsewhere was pre-ordained, unavoidable, or inevitable. The resulting political entities in the West must assume the manners in which they acted. It is history, literally. And of course we know through Voltaire, we know through Montaigne, we know even through Roger Bacon, that even in those times people realized that in fact the world had not been made and hence had not been before as it would become later; that other ways were (and still) are possible; and that the pathologies of the violence of religious and civil wars in Europe conditioned some the behaviours displayed in the New World and Africa during conquest and enslavement.
For the same reason I recommend students to read Kant: I tell them to read Kant as a resource for understanding how we might think about the world today, but I am compelled to say often to my students that before Kant, hospitality, and such cultural intermediaries as theDragomans in the Ottoman Empire, the Wangara in West Africa, the Chinese Diaspora in East and Southeast Asia, and so forth, enabled commerce across continents for centuries before Europe was included into the existing trading networks. This is not to dismiss Kant, it is simply to force students to put Kant in conversation with a different trajectory of the development of commercial societies, cross-regional networks, and the movements to envisage laws, rules, and ethics to enable communications among populations and individual groups.
This approach causes many people to ask whether the IR programme at Johns Hopkins really concerns IR theory or something else. I actually often get those kinds of questions, and they are wedded to particular conceptions of IR. I am never able to give a fixed and quick answer but I often illustrate points that I wish to make. Consider how scholars and policymakers relate the question of sovereignty to Africa. Many see African sovereignty as problem, either because they think it is abused or stands in the way of humanitarian or development actions by supposed well-meaning Westerners. I attempt to have my students think twice when sovereignty is evoked in that way: 'sovereignty is a problem; the extents to which sovereignty is a problem in Africa; and why sovereignty is unproblematic in Europe or America'. This questioning and bracketing is not simply a 'postmodernist' evasion of the question.
Rather, I invite my students to reconsider the issue: if sovereignty is your problem, how do you think about the problem? For me, this is a much more interesting question; not what the problem is. For instance, if you start basing everything around a certain mythology of the Westphalia model, particularly when you begin to see everything as either conforming to it (the good) or deviating from it (the bad), then you have lost me. Because before Westphalia there were actually many ways in which sovereigns understood themselves, and therefore organized their realms, and how sovereignty was experienced and appreciated by its subjects. Westphalia is a crucial moment in Europe in these regards—I grant you that. If you want to say what is wrong with Westphalia, that's fine too. But if Westphalia is your starting point, the discussion is unlikely to be productive to me. Seriously!
In your work on political identity in Africa, such as your contribution to the 2012 volume edited by Arlene Tickner and David Blaney, the terms periphery, margin, lack of historicity recur frequently. What regional or perhaps even global representational protagonism can you envisage for IR studies emerging from Africa and its spokespeople?
The subjects of 'periphery' and 'marginalization' come into my own thinking from multiple directions. One of them has to do with the African state and the kind of subsidiarity it has assumed from the colonization onward. That's a critique of the state of affairs and a commentary on how Africa is organized and is governed. But I do also use it sometimes as a direct challenge to people who think they know the world. And my second book, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy (2006), was actually about that, and that book was triggered by an account of an event in Africa, that everybody in African Studies has repeated and still continues to repeat, which is this: in June 1960, Africans went to defend France, because France asked them to. This is to say that nobody could imagine that Africans—and I am being careful here in terms of how people describe Africans—understood that they had a stake in the 'world' under assault during World War II. And so the book actually begins with a simple question: in 1940, which France would have asked Africans to defend it: Vichy France which was under German control, or the Germans who occupied half of France? But the decision to defend France actually came partly from a discussion between French colonial officers in Chad and African veterans of World War I, who decided that the world had to be restructured for Africa to find its place in it. They didn't do it for France, because it's a colonial power, they did it for the world. That's the thing. And Pétain, to his credit, is the only French official who asked the pertinent question about that, in a letter to his minister of justice (which is an irony, because justice under Pétain was a different question) he said: 'I am puzzled, that in 1918 when we were victorious, Africans rebelled; in 1940, we are defeated, and they come to our aid. Could you explain that to me?' The titular head of Vichy had the decency to ask that. By contrast, every scholar of Africa just repeated, 'Oh, the French asked Africans to go fight, and the Africans showed up'.
Our inability to understand that Africa actually sees itself as a part of the world, as a manager of the world, has so escaped us today that in the case of Libya for instance, when people were debating, you saw in every single newspaper in the world, including my beloved Guardian, that the African Union decided this, but the International Community decided that, as if Africans had surrendered their position in the international society to somebody: to the International Community. People actually said that! The AU, for all its 'wretchedness', after all represents about a quarter of the member states of the UN. And yet it was said the AU decided this and the International Community decided that. The implication is that the International Community is still the West plus Japan and maybe somebody else, and in this case it was Qatar and Saudi Arabia: "good citizens of the world", very "good democracies" etc. That's how deeply-set that is, that people don't even check themselves. Every time they talk they chuck Africa out of the World. Nobody says, America did this and the International Community decided that. All I am saying is that our mindscapes are so deeply structured that nothing about Africa can be studied on its own, can be studied as something that has universal consequence, as something that has universal value, as something that might be universalizing—that institutions in Africa might actually have some good use to think about anything. Otherwise, people would have asked them how did colonial populations—people who were colonized—overcome colonial attempts to strip them of their humanity and extend an act of humanity, of human solidarity, to go fight to defend them? And what was that about? Even many Africans fail to ask that question today!
And it could be argued that this thinking is, to some degree, down to widespread ignorance about Africa. We all are guilty of this. And oddly, especially intellectuals are guilty of this, and worse. Let me give you an example: recently I was in Tübingen in Germany, and I went into a store to buy some shoes—a very fine store, wonderful people—and I can tell you I ended up having a much more rewarding conversation with the people working in the shoe shop than I had at Tübingen University. Because there was a real curiosity. You would like to think that it is not so unusual in this day and age that a person from Guinea teaches in America, but you cannot blame them for being curious and asking many questions. At the university, in contrast, they actually are making claims, and for me that is no longer ignorance, that is hubris.
Your work presents an original take on the role of language in International Relations. How is language tied up with IR theory?
The language problem has many, many layers. The first of these is, simply, the issue of translation. If I were, for instance, to talk to someone in my father's language about Great Power Responsibility, they would look totally lost. Because in Guinea we have been what white people call stateless or acephalous societies, the notion that one power should have responsibility for another is a very difficult concept to translate, because you are running up against imaginaries of power, of authority, etc. that simply don't exist. So when you talk about such social scientific categories to those people, you have to be aware of all the colonial era enlightenment inheritances in them. When we talk about International Relations in Africa, we thus bump into a whole set of problems: the primary problem of translating ideas from here into those languages; another in capturing what kind of institutions exist in those languages; and a third issue has to do with how you translate across those languages. Consider for instance the difference between Loma stateless societies in the rain forest in Guinea, and Malinke who are very hierarchical, especially since SundiataKeita came to power in the 13th century. But the one problem most people don't talk about is the very one that is obsessing me now, is the question how I, as an African, am able to communicate with you through Kant, without you assuming that I am a bad reader of Kant.
The difference that I am trying to make here is actually what in linguistics is called vehicular language which is distinct from vernacular language. Because a lot of you assume that vehicular language is vernacular—that there is Latin and the rest is vernacular; that there is a proper reading of Kant and everything else is vernacular; or you have cosmopolitan and perhaps afropolitan and everything else is the vernacular of it. But this is not in fact always the case. The most difficult thing for linguists to understand, and for people in the social sciences to understand, is that Kant, Hegel and other thinkers can avail themselves as resources that one uses to try to convey imaginaries that are not always available to others—or to Kant himself for that matter. And it is not analogical—it is not 'this is the African Machiavelli'. It is easy to talk about power using Machiavelli, but to smuggle into Machiavelli different kind of imaginaries is more difficult. Nonetheless, I use Machiavelli because there is no other language available to me to convey that to you, because you don't speak my father's language.
Moreover, there is a danger for instance when I speak with my students that they may hear Machiavelli even when I am not speaking of him, and I warn them to be very careful. Machiavelli is a way to bring in a different stream of understanding of Realpolitik, but it's not entirely Machiavelli. If you spoke my father's language, I would tell you in my father's language, but that is not available to me here, so Machiavelli is a vehicle to talk about something else. Sometimes people might say to me 'what you are saying sounds to me like Kant but it's not really Kant' then I remind them that before Kant there were actually a lot of people who talked about the sublime, the moral, the categorical imperative, etc. in different languages; and if you are patient with me then we will get to the point when Kant belongs to a genealogy of people who talked about certain problems differently, and in that context Kant is no longer a European: I place Kant in the context of people who talk about politics, morality, etc. differently and I want to offer you a bunch of resources and please, please don't package me, because you don't own the interpretation of Kant, because even in your own context in Europe today Kant is not your contemporary, so you are making a lot of translations and I am making a lot of translations to get to something else: it is not that I am not a bad reader.
At an ISA conference I once was attacked by a senior colleague in IR for being a bad reader of Hegel, and I had to explain to him that while my using Hegel might be an act of imposition, and a result of having been colonized and given Hegel, but at this particular moment he should consider my gesture as an act of generosity, in the sense that I was reading Hegel generously to find resources that would allow him to understand things that he had no idea exist out there, and Hegel is the only tool available to me at this moment. But because all of you believe in one theology or another, he insisted that if I spoke Hegelian then I was Hegelian, and I retorted that I was not, but that deploying Hegel was merely an instance of vehicular language, allowing me to explore certain predicates, certain precepts and assumptions, and that is all. In this way, I can use Kant, or Hegel, or Hobbes, or Locke, and my problem when I do this is not with those thinkers—I can ignore the limitations of their thinking which was conditioned by the realities of their time—my problem is with those people who think they own traditions originating from long dead European thinkers. Thus, my problem today is less with Kant than with Kantians.
Or take Hobbes: Hobbes talked about the body in the way that it was understood in his time, and about human faculties in the way that they were understood at that time. Anybody who quotes Hobbes today about the faculties of human nature, I have to ask: when was the last time you read biology? I am not saying that Hobbes wasn't a very smart man; he was an erudite, and I am not joking. It is not his problem that people are still trivializing human faculties and finding issue with his view of how the body works—of course he was wrong on permeability, on cohabitation, on what organs live in us, etc.—he was giving his account of politics through metaphors and analogies that he understood at that time. When I think about it this way, my problem is not that Hobbes didn't have a modern understanding of the body, the distribution of the faculties and the extent of human capacities. Nor is my problem that Hobbes is Western. My problem is not with Hobbes himself. My problem is with all these realists who based their understanding of sovereignty or borders strictly on Hobbes' illustrations but have not opened a current book on the body that speaks of the faculties. If they did, even their own analogies may begin to resonate differently. There is new research coming out all the time on how we can understand the body, and this should have repercussions on how we read Hobbes today.
The absence of contextualization and historicization has proved a great liability for IR. Historicity allows one to receive Hobbes and all those other writers without indulging in mindless simplicities. It helps get away from simplistic divisions of the world—for instance, the West here and Africa there—from the assumptions that when I speak about postcolonialism in Africa I must be anti-Western. I am in fact growing very tired of those kinds of categories. As a parenthesis, I must ask if some of those guys in IR who speak so univocally and unidirectionally to others are even capable of opening themselves up to hearing other voices. I must also reveal that Adlai Stevenson, not some postcolonialist, alerted me to the problem of univocality when he stated in 1954 during one UN forum that 'Everybody needed aid, the West surely needs a hearing aid'. Hearing is indeed the one faculty that the West is most in need of cultivating. The same, incidentally, could be said of China nowadays.
One of the things I would like to deny Western canonist is their inclination to think of the likes of Diderot as Westerners. In his Supplément au Voyage a Bougainville (1772), Diderot presents a dialogue between himself and Orou, a native Tahitian. Voltaire wrote dialogues, some real, some imaginary, about and with China. The authors' people were reflecting on the world. It is hubris and an act of usurpation in the West today to want to lay claim to everything that is perceived to be good for the West. By the same token that which is bad must come from somewhere else. This act of usurpation has led to the appropriation—or rather internal colonization—of Diderot and Voltaire and like-minded philosophers and publicists who very much engaged the world beyond their locales. I have quarrels with this act of colonization, of the incipit parochialization of authors who ought not to be. I have quarrels with Voltaire's characterization of non-Europeans at times; but I have a greater quarrel with how he has been colonized today as distinctly European. Voltaire rejected European orthodoxies of his day and opted explicitly to enter into dialogue with Chinese and Africans as he understood them. Diderot, too, was often in dialogue with Tahitians and other non-Europeans. In fact, the relationship between Diderot and the Tahitian was exactly the same as the relationship between Socrates and Plato, in that you have an older person talking and a younger person and less wise person listening. A lot of Western philosophy and political theory was actually generated—at least in the modern period—after contact with the non-West. So how that is Western I don't know. I encounter the same problem when I am in Africa where I am accused of being Western just because I make the same literary references. It is a paradox today that even literature is assigned an identity for the purpose of hegemony and/or exclusion. Francis Galton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton) travelled widely and wrote dialogues from this expedition in Africa, so how can we say to what extent the substance of such dialogues was Western or British?
So in sum you are not trying to counter Western thought, but do you feel that the African political experience and your own perspective can bring something new to IR studies?
I am going to try and express something very carefully here, because the theory of the state in Africa brought about untold horrors—in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, and so on—so I am not saying this lightly. But I have said to many people, Africans and non-Africans, that I am glad that the postcolonial African state failed, and I wish many more of them failed, and I'm sure a lot more will fail, because they correspond to nothing on the ground. The idea of constitutions and constitutionalism came with making arrangements with a lot of social elements that were generated by certain entities that aspired to go in certain directions. What happened in Africa is that somebody came and said: 'this worked there, it should work here'—and it doesn't. I'll give you three short stories to illustrate this.
