Capacity for otherness

1390 words, 7 min read

A couple of weeks ago I had an article recommended to me that I then read and greatly appreciated. Since the original is in Spanish, I would here like to offer a quick translation of the text to English, since I believe that it has a high degree of relevance and value beyond its original context. The article is entitled "A space yet to be discovered" and was written by the Catalan Jesuit, Xavier Melloni, in response to the current, tense political situation in Catalonia. Here Melloni offers his perspective on what it takes to truly dialogue with another person, which is something that is needed everywhere and at all times.

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In view of the events of recent months in Catalonia, the assessments and interpretations we have made have grown out of our own positions. At first it can not be otherwise, because we do not see reality as it is, but as we are. There is no objective reality and subjective perception, instead at the moment of perceiving reality we are already configuring and co-creating it with our categories. Starting from this assessment, is essential to avoid falling into moral judgments about the opinions of others, because opinion is preceded by perception, at the same time as perception being conditioned by opinion, because every cognitive act is both affective and perceptive. Now, if we want to go beyond the increasingly polarized, tense and entrenched situation in which we find ourselves, we have to find a place that transcends us and makes us all grow. This place is not behind us, as if nothing had happened, but within each one of us and in front of us, in a space still to be discovered and created. A space that will only appear and will only be reached when we are capable of mutual recognition, which also involves the ability to recognize one's own excesses or mistakes.

So much is the vehemence of our positions that we do not have nor leave space for the other. We are facing an important and delicate issue that corresponds to the third and fourth needs according to the scale of Abraham Maslow: the sense of belonging and the need for recognition, issues that revolve around identity. Leaving space for the other does not mean confusing ourselves with them or submitting to their point of view, instead it implies considering them seriously and tenaciously as part of the reality that we both (three, four, hundreds, thousands, millions of citizens) are parts of. We are all parts of everything and we are parts of an All. We must come to accept that the other's point of view is as necessary and valid as our own and welcome it, just as we expect the other to do so with regard to ourselves. For this to be possible, the first step is to avoid judgment, to not dismiss the other. I can only maintain my own position with nobility if I consider that the position of the other is also noble and that they, as I do, look for their sense of belonging and for their need for recognition. Every time I think or say that the other is stupid or lies, we are annihilating them and committing mental or verbal violence against them, even if they do not hear us. We have to arrive at a vote of confidence in the other having some reasons in terms of which they perceive-interpret events in a way that is different and even opposed to mine, but that this does not mean that they lie, just as I hope that they do not consider me an idiot or a liar either, because I perceive-interpret things in a way opposite to theirs.

If we are able to have such openness and such respect, many things will follow, since an affective and cognitive space will appear where the other is present also. This nobility and generosity towards the other, this vote of firm and sustained confidence is put to the test when the other then does not give me space, when I do not feel that they recognize me. It is then easy to give in and respond with the same dismissal and judgment that I receive.

The principles of non-violence are very demanding and their fruits tend to be long-term. Only rarely are they immediate. But this is the test that a confrontation must go through if it wants to be noble. If the confrontation is noble, it will ennoble those who participate in it and they will turn it into fertile dialogue. If it is vile, confrontation will degrade them. It is difficult, very difficult, to persist in the non-dismissal of the other when their opinion, attitude or action are opposed to our own. But it is here that the extent to which we have integrated the values of the Gospel into our lives, which are the same as those of non-violence, manifests itself. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount: "“You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, ‘Raqa,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.” (Mt 5:21-22).

What Jesus means is that when we insult someone, we are killing them. We kill them because we do not recognize them, because we eliminate them by condemning them to the categories we have assigned them. The other cannot be recognized in the image I have made of him. Then I cannot expect them to recognize me either. An abyss has been created between the two. We are both condemned by the other. This is the fire by which we are consumed. What is the way out of this hell? “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles.” (Mt 5:38-41).

The bar is very high, as high are the flames of the fire that devours us and as tall are the walls that we must transcend to find the place where we still are not.

This is not naiveté or “do-goodery", instead they are the conditions for the possibility of a new way of existing and co-existing that can be born in each moment if we apply ourselves to it. The challenge is to convert every act, every word and every thought into a spiritual exercise. I understand by "spiritual" the open and available space that exists between me and the other, beyond and deeper than our understandable, but visceral and totally insufficient, reactions. Political and civic life are urgently in need of this demanding exercise of the containment and transcendence of our positions that are still too primary and emotional. The emotions are intense, but ephemeral. What remains are acts and we still have time to reorient them towards the creation of a common space.

Space widens when we look, speak and act from a broader perspective that includes the other. Conversely, when we absolutize our point of view, we constrain our inner space and also the common space and we tear each other apart because there is no space for everyone. We cannot wait to open this space until the other is willing to do so. It begins to appear when one takes the first step and acts with courage and generosity, giving a vote of confidence to the other, as many times as necessary. “As many as seven times?” “Not seven times but seventy-seven times.” (Mt 18:21-22).

Each one of those times brings me closer to the other, who, feeling recognized, sooner or later will also recognize me and we will discover a space that is fruitful for all. Is not this the opportunity we have to grow together in greater capacity for otherness?