One of the presidents of postcolonial Guinea, the one I despise the most, Lansana Conté (in office 1984-2008), also gave me one of my inspirational moments. Students rebelled against him and destroyed everything in town and so he went on national TV that day and said: 'You know I'm very disheartened. I am disheartened about children who have become Europeans.' Obviously the blame would be on Europe. He continued, 'They are rude, they don't respect people or property. I understand that they may have quarrels with me, but I also understand that we are Africans. And though we may no longer live in the village', and it is important for me that he said that, 'though we may no longer live in the village, when we move in the big city, the council of elders is what parliament does for us now. We don't have the council of elders, instead we have parliament. They, the students, can go to parliament and complain about their father. I am their father, my children are older than all of them. So in the village, they would have gone to the council of elders, and they could have done this and I would have given them my explanation'. And the next morning, the whole country turned against the students, because what he had succeeded in doing was to touch and move people. They went to the head of the student government, who said: 'The president was right. We had failed to understand that our ways cannot be European ways, and we can think about our modern institutions as iterations of what we had in the past, suited to our circumstances, and so we should not do politics in the same way. I agree with him, and in that spirit I want to say that among the Koranko ethnic group, fathers let their children eat meat first, because they have growing needs, and if the father doesn't take care of his children, then they take the children away from the father and give them to the uncle. Our problem at the university is that our stipends are not being paid, and father has all his mansions in France, in Spain, and elsewhere, so we want the uncle.' He was in effect asking for political transition: he was saying they were now going to the council of elders, the parliament, and demand the uncle, for father no longer merits being the father. He was able to articulate political transition and rotation in that language. It was a very clever move.
The second one was my mother who was completely unsympathetic to me when I came home one day and was upset that one of my friends who was a journalist had been arrested. She said, 'if you wish you can go back to your town but don't come here and bother me and be grumpy'. So I started an exchange with her and explained to her why it is important that we have journalists and why they should be free, until our discussion turned to the subject of speaking truth to power. At that moment she said, 'now you are talking sense' and she started to tell me how the griot functioned in West Africa for the past eight hundred years, and why truth to power is part of our institutional heritage. But that truth is not a personal truth, for there is an organic connection between reporter and the community, there is a group in which they collect information, communicate and criticize, and we began to talk about that. And since then I have stopped teaching Jefferson in my constitutional classes in Africa, as a way of talking about the free press, instead I talk about speaking truth to power. But it allows me not only to talk about the necessity of speaking truth to power, but also to criticize the organization of the media, which is so individualised, so oriented toward the people who give the money: think of the National Democratic Institute in Washington, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Germany, they have no organic connection to the people. And my mother told me, 'as long as it's a battle between those who have the guns and those who have the pen, then nobody is speaking to my problems, then I have no dog in that fight'. And journalists really make a big mistake by not updating their trade and redressing it. Because speaking truth to power is not absent in our tradition, we have had it for eight hundred years, six centuries before Jefferson, but we don't think about it that way. I have to remind my friends in Guinea: 'you are vulnerable precisely because you have not understood what the profession of journalism might look like in this community, to make your message more relevant and effective'. You see the smart young guys tweeting away and how they have been replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, because we have not made the message relevant to the community. We are communicating on media and in idioms that have no real bearing on people's lives, so we are easily dismissed. That is in fact the tragedy of what happened in Tunisia: the smart, young protesters have so easily been brushed aside for this reason.
The third story is about how we had a constitutional debate in Guinea before multipartism, and people were talking about the separation of powers. And I went to the university to talk to a group of people and I put it to them: why do you waste your time studying the American Constitution and the separation of powers in America? I grant you, it is a wonderful experiment and it has lasted two hundred years, but that would not lead you anywhere with these people. The theocratic Futa Jallon in Guinea (in the 18th and 19th centuries) had one of the most advanced systems of separation of powers: the king was in Labé, the constitution was in Dalaba, the people who interpreted the constitution were in yet another city, the army was based in Tougué. It was the most decentralised organization of government you can imagine, and all predicated on the idea that none of the nine diwés, or provinces, should actually have the monopoly of power. So those that kept the constitution were not allowed to interpret it, because the readers were somewhere else. But to make sure that what they were reading was the right document, they gave it to a different province. So the separation of powers is not new to us.
In sum, the West is a wonderful political experiment, and it has worked for them. We can actualize some of what they have instituted, but we have sources here that are more suited to the circumstances of the people in that region, without undermining the modern ideas of democratic self-governance, without undermining the idea of a republic. Without dispensing with all of those, we must not be tempted to imagine constitution in the same way, to imagine separation of powers in the same way, even to imagine and practice journalism in the same way, in this very different environment. It is going to fail. That is my third story.
Siba N. Grovogui has been teaching at Johns Hopkins University after holding the DuBois-Mandela postdoctoral fellowship of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1989-90 and teaching at Eastern Michigan University from 1993 to 1995. He is currently professor of international relations theory and law at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). He has recently completed a ten-year long study partly funded by the National Science Foundation of the rule of law in Chad as enacted under the Chad Oil and Pipeline Project.
Related links
Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins University Read Grovogui's Postcolonial Criticism: International Reality and Modes of Inquiry (2002 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's The Secret Lives of Sovereignty (2009 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Counterpoints and the Imaginaries Behind Them: Thinking Beyond North American and European Traditions (2009 contribution to International Political Sociology) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Postcolonialism (2010 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Sovereignty in Africa: Quasi-statehood and Other Myths (2001 book chapter in a volume edited by Tim Shaw and Kevin Dunn) here (pdf)
Issue 71.1 of the Review for Religious, 2012. This was the final issue. ; Volume 71 2012 Editor Michael G. Harter sj Associate Editor Garth L. Hallett sj Book Review Editor Rosemary Jermann Scripture Scope Eugene Hensell osb Editorial Staff Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp e v i e w f o r r e l i g i o u s A Journal of Catholic Spirituality contents prisms 4 Prisms Ignatian spirituality 8 Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? We Are Sent Kathleen Hughes rscj explores the provocative parallels between the Four Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises and the four-part rhythm of the Eucharist as two ways we are caught up in the work of God in Christ, and two invitations to replicate the whole life, death, and rising of Jesus. This article was one of the keynote presentations at Ignatian Spirituality Conference V held in St. Louis, Missouri, July 21-24, 2011. 29 Without the Drama: The Transition from Third to Fourth Week Ronald Mercier sj explores how those who make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are invited to enter into a grand silence where they contemplate the empty space without answers that follows the crucifixion—the space that remains the context of our lives, the place of our ministries, and the space within which joy dawns for those who know the Risen Lord. Questions for Reflection 58 Finding or Seeking God in All Things: A Few Cautionary Notes Peter J. Schineller sj researches the phrase "finding God in all things," common in writings about Ignatian spirituality, and discovers that it is rare in the writings of Ignatius. He finds that phrases such as "searching for and seeking God in all things" more accurately describe the Ignatian approach. 2 Review for Religious sharing experience 69 The Warmth, the Will, and the Way Ben Harrison mc is discovering that it helps him be more consistent in his spiritual journey if he is attentive to the warmth of the Spirit's presence in his heart and to the vows as an expression of the will to move deeper in his relationship with God. 78 Getting with the Program A young man writes of his experience of coming to terms during the novitiate with his addiction to pornography. This article could be used profitably as a case study during a novitiate class or read as background for a community discussion. Questions for Personal Reflection and Group Study discernment models 86 Dialogue with the Radically Other: Models of Discernment in the Old Testament Ligita Ryliskyte md phd sje explores the rich imagery of the Old Testament and offers valuable paradigms to understand spiritual discernment as a dialogue with God. In this essay she describes four models of discernment that might be distinguished in Old Testament imagery. departments 100 Scripture Scope: Vocation and the Call to Discipleship: A Reflection on Mark 1:16-20 105 Book Reviews 71.1 2012 3 Review for Religious prisms 4 A wise man once said: "It's a shame to waste a good crisis." If that is true, Review for Religious is facing a moment of great opportunity. In recent years the number of subscribers has steadily fallen off, and the cost of publication has risen to the point that our future as a print journal is in jeop-ardy. The recent deaths of Fathers Fischer and Fleming have taken their toll. We have reached a critical point in our history. When my provincial assigned me to succeed David Fleming as editor, he gave me a specific mission: Assess the viability of the publication. So for the past year, the staff and our advisory board have taken that mission seriously even as we worked to meet our ordinary production schedule. While we all hoped to be able to keep this good work alive, the real goal of our discernment was not to save or to close the journal, but to explore ways to more effectively serve the church. In the past months we have consulted widely. We looked at the shifting demographics of reli-gious life and understood that younger reli-gious are getting more of their information on 71.1 2012 5 the Internet than through printed periodicals. We sorted through spreadsheets of detailed financial information. We looked hard at our available resources and realized that we could sustain publication of the journal in its present format for a maximum of three to five years. The hand-writing on the wall could not be clearer: Simply maintain-ing operations as they are will inevitably lead to closure. Maintenance, without change, is not an option. Part of our analysis took us back to look at our history. Our journal came into being in 1941 at a Jesuit theolo-gate in St. Marys, Kansas, where three enterprising faculty members—Augustine Ellard, Adam Ellis, and Gerald Kelly (later joined by Henry Willmering)—invited their students to edit and publish the papers they wrote as class assignments in what became the early incarnation of this journal which has served the church and religious life proudly for the past 70 years. Richard Smith, Daniel F. X. Meenan, Philip Fischer and David Fleming edited the publi-cation over the subsequent decades. Since Review for Religious was founded at a small theology school, we began exploring the idea that a theology center, rather than the confines of our office, would be a more logical site for the publication of this journal. As we realized that a network of theology centers around the world linked through the Internet could have great potential for producing articles and generating lively discussion, we began exploring that path. We contacted the moderators of Jesuit Conferences that have significant centers of religious formation in Africa, India, and the Asia-Pacific region—in parts of the world Augustine Ellard, Adam Ellis, Gerald Kelly, Henry Willmering Review for Religious Author • Title 6 where religious life is growing—to see if any of them would have an interest in assuming responsibility for the journal. As a result of our inquiries, we are engaged in a conversa-tion with just such a center about continuing the mission of Review for Religious. We are not looking to replicate the journal as it cur-rently exists, but are talking about re-envisioning and re-designing it with current and future generations of religious in mind. As a result of our discussions and discernment, we have determined that this copy of Review for Religious is the final issue that will be produced by our St. Louis office. Whether the journal remains as a print publication, or is redesigned for delivery on the Internet, or ceases publication altogether is yet to be determined. In the meantime, we are suspending publication and putting a moratorium on renewals or new subscriptions until our discernment is completed. To say that we have reached the end is premature. A hiatus or pause is a more accurate description. As Ron Mercier points out in his article in this issue, a rest is as important a part of a musical score as is a chord or a whole string of arpeggios. And such a time of waiting can be a rich moment. We are not sitting idly while the discussion goes on but are in the process of digitizing our entire collection. We plan to make every article, poem, and book review we have published available on the Internet. It should be an invalu- Richard Smith, Daniel Meenan, Philip Fischer, and David Fleming. 71.1 2012 7 able archive for anyone wishing to research the shifts in religious life during the past 70 years. I am grateful to our current staff: Mary Ann Foppe, who has been the office manager for the past 25 years; Judy Sharp, our receptionist, who has handled subscriptions; Rosemary Jermann, who has written the Bookshelf column; Garth Hallett sj, who has served as Associate Editor; Tracy Gramm, who has done layout and graphic design. I have appreciated Ed Hensell osb, Elizabeth McDonough op, Richard Hill sj, and Joseph Gallen sj, who have provided regular columns over the years, and Jean Read, Iris Ann Ledden ssnd, Regina Siegfried asc, Claire Boehmer asc, Joe Meek, and many oth-ers who have made major behind-the-scenes contri-butions. They have been an excellent staff. We are grateful to the countless number of con-tributors who have sent us manuscripts and poetry for our consideration. They helped us keep our finger on the pulse of religious life. And finally, we thank you, our faithful subscribers. We are grateful for your support, and we trust that we have been an important resource for you over the years. Please read the inside of the back cover of this issue. It contains details about how to keep informed about the progress of our discernment. We will notify each subscriber about the outcome of that discernment. Please pray that the Spirit will lead us to a good conclusion. Michael Harter SJ Rosemary Jermann, Mary Ann Foppe, Tracy Gramm, Judy Sharp and Michael Harter Review for Religious Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? We Are Sent I need to begin with a confession. I was given an assignment to speak about the Eucharist, particularly as it describes a way of life flowing from Weeks Three and Four of the Exercises. I am not an expert on the Spiritual Exercises, but I have been a student of the Eucharist for many decades, so I was happy to think about this topic. And, though the talk was still non-existent, a description had to be prepared for the program booklet. Many of you have prob-ably had the same experience. You make up a description of a talk right out of thin air, hop-ing to be sufficiently generic so you can talk about almost anything at all. kathleen hughes ignatian spirituality 8 Kathleen Hughes rscj, former professor of Word and Worship at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and former provincial of her order's United States prov-ince, is currently a mission consultant in the Network of Sacred Heart Schools. Her address is 541 S. Mason Road; St. Louis, Missouri 63141. 71.1 2012 9 But a funny thing happened to me on the way to the topic assigned. I took a detour. I stumbled onto what I regard as an amazing new insight about how the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises mirror each other. At first I thought I was the last to arrive. Then I checked with those who have far greater familiarity with the literature on the Spiritual Exercises, and no one had heard any reflection on such a topic. That, too, gave me pause and left me wondering how far out on a limb I was climbing. Nevertheless, here's the insight I want to develop in the first part of this talk: there seems to be a quite provocative parallel between the Four Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises and the four-part rhythm of the Eucharist. The gathering rites of the Eucharist include elements of praise and penitence, as are typical of movements in Week One of the Spiritual Exercises; the Liturgy of the Word is the gradual unfolding of the person and work of Jesus Christ, as occurs in Week Two; the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the celebration of Jesus' death for the life of the world, is the heart of Week Three; and the concluding rites of the Eucharist have an affinity with the rhythms of Week Four. In these pages I intend to develop this thesis in more detail, hoping in the process to give fresh insight into God's activity in these two parallel celebrations of the paschal mystery—these two ways we are being caught up in the work of God in Christ. Then I will move to a focus on the Eucharist itself, as it flows from Week Three, incarnates the intimacy of Week Four, and remains the abiding experience of consolation, chal-lenge, and invitation to faithful living, parallel to leav-ing retreat and picking up everyday life. Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 10 Part I: Parallels Overview First, then, before we look at the Four Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises and the four parts of the Eucharist in more detail, let me offer an overview of the resonances I've discovered between them. Both the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises are a series of movements or stages that, negotiated with grace, realize the Christian ideal of identification with Christ. Both are invitations to conversion; both, at their heart, are offers of holi-ness and transformation. Both the Exercises and the Eucharist have a basic psychological rhythm that facili-tates growth in the spiritual life. The Exercises and the Eucharist as we know them only gradually evolved to their present form. The Exercises began as jottings in Ignatius's personal notebook—conso-lations, desolations, graces received—and this collec-tion of insights developed into a practical manual as Ignatius gave them to oth-ers and learned from their experience. They remain a core series of spiritual exercises that are endlessly flexible as enfleshed in the lives of individuals. The Eucharist, too, is the result of a gradual evolution over time around the core of readings and the breaking of bread, making every age and every human commu-nity a fresh inculturation of a basic pattern. Happily, in our day the basic four-part structure of gathering, listening, responding, and sending has been recovered in the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Both the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises interrupt our ordinary time with extraordinary grace. 71.1 2012 11 Interestingly, both the Exercises and the Eucharist are filled with words, indeed with dialogue, and with spaces of silence. Both also make appeal to all of our senses and stir up mystagogical insights in those who are attentive. Both the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises interrupt our ordinary time with extraordinary grace; they help us to make sense of our life as it is unfolding before the living God. And both the Eucharist and the Exercises send us to live, in deed, what we have just experienced in this time of encounter with the divine. Finally, both these patterns of prayer follow, for most of us, familiar and predictable dynamics and so, for each, we need the grace to pay attention, to move beyond the familiar in order to get inside the mysteries. The First Week and the Gathering Rites of the Eucharist We come to retreat or to Eucharist just as we are, and we bring our history and our particular world with us into this sacred time and place. We come, sometimes breathlessly, from the work we have just left behind and the preoccupations that fill our minds and hearts. We come always with unfinished business and with distrac-tions, even burdens, of body and spirit. We come with our crosses and our inexhaustible needs. We come because we are drawn to a time and space of intimacy and prayer, of encounter with the Lord who will tutor our hearts, of transformation to new and deeper life. We come to be nourished. We come remembering God's goodness and God's fidelity to us, no matter our own response. We come hoping to touch our finger to the flame once again, placing ourselves, for this span of time, on holy ground. God's unconditional and ever-faithful love perme-ates our awareness in Week One. Each one of us has Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 12 been blessed with divine life; God's creative activity has showered each of us in unique ways and has supported and sustained us throughout our lives. In face of the immense goodness of God, we acknowledge our inade-quate response; we know that sin has hindered our rela-tionships with self and others and, above all, with God. Week One provides the opportunity to recognize sin as our failure to respond with love to God always present, to express our own sorrow and repentance, and then to know God's ever-greater love, mercy, and forgiveness. We reflect on our lives in light of God's boundless love for us, knowing that God wants to free us of everything that gets in the way of a loving response. The focus is less on particular sins than on our relationship with God that has been damaged, perhaps even shattered. Yet it is a relationship always available, for God longs for intimacy with us far more than we could ask or even imagine. Our personal history gives us hope: God is filled with mercy and compassion, slow to anger, full of kindness. God's response to our repentance is mercy and forgiveness. By the end of the First Week, we know ourselves as sinners, loved and rescued by a God who is so much greater than our hearts. These same heart movements are present in the gathering rites of the Eucharist. We generally begin the celebration with a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. We are then invited into a time of silence before the liv-ing God, and we cannot but realize our unworthiness and our experience of sin. In the language of the new Missal we own our complicity in sin "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault," and we join with one another in begging for mercy and for-giveness: "Lord, have mercy." Then the Gloria is our hymn of praise after the words of absolution: "May 71.1 2012 13 almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you your sins, and bring you to life everlasting. Amen." We begin the Eucharist knowing ourselves as loved sinners, disposed to open our hearts to the word proclaimed in our midst. There are two additional striking parallels between the First Week of the Exercises and the gathering rites of Eucharist. The first has to do with the cross of Christ, for the cross is prominent at the beginning of both experiences. The retreatant is invited to make a first meditation before the cross; similarly, when we gather for the Eucharist, the entrance procession places the cross at the very beginning of the celebration. There is nothing like the cross of Christ to sharpen our focus, to bring us to the sober reality that relationships have consequences, that the paschal mystery of Jesus' life, death, and rising is what has made it possible to draw near to the throne of grace. And here's a second intriguing possibility with the Eucharist. There is a presidential prayer at the conclu-sion of the entrance rites, another at the preparation of the table and the gifts, and a third after Communion. These are all, essentially, prayers of petition; they each ask for a specific grace that is dependent for its focus on the place of the prayer in the rite. We really could think of these prayers as "preludes" that name and ask for a specific grace as we move from one week to the next, from one part of the Eucharist to the next. For example, the opening prayer for today's liturgy, the Seventeenth Sunday, Year A, from icel's Missal of 1998, reads: God of eternal wisdom, You alone impart the gift of right judgment. Grant us an understanding heart that we may value wisely the treasure of your kingdom Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 14 and gladly forego all lesser gifts to possess that kingdom's incomparable joy. We make our prayer through Our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit God for ever and ever. Amen.1 What a perfect presidential prayer to open our hearts to the Word of God; what a perfect prelude to move to Week Two of the Exercises. The Second Week and the Liturgy of the Word The parallels between the Second Week of the Exercises and the Liturgy of the Word are easily dis-cernible. Both focus on the scriptures, and both invite decision; both are grounded in the Gospels and in the Mystery who is Christ; both the Spiritual Exercises and the Liturgy of the Word, over time, offer an intimate encounter with Jesus of Nazareth—healing, teaching, sharing meals, welcoming sinners, going about doing good, spending the night in union with his Abba, gath-ering disciples and forming their hearts. We reflect on scripture passages, in retreat as at Mass, one after another, not in order to know the scriptures better but to discover ever more fully the One whom they disclose to us. During the Second Week of the Exercises, like Martha's sister, Mary, the retreatant sits at the feet of Jesus, the teacher, drawn to his person, absorbing his attitudes and values, his choices, his preaching of the dream of God for the world, for humankind, for each of us. The Second Week, of course, is not full only of the consolation of spending time with a dear friend. That 71.1 2012 15 dear friend of ours also reveals to us the cost of dis-cipleship, the misunderstandings, the disappointments, the gathering storm of criticism and anger. We take in the whole of the life of Jesus Christ and are drawn to know him more intimately, to love him more ardently, and to follow him more faithfully. We choose to be dis-ciples of the perfect disciple. Empowered by the love of God experienced in Week One and by Jesus' friendship, which deepens for us in Week Two, we choose an ever closer relationship with him, no matter what. Loved sin-ners become loving servants, embracing and following Jesus, setting our faces, with him, to Jerusalem. It has been written that during the Second Week "We find ourselves drinking in the experiences of Jesus, so that we begin to assimilate his values, his loves, his freedom. This style of praying provides the necessary content of decision-making or discernment, which forms an essential part of the Second Week and is meant to be an abiding part of a Christian's life that is shaped by the Exercises."2 Of course, those statements also describe a regu-lar pattern of solitary prayer in daily life that reaches its summit in the Eucharist. God speaks to our hearts, opening up for us the mystery of redemption and salva-tion and offering us spiritual nourishment; Christ him-self is present in the midst of the community through the Word proclaimed.3 The cycle of readings, highlighting first one evange-list's portrait of Christ and then another's in the three-year cycle, invites our reflection on the life and ministry of Jesus, his proclamation of the Good News, his say-ings and parables, his teachings and miracles, and, espe-cially during Lent and the triduum, how his face was set to Jerusalem during his last days on earth. The Gospel is the highpoint of the Liturgy of the Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 16 Word, and we mark it with various signs of reverence for the book and with the tracing of the cross on our forehead, lips, and breast, praying that our mind be opened, that our words be true, and that our whole being be exposed to the consolation and the challenge of a Gospel way of life. The homily follows. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal describes the homily as a necessary source of nourishment of the Christian life.4 In fact, for a majority of Christians it is often the only source of spir-itual nourishment in a busy week. The Second Week of the Exercises illuminates the challenge to those who give the homily in the Eucharist. The point of the hom-ily is identical to the grace sought in Week Two of the Exercises, namely, to enable the assembly to know Jesus more intimately, to love him more ardently and to follow him more faithfully. Nothing less! Not entertainment. Not exegesis. Not personal self-disclosure. Nothing less than knowing, loving, and following Christ, choosing his choices, becoming gradually and almost imperceptibly more like him, putting on his mind and heart. Just as one chooses discipleship at the end of Week Two, so too there is a choice at the end of the Liturgy of the Word. As we prepare to move from the Table of God's Word to the Table of the Lord's Supper, we join ourselves to Christ and ask that we too be transformed every bit as much as the bread and the wine, that we and they may become for us and for our world the Body and Blood of Christ. The Third Week and the Liturgy of the Eucharist The focus of Week Three is both the Last Supper and the Passion. So, too, these two themes are conflated in the Liturgy of the Eucharist: "the Sacrifice of the 71.1 2012 17 Cross and its sacramental renewal in the Mass, which Christ the Lord instituted at the Last Supper and com-manded the apostles to do in his memory, are one and the same, differing only in the manner of offering, and . . . consequently the Mass is at once a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, of propitiation and satisfaction."5 The first meditation of the Exercises in Week Three is on the Last Supper in its entirety—including the preparations, the choice of place, the arrangements for the meal, the assembling in the upper room, Christ's washing of the apostles' feet, the supper itself, Christ's giving of his body and blood in Eucharist as the ultimate expression of his love for them, and his final words, his last will and testament, that they continue this same action in his memory. Much of this finds a resonance in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. There is, of course, first the preparation of the table and the gifts, the preparation of the altar itself and then of the offerings of bread and wine. There is the washing of the hands of the presider, a ritual of cleansing and interior purification in readiness for all that will follow. There is the prayer over the gifts, a simple and focused petition—a second "prelude," if you will, asking in a variety of ways that the gifts we have placed on the table will become holy and that we our-selves will be caught up in this action and be made holy to the praise and glory of God. Then the great prayer of praise and thanksgiving, the Eucharistic Prayer, begins. We tell the story of Jesus' life, death, and rising. We enter into Christ's liturgy, the endless self-giving of Christ into the hands of the One he called Abba, from whom he receives back his life. Our worship is an offering of our whole selves with and in Christ to God. That is our participation in the paschal Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 18 mystery of Christ's obedience unto death, our identifica-tion with Christ in his radical obedience to God. Have you ever used one of the Eucharistic Prayers for your meditation during Week Three? The Eucharistic Prayer is addressed to God the Father. Could we not think of it as a colloquy with the One Jesus called Abba, our own intimate conversation with God, as we ponder the mystery of the Passion? By turns, the Eucharistic Prayer "collo-quy" offers thanksgiving to God for the whole work of salvation realized in Christ; it implores the action of God's transforming Spirit; it tells the story again of the night before Jesus died when he offered his body and blood, gave the apostles to eat and drink, and left them a command to perpetuate this mystery; it recalls the events that fol-lowed the supper, especially the blessed Passion of Christ together with his victory over sin and death; it makes an offering to God not only of the spotless victim but of our-selves so that day by day we might be perfected through Christ the mediator and be brought into unity with God and with each other when God may be all in all.6 It is a perfect prayer; it is a perfect condensed statement of what we believe and what we long for; it is a colloquy, if you will, that gathers up and gives expression to the faith of the community in Jesus' salvific death and rising and our par-ticipation in that mystery. There is no better word at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, or at the end of our Third Week meditation on the Passion as we dwell in the silence of God, than the word "Amen." So be it. Week Four and the Communion and Concluding Rites We are ready for Week Four—Jesus' resurrection and his apparitions to his mother, to the women, to the disciples, to Mary in the garden. Always the message is 71.1 2012 19 the same: do not be afraid; peace be with you; go now and tell the good news; go now to feed my lambs. And as peace is the gift of the Risen One, we beg that same peace for the whole human family, and we ask for mutual love among ourselves. We approach the table of the Lord and receive the one Bread of Life, which is Christ who died and rose for the salva-tion of the world. Our Communion makes us one with the Risen Christ, and the last presidential prayer, the prayer after Communion, is a final "prelude"—a peti-tion that we might go forth and live, in deed, what we have just done in word and ritual action. "Please make this Communion take!" this prayer seems to beg. We become what we eat. Through the Communions of our lifetime we are gradually being transformed into God. We know that we ourselves and our world have been radically changed by Jesus' resurrection, and we embrace his commission to become the Heart of God on earth. In contemplating the love of God in the conclud-ing exercise of Week Four, we pray an intimate prayer of thanksgiving to the One who has shared his life so completely with us that we are filled with gratitude and with a desire to make a generous return of love. "Take, Lord, receive," we say, and in so doing we express our availability before God for whatever we will face, rely-ing simply and completely on God's grace. We know ourselves as blessed and sent. Thus far I have been developing the ways that the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises mirror and some-times illuminate aspects of each other. As a transition to the second part of this reflection, I suggest pausing over the words of the "Anima Christi" using David Fleming's translation. It was David who said that this prayer is a summary of the dynamics of the whole movement Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 20 of the Exercises, and he also described the prayer as a summary of the transformation wrought through the Eucharist. Jesus, may all that is you flow into me. May your body and blood be my food and drink. May your passion and death be my strength and life. Jesus, with you by my side enough has been given. May the shelter I seek be the shadow of your cross. Let me not run from the love which you offer, but hold me safe from the forces of evil. On each of my dyings shed your light and your love. Keep calling to me until that day comes, when, with your saints, I may praise you forever. Amen.7 Part II: Living the Eucharist David Fleming also called the "Anima Christi" a summary of the living of the Fourth Week in the everyday, so it is to that topic we turn, the living of the Eucharist. Many years ago I read a book by Gregory Dix called The Shape of the Liturgy, a very long, very erudite history of the Eucharist by an Anglican clergyman and liturgi-cal scholar. At the conclusion, around page seven hun-dred something, the author shifts from liturgical history, archeology, and philology to spirituality. He quotes the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, "Do this in memory of me," and then poses an intriguing question: Was ever another command so obeyed? Dix paints an extraordinary picture: Century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country, to every race on earth, this action of Eucharist has been carried out in every conceivable human circumstance and for every conceivable human need, from the heights of 71.1 2012 21 power to places of poverty and need, for royalty at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold, for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church, for the wisdom for the Parliament of a mighty nation, for a sick old woman afraid to die, for Columbus setting out to discover the New World, for a barren couple hoping for a child, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows, and on and on. Dix lyrically enumerates these and scores of other instances in which the Christian com-munity has been faithful to Jesus' command, "Do this."8 Over the centuries the Eucharist has been celebrated by innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful women and men like you and me, people with hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and sins and temptations and prayers every bit as vivid and alive as yours and mine are now. Week by week, on a hundred thousand succes-sive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, the followers of Jesus have done just this for the remembrance of him.9 This is an extraordinary picture of the sacrament that constitutes the community, of the event that binds us together, one with another and with Christians of every age, place, race, tongue, and way of life. The Eucharist has been like a wave of grace rolling over the community again and again across the centuries of Christendom, hollowing out spaces for the divine in the midst of the everyday. Was ever another command so obeyed? But after pondering Dix, I realized that when I con-sidered that Last Supper of Jesus and his friends, there was another question on my mind. When Jesus said "do this in remembrance of me," what did he mean by the this? Surely not just the Jewish pattern of the meal, though we know a lot about Jewish rituals, the blessing of bread, the number of cups, the style of blessing said over both. Surely the this is something more. What are Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 22 we being asked to do? to be? to embrace? to celebrate? What commitment do we make when we say "Amen"? Scripture supplies two directions toward an answer: one in the Synoptic accounts of the supper and Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, and the other in the Gospel of John. Recall the words of Paul describing the Last Supper: I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me" (1 Cor 11:23-25). Do this in remembrance of me. But what is the this? Have you ever considered that the Last Supper was precisely that—it was the last. The Last Supper was the last of a whole series of Jesus' meals recorded in the Scriptures. Jesus never played the pious ascetic, keep-ing away from celebrations. He loved a good feast. He used that image of feasting as a metaphor of the reign of God—a great banquet. It was said of him, "This man is a glutton and a drunkard." An even more shocking accusa-tion was whispered behind his back: "This man sits down at table with sinners, with the morally dubious, with the outcasts of society, with those living on the fringes." On nearly every page of the Gospels there is a meal or a reference to food. Jesus calls out to Zacchaeus, "Get down from that tree. I'm coming to your house for What commitment do we make when we say "Amen"? 71.1 2012 23 lunch." There is the story of Simon who threw a din-ner party but was an inattentive host, and of the woman who slipped in to minister to Jesus as he sat at Simon's table. There is the story of Peter's mother-in-law who is cured only to get up and wait on them. There is the Syrophoenician woman who would not take no for an answer, who spoke about crumbs that fell from the table and who expected—and received—more than crumbs from this man. There are the feeding miracles that tell us something of the utter lavishness of the banquet and that everyone will receive enough and there will still be something left over for another day. There are parables of feasts, of great abundance, of jockeying for places at table, of appropriate attire, of filling the room with those drawn from the highways and the byways. Even the risen appearances of Jesus include meals. "Peace be with you," Jesus says. "What's for dinner?" On the shore, in the upper room, on the way to Emmaus, they recognize him in the breaking of the bread. How do you recognize someone? Even at a distance, you rec-ognize the timbre of a voice, or a particular gesture, or the slight tilt of the head so characteristic of an indi-vidual. The disciples recognized Jesus for what was most characteristic of him: the way he broke the bread. What is the this that we are to replicate? It is the whole life and ministry of Jesus at table. Scripture scholars refer to this as Jesus' ministry of table fellow-ship. To share food, in Semitic times, was to share life itself. And Jesus shared life with an astonishing assort-ment of people. Everyone was welcome to sit with him at table, to tell stories and to break the bread. Jesus' ministry of table fellowship is a ministry of universal reconciliation, no exceptions. The Last Supper reca-pitulated the attitudes and values of Jesus, who opened Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 24 his table and his heart to everyone, who offered hospi-tality to all, who was himself at home with all manner of people, who knew the human need for nourishment of body, mind, and spirit and who was always present to the other—welcoming, reconciling, offering life. Do this in memory of me. The Gospel of John offers a second answer to the question "What is the this?" In John there is a very dif-ferent institution narrative. It is the account of the foot washing. We know the story so well. Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel. He poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel. Peter resisted this tenderness until Jesus pressed: "If I do not wash you, you have no part with me." Peter relented in typical Peter fashion: "Not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" When Jesus had com-pleted the washing and resumed his place, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you" (Cf. Jn 13:1-15). You should do as I have done. In other words, "Do this in memory of me." I had an experience when I was studying at the University of Notre Dame that colors my understand-ing of the washing of the feet after the manner of Jesus. Notre Dame has a reputation for the excellence of its liturgical studies program and, at least when I was there, for the perfection of its liturgical celebrations: every 71.1 2012 25 minister rehearsed; every detail on a checklist; every liturgy perfect. And, during the sacred triduum, the lit-urgies were even more perfect! It was Holy Thursday and time for the foot washing. Twelve people moved forward, probably having prepared for the foot wash-ing by carefully washing their feet! Then, seemingly from nowhere, a very unkempt man started up the aisle, staggering a bit, perhaps under the weather. It was one of those stunning moments. Time stood still. Then the deacon walked down the aisle to help the man for-ward and assist him in taking off his shoes and socks. What is the this? Tender and loving care for the other; accepting our mutual vulnerabilities; choosing to open our hearts to all, even the one staggering into our life and upsetting its plans and perfections. Foot washing is not just a way of life but an attitude of heart, a kneeling before the other in reverence. Foot washing is embrac-ing a way of service after the manner of Jesus, simply, generously, not counting the cost. Do this: Embrace my attitudes and values as your own. Love those I love, and be my heart to them. Welcome the stranger, the one on the margins, the disenfranchised. Become vulnerable with one another. Kneel in reverence, especially before those whom soci-ety shuns. Nourish one another's bodies and spirits. Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep, both here at home and half a world away— those in Norway who are paralyzed by a massacre they Foot washing is not just a way of life but an attitude of heart, a kneeling before the other in reverence Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 26 could never have imagined, those who are starving from the drought in Africa, those who are terrified of nuclear contamination in Japan, those who are caught up in trafficking around the globe or denied asylum here at home, those who have lost the ones they love and all they owned in fire, flood, tornado, or earthquake. Make a habit of roaming the globe in prayer so that you do not remain distant from the joys and pain of the world. Send those waves of grace once again across continents and cultures to bathe our world in the love and mercy of Eucharist. Do this in memory of me. Conclusion Week Three invites us to experience the Last Supper, to place ourselves there in the upper room, to look around at the faces, to listen to the words, to pon-der them in our hearts as we watch the immense tender-ness of the Lord with those he loved even to the end, whose hearts he was tutoring even on the night before he died. And we have stayed with him, watched and prayed with him, and accompanied him as he gave up his life. Then we have simply dwelt in silence. That same intimacy and presence to one another marks Week Four, a time of tenderness and affection with the risen Jesus who shares his love and his joy with us but does not let us cling to him. He sends us as apostles, empowered by his Spirit, to continue his sav-ing presence, to be his heart on earth. And day by day, week by week, the Eucharist con-tinues to draw us into these mysteries. The heart of the Eucharist is Jesus Christ. The heart of it is the cel-ebration of Jesus' life, death, and rising every time we gather—and the merging of our daily living and dying with his and with one another—for the life of the world. 71.1 2012 27 The heart of it is joining ourselves to Christ, the perfect sacrifice, to the praise and glory of God. The heart of it is begging that the Spirit will transform each one of us just as really as the bread and wine so that we become more and more Christ's Body in truth, not just in name. The heart of it is learning over and over again to say "Amen" to all of these realities and—at least some-times— actually meaning it. Meaning "Amen," meaning yes I will try to live, in deed, in the coming days, what we have just enacted in word and ritual action. I conclude with a favorite reflection of mine on the word "Amen." Be careful of simple words said often. "Amen" makes demands like an unrelenting schoolmaster: fierce attention to all that is said; no apathy, no preoccupation, no prejudice permitted. "Amen": We are present. We are open. We hearken. We understand. Here we are; we are listening to your word. "Amen" makes demands like a signature on a dotted line: sober bond to all that goes before; no hesitation, no half-heartedness, no mental reservation allowed. "Amen": We support. We approve. We are of one mind. We promise. May this come to pass. So be it. Be careful when you say "Amen."10 Notes 1 Cf. Sunday Celebration of the Word and Hours (Ottawa: Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1995). This book contains the Sunday collects prepared by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy for the Missal of 1998, since withdrawn. Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 28 2 David L. Fleming sj, "The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises: Understanding a Dynamic," in Notes on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola (St. Louis: Review for Religious, 1981) 11. 3 General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 2003, §29, paraphrase. 4 GIRM, § 65. 5 GIRM, § 9. 6 GIRM, § 79. 7 David L. Fleming sj, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1978) 3. 8 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945) 744-5, passim. 9 Ibid. paraphrase. 10 Barbara Schmich Searle, "Ritual Dialogue," Assembly 7:3, February, 1981. Obedience You have had my yes for years– and I have had yours since the sun, the seashells, and the storms at sea. But now, ah . . . you and I are more than yes. As time moves with, within, and around, this yes of ours takes on wings, takes on colors I never imagined, challenges that strengthen and soften me, glory that stills me, stirs me, extends and opens me. It becomes a murmur of love that we share. Love that frees me and compels me to choose you again and yet again . . . that I might respond as I wish to respond . . . openly, knowingly, even a little mysteriously . . . as the bush in the desert responded to flame. Kimberly M. King rscj 71.1 2012 ronald mercier 29 Without the Drama: The Transition from Third to Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises S travinsky's "Rite of Spring" caused a furor when it was first performed in 1913, but the more I listen to it, the more I think it expresses something important, and not only from a musical point of view. At the tail end of the piece, the "Sacrifice," Stravinsky tries to cap-ture the human spirit in its "pagan"—pure—form. You might want to find a recording of it and play it before you read further. Cacophony—there's no other way to describe it! Bad sound. It assaults the senses. It builds to a crescendo and with the violence of spirit that leads to the sacrifice of a human, a woman who dances herself to death for the Ronald Mercier sj is associate professor of theology at Saint Louis University and rector of the community where Jesuit scholastics pursue the study of philosophy and theology. This article was originally given as a keynote presentation at Ignatian Spirituality Conference V on July 22, 2011, in St. Louis, Missouri. Comments can be addressed to him at Bellarmine House of Studies; 3737 Westminster Place; St. Louis, Missouri 63108. Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 30 sake of the community. It is violence that can kill and wound and send to hell, to use Ignatius's words from the Incarnation meditation. In the ballet that goes with the music, there is a frenetic dance that is almost a form of madness. No wonder people were so challenged by the music; this is not about some nice ethereal enjoyment, but is a revelation of what can shape the human heart and actions. This revelation opens to our fears but not to our hopes. Curiously, the music ends with a bang, a loud discor-dant chord that leaves us waiting for something more. We would like some kind of resolution at this point, but we are left with utter silence after that dramatic end. We wait, but the music just ends. Or does it? For me, this piece leads to a reflection on the transition from the Third to the Fourth Week in the Ignatian Exercises, a movement out of a murderous drama into a disorienting grand silence within which the Fourth Week dawns. I would like to invite you to sit with Ignatius in what we would name "Holy Saturday," a place he sketches as the space for contemplation within which we experience Resurrection. My thesis is simple: Without the grand silence of Holy Saturday, the "seventh day" for Ignatius, we do not experience the joy and freedom of the Fourth Week. Waiting in the transition—a transition into, not out of, emptiness—allows for creation of the space into which the Risen Lord comes, if we let the quiet ripen. The music of Stravinsky captures the movement of the Third Week, a drama of human making. We walk with Jesus as he experiences being sacrificed for "the good of the people." Curiously, Ignatius invites us to experience the Passion, but he does not describe the gore that would have been standard fare in the spiritual-ity of his time. No doubt he assumed that people knew 71.1 2012 31 the specifics of the passion, crucifixion, and death from the religious imagination of his time. I wonder, though, whether that is all. It strikes me that we are invited into two spaces: the fullness of the world upon which the Trinity gazes in the Incarnation mediation, but also the reality of the Trinity's desire effected through what happens in these moments. In this transition, we fulfill the movement of the Incarnation meditation. Ignatius certainly invites us to "consider what Christ our Lord suffers in His human nature . . . [and] to strive to grieve, be sad, and weep" (SpEx §195). We "must be with the Lord in his suffering, [and] follow him unto his death," lest we be "simply spectators at a Passion event which may be very touching, but which in no way dis-turbs the egotism of our lives,"1 as Gilles Cusson so nicely puts it. We experience with Jesus what human egotism can do, the dramatic clash that seeks sacrifice to maintain some order. Ignatius's contemplation of the Passion has little to do with Mel Gibson's hero worship; we con-template one who embraces utter powerlessness, not "muscular humanity." Yet, Cusson also says that we need to attend to Ignatius's Fifth Point, "how the divinity hides itself; . . . it could destroy . . . but does not do so" (SpEx §196). What is God about in Christ? What goes beyond the "work of our hands," the murderous sacrifice, and actu-ally effects the will of the Trinity? Is God violent? Is We contemplate one who embraces utter powerlessness, not "muscular humanity." Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 32 this the "divinity [who] hides"? Or is the violent god our god? What occurs when our dramatic violence ends? For me, personally and as a director, this question is never academic. The temptation to remain specta-tors or to wonder at the horrors of the Passion—and so to remain distant from it and from the Resurrection— always presents itself as a path of light, as "really feeling bad" for Jesus, and perhaps knowing real (even mur-derous) anger toward those who create perverse tor-tures for him. The experi-ence of the Fourth Week then somehow appears too remote, not surprisingly, and not only because by that time we know the exhaustion of having given ourselves so radically to prayer. But if we remain spectators of the Passion, what also becomes remote is the real joy of the Fourth Week, a joy so different from the transient happiness that we may whip up but never suffices for the long-term journey. And the Fourth Week is really for the long haul, not transient at all. What alternative remains? Consider for a moment where Ignatius leads us. As he did in the contemplation on the Incarnation, he places us with the work of the Trinity and with Mary. This gives us our transition point and deserves some pause. Notice how he frames our prayer at the end of the week, the time of transition: One should consider as frequently as possible . . . that the most Sacred Body of Christ our Lord remained If we remain spectators of the Passion, what also becomes remote is the real joy of the Fourth Week. 71.1 2012 33 separated from the soul, and the place and manner of his burial. Let [the exercitant] consider, likewise, the desolation of our Lady, her great sorrow and weariness, and also that of the disciples (SpEx §208, Seventh Day). Two dimensions frame the time after the death of Jesus on the cross, two movements that invite us into a depth within which resurrection happens: the experi-ence of death in Jesus and its impact on those (like us) who love him. Resurrection, Cusson rightly suggests, never becomes a topic for consideration, but encounters us in and through the one whom we love and who has conquered death, a "confirmation from above surpass-ing all human hope."2 Let us stay, though, for a moment with the two aspects Ignatius gives us not so much as a conclusion to the Third Week as the door through which the Third Week becomes, or opens to, the Fourth Week. We have in the Christian tradition a powerful sense that the Paschal Mystery—the death, coming to the dead, and Resurrection of the Lord—never constitutes the past, something complete and over, but, rather, remains the context of our lives, the place of our ministries, the space within which joy dawns for us and for all who know the Risen Lord. Two things, then, shape this contemplation, which really becomes the shape of "the seventh day," a con-templation of the Passion as a whole. First, Ignatius begs us to consider the fullness of the death of Jesus because, without an experience of that fullness, we really cannot complete the journey of the Third Week (and of the Incarnation) or comprehend the fullness of the ways in which Jesus' ministry touches and shapes our lives and our world. We need to ponder, prayerfully, what it Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 34 means for Jesus to "remain separated from his soul," to know death, not just to "be killed." Let me suggest that this consideration never rep-resents some thought exercise or parlor game. In our culture we often trivialize death and, in fact, avoid the topic completely or paper it over with euphemisms. We do not say that people die, but that they "pass away." We make the reality so antiseptic, so unreal, that we actually generate a fear of death that drives us even to try to con-trol it, like some unruly passion. Humans have always feared death, as the social critic Ernst Becker makes clear. In our modern North American culture, though, we have created a kind of nightmare; we rarely encoun-ter the reality of someone's dying. Even worse, people have to die not freely as Jesus did, but alone, caught up in our medicalized model. Alternatively, we can make death into a mere video game: how many can we kill? By contrast, Ignatius invites us to a thoroughgoing realism. In Jesus' death, we contemplate the fullness of his human death, freely embraced for us, the fullness of the trajectory of the Incarnation. We are invited to consider especially his embrace of abandonment. Hans Urs von Balthasar, the great Swiss theologian and pro-foundly Ignatian thinker, asks us to ponder just what this means, as a path toward hope: The Redeemer showed himself therefore as the only one who, going beyond the general experience of death, was able to measure the depths of that abyss.3 Think about that with me for just a moment. For Balthasar (and here he places himself in the whole strand of Christian mystics) we desire to shield our-selves from death. We may have "the general experience of death," but we seek to hold it at bay, often at great cost. No one wants to die, of course, and from time 71.1 2012 35 immemorial we have created lovely myths of "afterlife" as ways of avoiding the fullness of what we would expe-rience in death, so that we do not really die. Instead, Ignatius invites us, in the wake of the cry by which Jesus freely gives up his spirit and accepts death, to consider what it would mean for someone freely and fully to enter into the realm of Hades, of Sheol, in which, as the psalmist says, "no one can praise You." In Jesus, God goes fully to claim the reality of human death and dying as God's very own. Balthasar uses the image of the abyss—a wonderful image—for this. We need to ponder, not morosely but in faith, the full tra-jectory of the Third Week. Ignatius places us there and asks that during the Seventh Day—however long it might be—we continually call that reality to mind and keep it before us. He invites us there in place of repetitions or Applications of the Senses, because in pon-dering the fullness of the death of Jesus, in letting it "ripen to fullness," as it were, we begin to grasp the fullness of what it means that he dies for our sake, that he goes where we would not go. If, as David Fleming, John Futrell, John English and many others suggest, the Last Supper sets the tone for the Third Week, here we know what it means to "be broken and poured out," even to the fullness of death itself. We have been praying for the grace of freedom throughout the Exercises, and in a sense here we encounter freedom in its fullness. Balthasar notes what freedom—in its purest form, free from all stain of sin—would mean: "And precisely in that did his mortal anguish and God-abandonment differ radically from the habitual anxiety of the sinner." 4 Jesus freely—and with-out defense—walks the way ahead of us, embraces our path. Jesus claims the fullness of death as a space within Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 36 which to meet us—thus, the implication of the seventh-day exercise. We can—and do—often hurry by the real-ity, or simply marvel at the wreck of a corpse in the Pietà. Ignatius, according to Balthasar, invites us to let death be full, that we might know freedom with Christ, freedom for our mission ultimately, freedom to love "even to death itself." No masochism or delectatio morosa marks this moment, but only a profound invitation to explore what we fear with the One who has gone the way before us. For Ignatius, that remains key. If Resurrection cannot grasp the fullness of what death means, if it can-not meet us in the anxiety that would hold us bound and create the kind of craziness that marks our death-obsessed culture, it remains but a "nice idea," easily dis-pensed with, perhaps. For Balthasar, Jesus delves into death as abandonment, freely, without losing hope, but relying completely on the God who alone can overcome death. Imagine "separation of soul and body" in its totality, without the experience of Resurrection that often shields us. Jesus embraces that. This descent remains but part of the story for Ignatius, since he invites us to place ourselves with Mary and the disciples in their desolation—an impor-tant context. The imagery of that placement reveals a deliberate quality in two ways: it prepares us to encoun-ter the Risen Lord and accept our mission. In one sense, of course, we explore the same space as previously, explore what it means for Jesus to have died—but now from the perspectives of those left behind. Again, Ignatius invites us to contemplate with Mary—and to some extent with Mary Magdalene—to share space and time with women who also embrace the "empty space" without defense, freely. The sinlessness of Mary parallels Jesus' own condition, and invites us 71.1 2012 37 to imagine how she, whose heart knew only openness, would experience the "separation" of soul from body. In her once again, Ignatius asks us to confront death as death, in its fullness in Jesus, in one whom we pas-sionately love. While I will focus on the encounter with Mary, the mother of Jesus, as a basic form of the Resurrection con-templations, I do not mean to suggest that one must force people to engage that path. Eventually the pattern of the Exercises does lead us there, but as John English suggests in Spiritual Freedom,5 a directee may find it difficult to enter into the purity of Mary's openness to encounter the Risen Lord; a person may find more fruitful prayer with the grief of Mary Magdalene, or the guilt of Simon Peter, or others. Still, the fullness of that openness to the Risen Lord brings us back to the full "yes" of Mary, mother of Jesus, as a paradigm of freedom. We have probably all known a parent who has lost a beloved child. As I write this I cannot help but think of the parents of a young Chinese student who failed at university and chose suicide in the face of despair. I cannot begin to imagine the grief of soul such a moment would entail for those parents; nor can I imagine the added burden of feeling guilt for having laid on a child expectations that he could not fulfill. That empty space of a dead child shocks us; "it should not happen," we say quite rightly. Parents should die before their children do. The empty space becomes almost too much to take in, though with Michelangelo's Pietà we catch a glimpse of how a face might appear when gazing on that emptiness. Yet, for the director at this point in the Exercises, especially in the face of what happens in the transition, an important distinction remains. Monty Williams, in a work in progress that he shared with me, advises that we Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 38 note two different paths as one encounters fear, notably the fear of death. There are two ways of being present to our fears. We could look at them and wonder how we can be so stupid, and then make the plans . . . to ensure those mistakes never happen again. . . . The other way . . . is to experience the amazement. . . . The more we ponder . . . it, the more we are filled with a sense of wonder—which gives no answer. That wonder, that sense of amazement, is our first awareness of the presence of God in the space we have created by looking at our fears. As Williams frames it, two choices remain. We can panic and move into flight or analysis or simply an excess of emotions to make us feel better. Or we can be attentive, in the face of such fears, to an empty space without answers—a much harder place to be. When Ignatius invites us to contemplate, to recall Mary, all of those spaces we have known in the Second Week come to mind. Mary remains for us always the one who attends, who does not withdraw, even in the face of the horror of the slaughter of the innocents, but who pon-ders. The path of our entry into the Seventh Day parallels Mary's path, and a director looks at whether the exerci-tant gets caught up in his or her own pain or can ponder the empty space with Mary—that dreadful emptiness the church hints at in stripped altars and empty tabernacles after the Good Friday service. With Mary, we hear the invitation in freedom to know our beloved Jesus as dead. A terrible space, but not a maudlin one! We hear the call to compassion, to attentiveness, to let an empty space open. In essence, Michelangelo's Pietà invites us not to wild grieving but to face the reality of Mary holding her dead son. Attentiveness is a state of waiting, but for what? 71.1 2012 39 I can't help but remember Mary Oliver's powerful poem "The Uses of Sorrow," which captures so much of what I think Ignatius presents to us in constructing a place for prayer: (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.6 The poem admirably catches the difference between panic/analysis and attentiveness as ways of responding to the human—and here divine—reality of death. For us the path takes time; Ignatius invites us on the seventh day to recall this to mind again and again, but the full process may well be the journey of our lives and our dying. However, contemplating the loss of Jesus is but one dimension. With Mary—and with the disciples—we are invited to ponder the world in which, as Cleopas said, "we had hoped" but which is now a space of desolation. We face the fullness of what Ignatius means when he invites the retreatant to see and consider the Three Divine Persons. . . . They look down upon the whole surface of the earth and behold all nations in great blindness, going down to death and descending into hell (SpEx §106). The reality of human violence is seen in its full-ness in this moment, especially when, with the disciples, we see that violence is also part of their lives—in their abandoning their Master. With Mary and them, the full brutality of violence in the name of God, yet murder-ous of God, comes home to us in all its savagery. No doubt they had seen or heard of crucifixion before. This Roman "tool" helped maintain fear in the populace by destroying its memory of the one killed, lest anyone else Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 40 attempt to do what the crucified one had done. We can all rationalize human cruelty to suit our purposes. Here, though, their Master, Lord, Mentor, the one who healed, raised from the dead, preached Good News—the one they loved—becomes the victim of such cruelty. With him, the hope he had proclaimed also becomes a victim, exactly as the Romans would have desired. Hope is too dangerous a drug to a people fac-ing death. Is the reality of what Cleopas proclaimed— that "we had hoped"—also dead? With Mary and the disciples, we gaze on the empty space in the wake of the cross, and we know the dying of our hopes, of the ways in which all of our plans and expectations go to the cross with Jesus. Our history, our world, hangs in that balance. As director, how often have I sat with people who, in the wake of Jesus' death and burial, have to encounter again their own history of violence—received, experienced in others, commit-ted! The call to attentiveness in this space where our wounded history is made so evident places the past and the future in the balance. If in the first movement with Jesus and Mary we know the fear before death, in this second movement perhaps we face the fear of living in a world mediated by violence, a violence that we can usually hold at bay or ignore by switching the televi-sion channel. Yet, in this transition place, we face the brokenness and "poured-out" quality of our world, and we hear the call not to stronger forms of violence or retribution but to attend in that quiet space and know the fullness of a hope that might have died too. So many people live in this space. It is not theoretical. So, for me, the power of Stravinsky's piece, build-ing to that awful crescendo, that cacophony of death, followed by nothing, silence, lies in wanting some reso- 71.1 2012 41 lution other than the sacrifice. He captures well what those first disciples must have been going through on their "seventh day," after the terrible dramatics of human violence, cruelty, power; now Mary and the others know an empty silence made all the more desolate by what had come before. Building better plans, creating monu-ments, assigning guilt or blame—all of these would have tempered the grief. Instead, we hear the invitation to silence, to attentiveness. It may be that real forgiveness, hope, and resurrection can occur only in such silence. Ignatius places us before those realities that so easily move us away from attentiveness—fear of death and fear of violence or rejection—as a space within which some-thing very different—freedom—can arise. This experience could well represent a kind of "downer" for us, but need it be so? The sense of the deaths we experience—whether the physical death that Jesus freely embraces or the death of our illusions about the world and our patterns of dealing with it—create, as it were, a wasteland, an emptiness before which we stand and pray with Mary and the disciples. Its all-encompassing nature seeks to enlarge our freedom by placing before us our fears. Facing the wasteland yields fruit not in darkness or desolation (though we do indeed pass through these) but, as Antonio Valentino noted in a Directory written in the first generation after the death of Ignatius, aims at perfection in prayer and work, holding always God before one's eyes with gentleness and consistency, and remembering God whenever we think, speak or act.7 If we are moving toward the Contemplatio here as a mode of engaging the world, then this transition that "clears the ground" can yield an abundant harvest. We are left waiting for God's action—not ours. Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 42 I do not use the imagery of "clearing ground" acci-dentally. I find myself touched by the way in which one deals with one sweep of contemplation, which clears, seeds, and bears fruit in ever deeper ways. Think through with me the extraordinary introduction to the Fourth Week that piggybacks on what we have seen. As Cusson mentions, when Ignatius presents the medita-tion on the first resurrection appearance (SpEx §299), he offers a first point, nothing else; the simplicity of the perspective shines through: "He appeared to the Virgin Mary." Ignatius sees no need for second or third points, as are given in all the other meditations. It is a unique tableau.8 Ignatius does complete the sweep from where we have been: His soul, likewise united with the divinity, descended into hell. There he sets free the souls of the just, then comes to the sepulcher, and rising appears in body and soul to His Blessed Mother (SpEx §219). We have before us the same matter as in the con-templations on "the seventh day" of the Third Week; the setting does not change. What happens arises from within where we find ourselves as we attend to the empty space at the end of the Third Week. Our entry into the Fourth Week comes not because we will our-selves to joy. Rather, in the space that death and vio-lence have laid waste, Resurrection dawns like light and, with it, love, joy, and hope as the fruit. We do not change spaces for Resurrection, for the Fourth Week; rather, we extend the Third until it bears fruit. As director, I cannot overemphasize how hard it is to keep people focused at this point; exhaustion has set in. The Fourth Week regularly gets short shrift, as does Resurrection in so much of Christian life; yet, as I pray with the transition from Third to Fourth Week, I 71.1 2012 43 realize how crucial that transition point is to our ability to be in and to serve a broken but risen world. Ignatius leads us to the "hell" which Jesus has entered freely and fully, with all those who have gone before—and with us eventually—and then moves to Mary, in her home and oratory, exactly the order that repeats the end of the Third Week. I would like to move in three points—Jesus' apparition to Mary, Jesus' rising "from the dead," and the gift of joy to a world that killed and can kill still. They are related, but quite distinct too. Think of how redolent Jesus' apparition is for Mary. Ignatius does not describe it much, except for a clear allusion. He asks us to "see the arrangement of . . . the place or house of our Lady. I will note its different parts, and also her room, her ora-tory, etc." (SpEx §220). In §103 we were asked "especially to see the house and room of our Lady." The parallelism is almost exact, and, of course, David Fleming in Like the Lightning alludes to the Annunciation contemplation.9 This is not pious drivel, as some are tempted to say; this really is a new Annunciation, but one that asks Mary—and us—to go on mission for the Trinity with the Risen Lord. After all the Sturm und Drang of the Third Week— the drama of our human violence and blood-lust, even the drama of the Last Supper that begins the Third This really is a new Annunciation, but one that asks Mary—and us— to go on mission for the Trinity with the Risen Lord. Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 44 Week—this dawn of the Fourth Week, of a new world, is so undra-matic. Mel Gibson would have a difficult time with it. We would be tempted to make it dramatic, and certainly the Miraflores altar-piece does so, with Jesus showing his wounds and with Mary por-trayed as quite the medieval lady. Ignatius's description, though, is so different. Certainly, as he notes in the fourth point, the "divinity here manifests itself so miraculously," though in the fifth point the man-ifestation is as the consoler, the one who brings joy in the glory of the Resurrection. What are we to make of the apparition as "con-soler"? By the way, Ignatius gives only this contemplation in the Fourth Week, though we find a number of other texts arranged from §299-312 (in the section on the Mysteries of Christ's Life), with an ever wider circle of people let in on the Resurrection. In the Fourth Week itself, one contemplation alone pre-cedes the Contemplatio, again with Mary. If we take a step back, Mary represents the free per-son who has tasted the fullness of the passage of Jesus, both into death and at the hands of a broken, murderous world. If the darkness that John evokes in the Gospel stands as a hallmark of the Passion, Mary knows that darkness fully. As we wait with her, we hear the invita-tion to know that darkness, to let our own hopes and dreams die, to recognize the fullness of what death, as God-forsakenness, means. Mary roots us in a barren 71.1 2012 45 landscape without familiar landmarks. Stark—not dra-matic. Quiet. As long as we cling to our own artifacts, the land remains cluttered, and we are unable to receive. In essence, Mary descends into a kind of hell as well, the fullness of the First Week's hell, which is not of her doing, but which is the fruit of the world we have created. The more I ponder and pray with these texts, however, the more they strike me as a new "Incarnation," but with a different order and intent. In the Incarnation medita-tion, we move from the work of God, who ponders the broken, murderous world and chooses to enter it, invit-ing Mary—and us—to share in the work of the Trinity here now. With Mary we have been placed in a God-less world, the fullness of hell. We gaze, we ponder with her, in the freedom of those who have elected to follow Jesus. Mary—and we—know what God's heart would have felt in the acute desire to set people free. We now move from the order of "this world" to an encounter with the Trinity as we know the fullness of the desire of the Trinity in the Incarnation prayer, now effected by the Risen Lord. Again, I want to stress the point: Ignatius places us with Mary as the archetype of the person of the Exercises, the free person. While in later contempla-tions we are indeed shown the rest of the Gospel story, here he asks us to share in the fullness of what freedom The Apparition to Mary Reverses the order of the Incarnation meditation From the Trinity To a Broken World To revelation of the Trinity From a Broken World Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 46 means, freedom at the intersection of our engagement with a broken world, and we wonder at the dawning of a world shot through with Resurrection. The transition of this time represents not a movement from Third Week to Fourth Week, as if we could leave the former behind as just a bad memory; rather, the transition is the on-going space of discipleship. We, like Mary, remain in a broken world, but the transition into the Fourth Week recasts the meaning of the world in a dramatic way, so that we can accept the call to serve a world still broken. Contemplation constitutes the basic hallmark of this freedom; the encounter with the Risen Lord that Ignatius sketches out occurs as an offer of new life in the midst of the contemplation of the fullness of death and sinful violence. These two elements of death and life form a diptych, as it were, for our lives and our prayer. We encounter here not merely the Risen Lord but, with Mary, the pattern of what we shall know as we await that ultimate coming of Christ to the world, and we receive a mission to act upon hope. Into that space, the risen Lord comes, not just as resuscitated—"I'm back"—but as a living proclamation of a new world, God's plan for the ultimate healing and completion of the world God so loves. From the broken world, we encounter the divinity made flesh again for us, but now glorified and risen. If Christ performs "the office of the consoler," as Ignatius says, this consolation does not simply cause a "feeling good" or even a happi-ness, but a revelation of a new world and the empower-ing invitation to dwell in that new world and extend it through time and space. That power is "joy." Joy in this case is not an affect, or even a spiri-tual movement, for Ignatius. In fact, he distinguishes between the two realities: 71.1 2012 47 as soon as I awake [I will] place before my mind the contemplation I am to enter upon, and then . . . strive to feel joy and happiness at the great joy and happi-ness of Christ our Lord (SpEx §229). Happiness we know as an affective movement, a passing reality; we feel happy when we experience cer-tain realities. We can know happiness but still be alien to joy, since happiness comes and goes, depending on the experience we feel. Happiness has an object, and in this case Ignatius does want us to evoke within ourselves the experience of happiness; the encounter becomes the cause of our happiness. Joy, however, pertains to a very different reality. Joy—and this is Christ's joy, of course, a gift of the Holy Spirit—intends not a movement of the heart, a feel-ing, but a disposition, a way of being; it is the hallmark of those who have encountered the risen Lord in the midst of surrounding darkness. Joy makes possible the freedom to go on mission into the Fourth Week—our ordinary time. That light dawns in the Resurrection, not apart from but in the midst of the darkness which Mary—and we—have known. G.K. Chesterton's lament about "joyless Christians" captures something very important here: Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's [sic] ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world.10 The joy we experience in the presence of the Risen Lord does not suddenly wipe away the reality of the grief we know at the experience of the brokenness of Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 48 the world and its impact on the vulnerable; rather, such joy places it all in context, allows us to see the world as it is, in the context of God's proclamation of new life and hope in Christ. The way Ignatius ends the Exercises with Mary and this twofold contempla-tion seems to suggest that this joy becomes our "new normal," what God intended in creation and effects through the Incarnation, ministry, and Passover of the Word. We often emphasize the continuity/discontinuity of the Risen Jesus; he is like but different. But is it not really also the world which is continuous/discontinu-ous? In a great line from "Lion in Winter," Eleanor of Aquitaine says, "In a world where carpenters get resur-rected, everything is possible." Exactly—and such is our hope and the cause of our joy. As contemplatives moved to action, we in the Ignatian tradition live in the intersection of the two parts of the diptych, of Holy Saturday and Easter, but with joy as the hinge, something into which we grow. The encounter with the Risen Lord in the midst of a broken world becomes the reality of our lives and a point of conversion into this "new world." In that respect, we are unlike Mary but more like the others who encounter the Lord in a gradual way, but who nevertheless grow into a joyful engagement with the world. However, we can-not separate this encounter from the work which serves life and just peace; we grow in joy and hope only if we place ourselves at the service of justice, as it were, as the thirty-second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus suggested. Yet, we are no longer simply disciples, but apostles, those sent as the Word was sent into the world, but now into a world transformed. This "new normal," a joyful realm, disorients in many ways. Please excuse me as I take a bit of a detour 71.1 2012 49 into a Byzantine theme, that of the "Harrowing of Hell," an ancient icon in the East that depicts a scene sketched by a homily from the second century. I ask you to pon-der it with me for just a few moments. We have here one particu-lar rendition of the icon, but a powerful one with three signifi-cant movements. One of these captures the Contemplation for the Fourth Week as given by Ignatius, namely that the Risen Lord sets free the souls of the just held bound before Christ's Resurrection. For Balthasar and oth-ers, this moment of encounter with the Risen Lord has become the deciding moment for them, the one in which heaven—and the second death—actually open. In that sense, we have a key moment of election again, a confirmation to "fol-low" but now in a different way—to eternal life for them. Yet this Risen Lord calls us to proclaim eternal life and freedom in this world. Second, and this evokes the reality of La Storta, the risen Christ carries the cross, but as a tool through which to break open the gates of Sheol. This Christ on mission invites us to the imagery of the Third Week, but now as a call to freedom, not to death or destruction. The order of the world is profoundly inverted here, and violence gives way to freedom. No wonder the thirty- Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 50 second General Congregation could so freely embrace being "under the banner of the cross" as a mode of identification. This rising Christ changes all the imag-ery of violence, death, and hopelessness we would have taken for granted. One finds joy even in the cross—how odd—but, again, joy is not simply a moment of happi-ness but a consistent mode of being. Again, we cannot separate encounter with the Risen Lord from presence to those who know Holy Saturday and its pain or loss of hope. Last, though, for the East—and for Ignatius, I think—the implications of this little icon and of the work of Christ show free-dom in an even bolder way. A second-century homily proclaims, "I did not create you to be held captive," as does the Office of Readings every Holy Saturday. Do we ponder, though, the implications of that little line, the heart of the link between the Third and Fourth Weeks? The dynamic of the Third Week—from the human point of view—reveals the inevitability of betrayal, duplicity, shame, violence, grief, blood-lust. Not an appetizing menu, to be sure. Ignatius would ask us to contemplate the recreated world in which such patterns have lost their power forever, not just for a moment; we know their power, but as something that has passed away, both from the world and from our lives. If a counterpart to the contemplation on the Incarnation in the Second Week is the Two Standards meditation, perhaps this "diptych" does something Joy is not simply a moment of happiness but a consistent mode of being. 71.1 2012 51 similar. In the Two Standards meditation, Satan calls his demons and "goads them on to lay snares for people and bind them with chains" (SpEx §142). Christ bids, attracts, graces, to a very different world, of poverty, bearing insult and humiliation freely as a means of free-dom (SpEx §146). We have seen that first standard lived to its full-est in the Third Week; now we see Christ who in his revealed divinity, as the fullness of the revelation of the Trinity, continues to serve, to free, to attract, to bid, but now as having conquered all freely and lovingly. Do we not know here the prospect of a whole new world unbound or in the process of unbinding, a process to which Christ missions us? Does Christ not call us in this contemplation with Mary to gather companions in the work of dwelling in this contemplative yet active space? The full import of what has been "the normal" becomes ever clearer to us, even as we enter more fully into com-panionship with Mary in this contemplation. The chal-lenge to us, however, never degenerates into hopeless self-scrutinizing or, even worse, scrupulosity. We do not get forced back into contemplating our sins, as too often happens when people gaze upon the cross, or into the violent guilt or shame of the Third Week. Rather, aware of the Third Week and its full impact on the one whom we love and on the world Christ so loves, we hear the invitation to explore contemplatively a dawning world, one which opens, I think, to the Contemplatio and to our role in extending Christ's joy. James Alison, the British Catholic theologian, has written movingly on this, inviting us to consider how our cultures shape our imaginations through the pat-terns of interaction—rivalistic patterns—which for us constitute "the normal." In Christ, and I think in Mary Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 52 and the disciples, God gives us a dramatically differ-ent pattern of interaction, one that creates relationships touched by joy, not by violence or rivalry or fear. In the complementary contemplations we are given through-out the Fourth Week, we encounter many such persons, wounded in and by the Third Week, even agents of the violence of the Third Week, with whom and in whom we now encounter the pattern of joy and hope. These reflections lead me to ponder the meaning of the "Rules for Thinking with the Church" (SpEx §352-370). They are usually given as a form of Counter- Reformation ecclesiology, a guide on how to engage the debates of the mid-sixteenth century. The text contains all kinds of very context-specific allusions—echoes of debates on predestination, sacraments, authority, and the like that helped tear the church apart. We realize that the inability to attend to what the other was saying represented but one more kind of violence in an already violent age. Ignatius, of course, never had shied away from a fight. One has only to remember how ready he was to dispatch the Moor who had shown insufficient defer-ence to the Blessed Virgin, his Lady. He certainly would not be the first choice as a poster boy for pacifism. Yet, think with me for a moment about the Rules, written at a time when everyone wanted a good fight and looked, all too often, for occasions to pick a fight or score a point. Ignatius's presentation strikes me as curious in that regard, strangely pacific, to use Alison's invitation to a radically different imagination, a con-version of imagination, where our normal expectation is no longer violence or the violent god but rather of a world ordered to and by peaceful relationships. We find here none of the grand drama of the instructions to 71.1 2012 53 the Cardinal Legates to the various Diets and Councils. Instead, we find a man desperate to preserve the unity of the community, to avoid the kinds of clashes that mark his age. Perhaps when we look at the Rules for Thinking with the Church, the metaphor that I have been using— of having had the earth scorched around us and entering a new world—could be helpful. We tend to bring with us the imagery and imagination to which we have grown accustomed. We bring the patterns of guilt or shame or blame or grief or violence that we have learned only too well from the world we have known as normal. Yet, the totality of the presence of the Risen Christ to Mary— and to us—challenges any return to those spaces to which we have grown accustomed. Certainly, if Christ has "harrowed hell" and broken dominant patterns, we are in need of "a way," of his way. Might not the Rules for Thinking with the Church be Ignatius's way of inviting us to turn from the slavish obedience so alien to the freedom of the Fourth Week and to become attentive to the community of people elected in grace, graced by Risen Life, empowered by saints, who could sketch out for us and for our imagi-nation a path with and to Christ? We stand in need of a community of faith, the Church militant in the original Spanish text, which can model for us the new life revealed in and through the Risen Lord. While the Rules invite a kind of docility in seeking a way of peace and renewal of imagination found in the community of the faithful, they do not require checking one's mind at the door. At times we can, like Ignatius, grieve because of a church that shows the marks of the violence and domination of those who killed the Lord. Nevertheless we wait in the hope of encountering Christ in this com- Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 54 munity, in the Holy Saturday-Easter Sunday diptych, still confident that we will contemplatively learn a way forward, not in spite of but in the pain. In a similar way, Ignatius needed the community to foster conversion out of scruples and into Christ. Still, a real encounter as is experienced in the tran-sition opens a path to community. Rooted in a new experience of the world, it is a community of peace, joy, hope, creativity. This, of course, has none of the "grand drama" of the Third Week that would thrill Mel Gibson, but it has the quiet quality of a son meeting a grieving mother who has been wounded by violence but, in joy, is experiencing the possibility of new life, the opening of heart and imagination. Quiet, not dramatic in the ways we are used to, but nonetheless a powerful and creative stance. The difference between the drama at the end of the Third Week and the quiet dawn of the Fourth invites us to know in its fullness what the Two Standards means and what Christ offers: not a crusade of our own, but an allowing of new possibilities to dawn in our age. We have seen such dawns, and their ecclesial power touches deeply. I think of Jean Vanier's L'Arche com-munity embracing the handicapped, those rejected by the world. There is the hospice movement, which rose from Dame Cecily Saunders's refusal to allow cancer patients for whom medical drama could do no more to simply go away and die. Those who serve refugees and bring a moment of tenderness and hope to fragile lives similarly stand at the confluence of this Paschal diptych. Easier, I suppose, would be to follow the temptation to take up arms and fight back or condemn, but we are invited to a very different path, not of moralism but of an embrace like that of Mary by her Son. 71.1 2012 55 We began this talk with Stravinsky's musical image of primal humanity and its lust for sacrifice, a lust that seeks "salvation for the people" in a woman condemned to die by dancing madly. The music crashes to a dra-matic conclusion followed by silence. I would like to end with a different dance, one described by Sydney Carter's words applied to the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts," here the "Lord of the Dance." Perhaps this could evoke something of the transition to a dance that is joyous, inclusive, expansive. May this be our prayer and our path. I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black— It's hard to dance with the devil on your back. They buried my body, and they thought I'd gone, But I am the Dance, and I still go on. Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he, And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be, And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he. They cut me down and I leapt up high; I am the life that'll never, never die; I'll live in you if you'll live in me— I am the Lord of the Dance, said he. Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he, And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be, And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he. Notes 1 Gilles Cusson, Biblical Theology and the Spiritual Exercises (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1988), p. 299. 2 Cusson, p. 303. Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 56 3 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1990), p. 168. 4 von Balthasar, p 169. 5 John English, Spiritual Freedom: From an Expertience of the Ignatian Exercises to the Art of Spiritual Direction (Guelph: Loyola House, 1973), p. 247. 6 Mary Oliver, Thirst (Boston: Beacon Press), p. 52. 7 Martin E. Palmer, S.J., On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599 (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), p. 79. 8 Cusson, p. 303. 9 David L. Fleming, Like the Lightning: The Dynamics of the Ignatian Exercises (St Louis, Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004), p. 77. 10 Gilbert K. Chesterton, Othodoxy (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1959), p. 160. Questions for Reflection 1. Where have I embraced the emptiness of death and how has it enabled me to experience the joy of the Risen Lord? 2. Do you have any favorite music, artwork, or poetry that helps you enter into the sacred silence discussed in this article—or that helps you understand other moments in the Spiritual Exercises or in the Gospels? 71.1 2012 57 Dolor 5: At the Foot of the Cross Giving birth is contracting to sleep with death. It is an agreement to pass on everything that has been fed, fondled, fiercely treasured, looked forward to as one looks for the first hibiscus every spring. It is a signature and seal in pledge that one will leave someone something. It holds the possibility—tormenting as tarantula's tricks— that the loved child may pass first, cursedly, of illness, mishap, quick step in the wrong place, by fate or by murderous hatred heaped upon the great. The blood and wash of afterbirth foretell that every holding close lets loose. Small fingers, small toes enlarge as mothering bellies pull back to size and shape. Flowerings green up. They will, they must, brown down with wintering. And every footfall tells an end to every earthly good, each breath started with a slap, each name begun so well that slips into what's next. Pamela Smith sscm Review for Religious 58 peter j. schineller Finding or Seeking God in All Things: A Few Cautionary Notes "T o find God in all things" is a commonplace of Ignatian spirituality. Books and essays on Ignatius and Jesuit spirituality have highlighted the phrase as a hallmark of that spirituality. However, in an essay entitled "The Ignatian Charism and Contemporary Theology," the late Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote that "to the best of my knowledge the expression 'finding God in all things,' does not appear verbatim in the writ-ings of St. Ignatius."1 He admits that we do find "similar expressions" in the writings of Ignatius, and adds that "it seems evident that God can be found in all things." Dulles's observation makes me wonder and leads me to the unanswerable question of whether Ignatius deliberately avoided the phrase "find God in all things." Ignatius does write in many places that we should seek Peter J. Schineller sj is the archivist for the New York Province of the Society of Jesus. He resides at America House, 106 West 56th Street, New York, NY 10019. 59 71.1 2012 and serve God in all things; but, as we will see, except for one place, he does not use the phrase "find God in all things." Jerome Nadal, one of the early companions of Ignatius, clearly believed that Ignatius had the gift or charism to "feel the presence of God" and that this experience should likewise characterize Ignatius's fol-lowers. He writes: "I shall not fail to recall that grace which he had in all circumstances, while at work or in conversation, of feeling the presence of God and of tasting spiritual things, of being contemplative even in the midst of action: he used to interpret this as seeking God in all things."2 Note well that Nadal says Ignatius interpreted this experience as seeking God in all things. So too, Pedro Ribadeneira, also an early compan-ion of Ignatius, reports that "we frequently saw him taking the occasion of little things to lift his mind to God, who even in the smallest things is great. From seeing a plant, foliage, a leaf, a flower, any fruit, from the consideration of a little worm or any other animal, he raised himself above the heavens and penetrated the deepest thought."3 And, in the Autobiography of Ignatius, Luis da Camara, who wrote down the words of Ignatius, states: "At whatever time or hour he wanted to find God, he found Him."4 (To be precise, da Camara says that Ignatius could find God at all times, not that he found God in all things.) So we ask: might there be some wis-dom or insight—or caution—in the fact that Ignatius only once uses the phrase "find God in all things"? The Sole Text and Its Context In the long letter to Antonio Brandão subtitled "Instructions given by our father Ignatius, or at his Review for Religious Schineller • Finding or Seeking God in All Things 60 direction . . ." we read the advice given to scholastics: "the scholastics cannot engage in long meditations . . . they can practice seeking the presence of our Lord in all things; in their dealings with other people, their walking, seeing, tasting, hearing, understanding, and all our activities. For his Divine Majesty truly is in every-thing by his presence, power, and essence. This kind of meditation—finding God our Lord in everything—is easier than lifting ourselves up and laboriously making ourselves present to more abstracted divine realities."5 Again, a caution. This letter was not written by Ignatius, but at his direction by Juan de Polanco. Further, before he says "finding God in everything," he says the scholastics must "practice seeking the presence of our Lord in all things." Finding that presence is not auto-matic— and, perhaps, not so easy as we might think! In the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, we read that Jesuit novices "should often be exhorted to seek God our Lord in all things . . . loving him in all crea-tures and all creatures in him" [§288]. Again, we see emphasis on the element of search. So too, in the Contemplation to Attain Love in the Spiritual Exercises, we read: "Here it will be to ask for an intimate knowledge of the many blessings received, that filled with gratitude for all, I may in all things love and serve the Divine Majesty" [SpEx §233]. Ignatius wants the retreatants to love and serve God in all; he does not write that they are to find God in all things. I wonder if the rea-son might be that Ignatius wishes to safeguard the Divine Majesty, the ever-greater God. Might it be that he fears that we will believe that we can capture or contain or iden-tify the ever-greater God in any one thing or in all things? In addition to frequently encouraging that we seek or serve God in all things, Ignatius does say that we 71.1 2012 61 can and must "find the will of God." Thus the Spiritual Exercises are a way of preparing the soul to rid itself of attachments and "of seeking and finding the will of God in the disposition of our life for the salvation of our soul" [SpEx §1]. And Ignatius most frequently ends his letters praying for the grace to "know God's most holy will and per-fectly fulfill it." Or, "may God in his goodness give us his abundant grace to know his most holy will and entirely to fulfill it." Even as Ignatius urges us to seek and find the will of God, he emphasizes the method and the search. He never claims that seeking and finding the will of God is easily done. It demands prayer, reflection, seeking, mortification, time, and effort. Today's Background, Context, Horizon In an obvious oversimplification, we might say that in our age we find two extreme tendencies: 1) the skepti-cal, secular way of underbelief and 2) the less critical way of overbelief. These correspond to two rival "isms" in our globalized world, spoken of by Fr. Adolfo Nicolás, supe-rior general of the Society of Jesus, in a major address on higher education: 1) an aggressive secularism and 2) a resurgence of various fundamentalisms.6 We might look at the cautious and critical way of Ignatius in light of these two tendencies. 1. The skeptical and secular viewpoint. Many today, including Christians, experience the distance, absence, Seeking and finding the will of God demands prayer, reflection, seeking, mortification, time, and effort. Review for Religious Schineller • Finding or Seeking God in All Things 62 or otherness of God. Rather than finding God in all things, they do not find God anywhere in their experi-ence. Or God is edged out by many possibilities, alter-natives, and options, by many "things" that are not God. They live in a world come of age that no longer "needs" God and are skeptical of those who find, describe, and talk of God so easily. They are critical of claims or interpretations that seem to make God into one thing among many. This objectification of God, they find, entails a loss of God's otherness and transcendence. 2. The less critical fundamentalism or overbelief. At the other extreme are the many believers who see God at work in every event. God is close and at hand. Some Christians seem to think they have a lock on God, clearly grasping and knowing the divine intentions and will for the world and for humankind. Statements to that effect indicate a temptation to reduce God to our size, to capture and lay hold of God. In a general way, two of today's thinkers reflect these two tendencies. The first is the critic George Steiner. In My Unwritten Books, a sequel to his book Real Presences, which points us to various signs of the transcendent, Steiner writes that he feels strongly the absence of God—a powerful experience of emptiness. "Awesome is the God who is not. . . . I strive to be with His sovereign absence."7 Steiner finds himself groping for and seeking God more than believing in and finding God. He adds that to be great, literature need not believe in or affirm God, but at least must grapple with the question of God, the search and debate over the reality of God. From an explicit Christian perspective, we might also listen to James Gustafson. In an article entitled "The Denial of God as God,"8 Gustafson writes that "the history of our religion is the history of human 71.1 2012 63 attempts to manage and manipulate the awesome power of God, who is finally beyond our capacities to know fully, to capture in human thoughts and deeds. . . . It is the history of efforts to control the times and places of his presence." Gustafson asserts that we overlook this awesome reality of God: "how we want a God we can manage, a God who comes when we beckon him, a God who permits us to say that he is here, but not there; a God who meets our needs on our terms; a God who supports our moral causes and destroys the forces we think are evil; a household God and a kitchen God." Then, drawing from the thought of Martin Luther, he challenges us not to try to manipulate or reduce God, but to "let God be God." Ignatius's Balance Surely Ignatius is not guilty of this reduction or denial of God. He had a strong sense of the immen-sity and majesty of God (he loved stargazing), as well as the closeness of God (recall his meditation on the Incarnation and birth of Jesus Christ in the Spiritual Exercises [§101-117]). But can this be said of all his followers? Might some be at times guilty of oversimpli-fying, reducing, identifying God with their own prefer-ences and thus not "letting God be God"? To put this more boldly; if we think it easy and pos-sible to find God in all things, might we end up by not finding the true God—the transcendent God—in or above any things? Emphasizing the finding of God in all things could become misleading and wrongheaded because it misses or misinterprets the special presence of God in some particular times, places, events, and things. Might this approach be similar to the positive emphasis on the generous and widespread presence and Review for Religious Schineller • Finding or Seeking God in All Things 64 offering of God's grace to all persons. If that view, good in itself, is pushed to the extreme, if all is grace, then we no longer distinguish between grace and non-grace, between grace and nature. Or, if all ground is seen as holy ground, then we might overlook or undercut the special presence or intervention, the special rev-elation of God. If we hold that everything i s sacred and noth-ing is profane or secular, then we could also hold the reverse, that nothing is sacred. Ultimately, it seems important and necessary that we maintain the distinction (not separation) of sacred and secular, of grace and nature, of the God who is in all things and yet above all things. Ignatius also writes of one other thing that Jesuits should seek in all things—namely, greater abnegation and continual mortification! "The better to arrive at this degree of perfection which is so precious in the spiritual life, [the] chief and most earnest endeavor [of the Jesuit candidate and those in formation] should be to seek in our Lord his greater abnegation and continual mortifica-tion in all things possible; and our endeavor should be to help him in those things to the extent that our Lord gives us his grace, for his greater praise and glory" [General Examen of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, §103]. While the seeking of mortification does not pre- If we think it easy and possible to find God in all things, might we end up by not finding the true God— the transcendent God— in or above any things? 71.1 2012 65 clude the effort to seek, find, and serve God in all things, surely it derives from a very different, and more sober perspective. It offers a balance to an overly posi-tive, totally one-sided incarnational spirituality. Ignatius is reminding us that the God or Christ that we seek and serve in all things is the Christ of the cross (abnega-tion and mortification) as well as the Christ of glory who comes with power. Thus Ignatius can write regard-ing the qualifications of the rector of a college, that he should "be a man of great example, edification and mortification of all his evil inclinations" [Constitutions, §423]. The ideal superior is one who both practices mortification and seeks to find God in all things! Living with and Maintaining the Tension Deus Semper Major—God Ever Greater—is the title of the monumental work of Erich Pryzwara sj on Ignatius of Loyola.9 The God of Ignatius, the God we seek, find, love, and serve is ever greater, always more. God is in all, but also always above all. Ignatius had the ability to keep seemingly opposing tensions or ten-dencies in view—prayer and action, contemplation and action, the local and the universal, trust in God and trust in our talents and efforts, and obedience and free-dom. In these reflections we are pointing to 1) the ten-sion between the God in all things, and the God above all things and 2) the possible tension between seeking God in all things, and finding God in all things. It seems best and most creative to hold on to both elements of these two tensions and not eliminate one or the other. In one tension we hold that God is in and also above all things: incarnate, indwelling, working in the world, and yet, in keeping with the fourth part of the Contemplation to Attain the Love of God, above Review for Religious Schineller • Finding or Seeking God in All Things 66 and beyond, the source of all. In the second tension, we maintain both the seeking for and the finding of God. St. Augustine writes that we would not seek God unless we had already found (and been found by) God. So I am simply suggesting that rather than conflate the two, or eliminate one or the other, we place a bit more emphasis on the seeking and searching, and less on the finding, in accord with Deut. 4:29: "from there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul." A Caution and a Challenge Does this mean we should not use the phrase "find-ing God in all things"? No. It is in common use and does reflect the way Ignatius was interpreted by his contem-poraries even if Ignatius was normally reticent in using it. At the same time, we should use the words carefully and with awe, recalling that God is always greater and beyond. We dare not think we have captured God. We can preserve and use "finding God in all things" if we emphasize the search, the process, the prayerful effort of trying to find God in places and events around us. Two final cautions: Meister Eckhart said that "Foolish people deem that they should look upon God as though he stood there and they here. It is not thus." God is ever greater, ever here, and ever beyond. We might recall, too, the words of Fr. John Courtney Murray when he saw a poster to be used at a demonstration. Expressing the spirit of the times and a commitment to faith and justice, the poster read: "God Is Other People!" Murray is reported to have said "They forgot the comma after the word 'other.' It should read: 'God is Other, People!' " Probably the strongest challenge now is to seek and find God in the cities, in the world of technology and 71.1 2012 67 computers. We should not seek to find God only in sun-sets and stars and in the least of the sisters and broth-ers, but also amid skyscrapers and elevators, amid steel and concrete buildings, amid asphalt streets, on subways and in airplanes—wherever God seems to be edged out, overlooked, or denied. If the challenge seems daunting, we might be consoled by the words St. Augustine attri-butes to God: "you would not search for me unless you had already found me." And, we might add, we would not search for God "unless God had already found us." Notes 1 Avery Dulles sj, "The Ignatian Charism and Contemporary Theology." America (26 April 1997): 16. 2 Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Mon. Nadal, iv, 651. 3 Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Vita Ignatii Loyolae, in Fontes Narrativi, iv, 742. 4 Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography, §99. 5 Ignatius of Loyola: Letters and Instructions, (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2006), p. 342. 6 Adolfo Nicolás sj, "Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education Today." Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education 40 (Fall 2011): 9. 7 George Steiner, My Unwritten Books, (New York: New Directions Books, 2008), p. 209. 8 James Gustafson, "The Denial of God as God." Criterion (Autumn 1977): 6-9. 9 Erich Przywara sj, Deus Semper Major: Theologie der Exercitien (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1940). Review for Religious 68 In Distressing Disguise for Agnes Gonxha Bejaxhiu he's a lonely old man dandruff dusts his faded black shirt some polyester blend shiny, holding odors of sweat and cigarettes and left-overs some of which remains on the front of his trousers the purple around his neck shabby, soiled, worn-out even burned a little in one place careless as he is with his smokes over my head his palsied hand trembles and to my ears come mumbled words of grace while my heart strains to see Him, to see His true face, here before me in distressing disguise. Sean Kinsella Winter Sunset At exactly five-fifteen p.m. the over-ripe sun paused a second on the town's rim, all the horizon's color sealed in its neon pulp. I could hardly stop gazing, sure it would burst and spill red-orange juice, winter's redemptive blood, across the Western sky. Patricia Schnapp rsm The Warmth, the Will, and the Way The dilemma is that I am not making very steady progress on my spiritual journey. This leads me to think that I need more consistency. Since I already live "a stable way of life" as a member of a religious order, my basic direc-tion is set. I see that this way of life is leading me where the deepest currents of my heart want me to go. But despite that general clar-ity of direction, I find myself dawdling along, sometimes going backwards, often wandering off to explore some curiosity, rarely totally focused on the path, much less on the goal, of this particular journey on which the Way is also the End. We often pray that the Holy Spirit will fill our hearts and "enkindle in them the fire" of 71.1 2012 sharing experi-ence 69 ben harrison Ben Harrison mc is a Missionaries of Charity Brother. He has worked in formation and has journeyed, in the U.S. and Europe, alongside homeless people, prisoners, addicts, and other people on the margins of society. His email is . Review for Religious Harrison • The Warmth, the Will, and the Way 70 his love. Once on a retreat I was complaining to the director that I didn't feel any sense of God's presence, and he assured me that I wouldn't be feeling the absence if there weren't a kind of presence; the longing itself was a sign of the Spirit's presence. If I could welcome that longing as a warming presence rather than endure it as a chilling absence, it would help to enkindle the fire of his love. When I speak of this warmth of heart I am not talk-ing about seeking emotional experiences in prayer but rather of finding that sense of inner presence that is so important in the prayer of Eastern Christianity. My mind and the actions it inspires range all over the place, but if I am attentive to that warmth in my heart, the inner pres-ence not only influences my thoughts and feelings but also anchors my actions and desires. This sense of warmth, then, helps me to be more consistent on my spiritual way. I frequently have very good insights, and for a long time I thought that they could keep me centered. I often thought, "Oh, what a brilliant idea! If I can only remember that every day, I will be set for life." And so I would make a note and stick it on the door, or I would write a prayer and say it every morning, until it became so routine that what I was saying didn't even register. Soon I would have another brilliant insight with life-changing potential. Such thoughts are like matches that provide real fire, but only for a few minutes. Then, unless the match is touched to a candle or to a heap of kindling, it is spent. I need something more reliable than insights. I need something more reliable than insights. 71.1 2012 71 Perhaps the secret is to do what would be done in a cottage in the woods: continually add fuel to the fire, a log at a time, to keep it burning. Then, late at night, bank the coals, rake them together in a little pile so that the heat will not dissipate. A few glowing embers will remain in the morning, upon which new kindling can be placed and fresh wood arranged so all is ready to warm the beginnings of the new day. That way the hearth never grows cold. I am discovering that this warmth of heart is a sign of the Spirit's presence with me, abiding in me, direct-ing me toward the goal. But there is something else that seems to be essential in order to deepen that presence and strengthen God's claim on me—what I would call will. The desire is there: the forward impulse, the yearn-ing for the heights, the longing to surrender my being to the One Who Is. What is the difference between this desire and will? To wish for something is to entertain a desire for it; to want it is to own that desire; to will it is to act on that desire, to put it into operation. Will has about it an element of determination. And it is not something I can drum up within myself. It has to be given. St. Paul says, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Phil 2:12-13). Will and the Vows As I think about my vocation, I would say that my will is expressed, above all, by the vows. My vows are the way I demonstrate to myself, to God, and to oth-ers this desire to belong totally to him. The Latin verb for will is volo, velle, and the Latin verb voveo, vovere means vow or wish. Though etymologically the roots of volo and voveo do not seem to be related, there is, Review for Religious Harrison • The Warmth, the Will, and the Way 72 to my mind, a consonance of meaning. The vows of religious life are a way of making concrete the double-edged desire that is God's desire for me, expressed in a call—a word spoken silently in the heart—that awakens a reciprocating desire in me. His desire to give himself completely to me sets that very same flame alight in me so that I desire to give myself irrevocably to him. The gentle fire of the Spirit's warmth that God enkindles in my heart is drawing me, slowly but surely, toward the blazing glory at the heart of God, and my vows repre-sent the power of that attraction and my determination by God's grace to reach that goal. I see the vows of religious life as the embodiment and expression of the will to be united with God and to give myself to him totally in a particular context, in response to his gift of himself to us in Christ. This is so whether we are speaking of the monastic vows of obedi-ence, stability, and conversion of life or the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience (or, for that matter, similar sets of vows or promises: those of priest-hood or sacramental marriage, of virginity or service, of oblate-hood or lay association). From primitive times a vow was a solemn promise to make some gift or sacrifice to a divinity as an earnest of a good requested or in thanksgiving for a boon received. Although on a literal level this sounds like a type of bargaining or commerce, I can also see it as a way of demonstrating to myself and my God how important something is to me, how sincerely I desire it, how des-perately I need it, how serious my intentions are. The medieval king might have prayed, "Lord, defend us from the threat of these brutal enemies and I will build a church for your glory." Or a mother may pray, "Lord, if you spare my daughter from this dread disease, 71.1 2012 73 I will do everything I can to support research for its cure." Or a widow may say, as one I know did, "Lord, if I am spared from this condition leading to blindness, I will never use my eyes to take pleasure in what is not good and pure." Thus we see how a vow is an expression of a wish for some good for oneself or others. The Italian word for such a commitment is impegno, which can be translated as "pledge." Literally, some-thing given in pegno is pawned. By the vows I am putting the treasure of my earthly life in pledge for a higher good. I am putting my security, my posterity, and my liberty in pawn for something I need more urgently. What is it, in this case, that I need so urgently? I need the grace to live up to this persistent impulse to give myself—an impulse that God has placed in my heart. I know that the faith, hope, and love in me are too weak and faltering to do the job, to get me where I yearn to go. And so I pledge what I have to him and entrust my poor being to him, not to pay him for what he freely gives, but to show him (and myself) that I am serious about following him and that I trust him with this pre-cious but paltry gift of my life, trust that he will keep it safe and see it redeemed and restored in his own time. Pledging my life to him, I am confident that he will give me the grace I need to live each day. In the world of commerce, one pawns something of value for ready money—something that has value but is not spendable, for something that can be spent. The ready cash makes it possible to buy what is needed today. Another word for this ready cash is currency, also called fluid or liquid assets. All these words—"current," "fluid," "liquid"— suggest an action of flowing and remind us of the Spirit, that spring of living water that flows forth from the heart of Christ. Review for Religious Harrison • The Warmth, the Will, and the Way 74 Thus, when I make my profession of vows, I am proclaiming my faith in God and my desire to belong to him. The vows that I pronounce represent the totality of my gift of self. In the institute to which I belong, we profess the evangelical counsels—the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These three vows are an apt symbol of the totality of my life. By dedicating to God all that I have, all that I love, and all my choices and decisions now and in the future, I am effectively giv-ing him all I am. This triad of the evangelical counsels reflects a totality of being, as do many similar triads. I have no trouble, for example, in seeing parallels between the vows and St. Ignatius's prayer surrender-ing "my memory, my understanding, my entire will." The traditional baptismal formula asks us to renounce "the world, the flesh, and the devil." Scripture tells us that we are to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind (Mt 22:37). The magi brought the treasures of the nations—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Micah tells us that our sole obligation is "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God" (Mi 6:8). It is easy to see how the three evangelical counsels reflect the three theological gifts of faith, hope, and love. And finally, without putting too fine a point on the comparison, I suggest that the vow of poverty is descriptive of my relationship with the Father, without whom I am nothing and have nothing; chastity reflects my relationship with the Word, the Son, who is friend, Savior, and Bridegroom of souls; and obedience is the domain of the Spirit, who prompts the content of obe-dience and makes possible its practice. The act of making vows is thus a statement of my desire to surrender myself absolutely to the Absolute, to dedicate myself to his way and consecrate myself to his 71.1 2012 75 purpose. The mutuality of giving to which God invites me does not mean a mere absorption in each other. Though I would be content to lose myself in God, he seems to want more for me than that. God wants me to share his love for others and so, by my self-offering, he unites me to his own mission—his out-pouring, in-gathering action of universal love. Thus I am given to the particular apostolates and ministries of the institute in which I live my vocation. Sometimes vows are spoken of as sacred bonds. Bonds are something that we feel gripping us, holding or securing us. If bonds are involuntary we feel them as a constraint, an injustice. If they are desired, we feel them as a comfort, a belong-ing, an embrace. I suppose anyone who makes vows feels them sometimes as a restriction and some-times as a liberation. But part of the radi-cal nature of such a commitment is the protestation that one is willing to pay the price, that one values the liberation of giving oneself more than the security of having oneself. It is a recognition that dying to self is the road to life and that the cross shared is the victory won. Like the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, I want nothing more than for the Little Prince to tame me, so that "the wheat, which is golden [like your hair], will remind me of you. And I'll love the sound of the wind in the wheat." The act of making vows is a statement of my desire to surrender myself absolutely to the Absolute. Review for Religious Harrison • The Warmth, the Will, and the Way 76 Consistency in the Way Returning, then, to my original point, I am saying that two things will help me to find a salutary consis-tency in my spiritual journey: the abiding warmth of the Spirit's presence in my heart, and the will—the determination—to yield to the relentless attraction of Jesus drawing me, and all, to himself. God's love for me in Christ arouses a reciprocating love in me. I give my poor self to him in pledge, not because I have to but because I want to, and he gives me, in return, the wherewithal to make the journey: the daily bread, the water from the rock, and the yearning for home—for the harbor—at the heart of God. Perhaps the greatest indication of his love that God has given me, from my point of view, is not his love itself for me (of which I can scarcely conceive) but my love for him, which is a sweet hunger, a soothing need. Nor is my love for him something that I can claim or that I often feel, but rather an occasional glimpse of light; a fitful melting of joy; a momentary, faint intima-tion of promised ecstasy. It is to the memory of those rare moments of tender quickening, of nostalgia for the unknown, that my will clings during the long periods of dryness, confusion, and loss. It is will that keeps me walking on the way when even the cherished memory fades and all I have left to fall back on is the Spirit's quiet presence in my heart. Indeed, it is all up to God. It is he who supports the journey from behind with his warm abiding. It is he who lures me from ahead through that hunger in my heart. And it is he who strengthens me on the way by the will to journey on. Each day's reminder of that will at work in me is the comforting burden of the vows, by which I experience within myself the debt of love, the 71.1 2012 77 yoke of gratitude, the claim of oneness by which I know that I am his. Being as I am, the fact that I do not manage to live my vows wholeheartedly is not surprising. But it is important that I feel the rub and the pinch and the chafe of them against my stubborn self. As my need and desire for God become stronger than all lesser needs and desires, so the bonds of my belonging to him will grow stronger than all my resistances. At the point that I can give myself without reserve, I will be free. And how do I dare to think that I will reach that point? St. Paul tells us that if God has gone so far as to give his Son for us, "will he not also give us all things with him?" (Rom 8:32). And Paul says further, "I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ" (Phil 1:6). I trust that God would not have put this desire in my heart, and that of my companions on the way, if he didn't intend to give us the grace to see it through. Home Walking the Labyrinth at Chartres Home. Is it where I begin or end or at the middle stillpoint? Am I at home on the way? Here I am, Lord. Never far from the beginning always approaching the end continually circling the center. Eugene Cartier Review for Religious Getting with the Program P robably one of the most important graces of my novitiate was coming to realize that I had an addiction. It was a painful and embarrassing experience, and yet I have no doubt that it was the best thing that has happened to me in a number of years. During my novitiate I started accessing pornogra-phy online. It was a development I was so ashamed of that I was afraid it would herald the end of my journey into religious life. Previously I had bought magazines and sought out sexually stimulating images in films or through image search engines on the Internet. My behavior began to take root at an early age in romantic fantasy. I would fantasize about being with a girl and wooing her in some exotic setting. Even though I was sexually inexperienced and naive and did not know what adults did together between the sheets, I would some-times escape into this fantasy when I went to bed. 78 A young man writes of his experience of coming to terms during the novitiate with his addiction to pornography. He has requested that the article be published anonym