Realities > ideas

803 words, 4 min read

During the last weeks I have been thinking a lot about one of the lemmas that Pope Francis presents in Evangelii Gaudium, namely that realities are greater than ideas (§231-233). There he argues that "[t]here [...] exists a constant tension between ideas and realities. Realities simply are, whereas ideas are worked out. There has to be continuous dialogue between the two, lest ideas become detached from realities. [...] This calls for rejecting the various means of masking reality: angelic forms of purity, dictatorships of relativism, empty rhetoric, objectives more ideal than real, brands of ahistorical fundamentalism, ethical systems bereft of kindness, intellectual discourse bereft of wisdom." This, however, is not a one-way street of adjusting ideas to match reality, but also a call to putting our ideas and convictions into practice: "Not to put the word into practice, not to make it reality, is to build on sand, to remain in the realm of pure ideas and to end up in a lifeless and unfruitful self-centredness and gnosticism." Leaving ideas and realities disconnected either results in our being deluded and/or disconnected from the world.

The above words of Pope Francis came to my mind recently in the context of hearing about how a friend of mine had made a mistake at work and how their attempt at presenting the situation in a way that didn’t correspond with the facts lead to a lot of tension, hurt and ultimately evil. What occurred to me then was another of Pope Francis’ recurring expressions, that the Devil is the “Father of Lies” (John 8:44). If lies then are a mismatch between reality and ideas, and the Devil personifies a turning away from God, who is good, then calling him the Father of Lies both points to that turning away being from the truth too (which also has its pinnacle and fulfilment in God) and it elevates lying to a privileged position among sins. Not necessarily from a perspective of gravity, but as the principle behind all evil.

Ultimately, it now seems to me, all evil has its roots in lies, in ideas being disconnected from reality and there being no correspondence between the two. If I hate, exploit, discriminate against or even murder another person, I have to have believed or at least implicitly assumed that they are different from me, that they are inferior to me, that their life matters less, that they are not beloved children of God. It is lies like these, mismatches between ideas and realities like these, that are the basis of and pre-requisite for evil.

Now, looking at the above, it might at first seem like an impossible situation: a mismatch between ideas and realities leads to evil, we only have direct access to ideas (challenge: try to give an example of something that is not an idea) and their mismatch with realities (that we do not have direct cognitive access to) is unknowable and seemingly inevitable. What a cruel setup!

Well, I don’t believe that this is what is actually going on. Instead of the above prison of ideas - inescapable and unsurpassable - I believe, with psychologists everywhere, that we experience reality not only in terms of ideas, but also in a variety of other conscious and unconscious ways. As a result, we may be saved from erroneous - and therefore potentially evil-oriented - ideas by our unconscious experiences. At some point we may be overcome by a feeling that our ideas just don’t add up and we may be prompted to re-examine and potentially change them, in spite of the epistemological gulf that persists between our minds and whatever gives rise to our experiences.

How can such a safety mechanism be triggered? Not primarily by being exposed to ideas (sadly, including these very ones), but by participating in realities and allowing these to interact with my conscious and unconscious processes. Having a low opinion of certain attitudes, choices or world views, the best thing to do alongside engaging with them rationally is to get to know those who have, have made or hold them. Like that, I can relate not only to their ideas, but also to their realities in a richer and fuller way and any lies I believe in may be challenged and overcome, much like the example given by the Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton, who suggests that meeting fulfilled childless women can lead one to abandon the untruthful conviction that they are all embittered.

This is both the way to stress and refine my own ideas and the mechanism by which I can have an effect on the ideas of others - not only by sharing my own ideas with them but by putting them into practice myself so that the other may experience them more fully than ideas alone would allow them to.

Viaticum

1746 words, 9 min read

Back in 2015, Pope Francis visited a Lutheran church in Rome and answered three questions from the congregation: one, from a 9-year-old boy, on what he liked about being Pope, another, from the community’s treasurer who was involved in a project for refugees, on how to avoid resignation and people turning to erecting walls, and the final one, which I’d like to take a look at here, on intercommunion. In particular, I would like to present Pope Francis’ answer more fully and, as always arguably, more closely than the Vatican’s official English translation.

As a result, the following account of his words will be a combination of the official English translation, which I will seek to follow as much as possible, and of my, coarse translation of his words when it departs from a more verbatim translation of the original Italian. Details about my departures from the official translation will be provided in the endnotes, not to interfere with a reading of his response to this important question.

Before proceeding, I’d like to thank the Vatican for its prompt and broad translation of the pope’s words into English - having access to them in this way is not something I take for granted and my alternative translation exercise here is not meant to be an attack or even a criticism, merely a different translation, possibly done with different objectives to the official one. E.g., I will favour closer, more verbatim English choices wherever these are available, even at the cost of a result that may sound odd or flow less well than other alternatives. The matter at hand is highly delicate and important and I believe that as close a rendering of the pope’s words as possible is preferable here, also because these were off-the-cuff remarks rather than a prepared text.

So, let’s begin at the beginning, with the question put to Pope Francis about intercommunion:¹

“My name is Anke de Bernardinis and, like many members of our community, I am married to an Italian, who is a Roman Catholic Christian. We have been living together happily for many years, sharing joys and sufferings. And therefore it hurts is very much that we are divided in our faith and that we cannot partake together in the Lord’s Supper. What can we do to, at last, reach communion on this point?”

The pope then responds (all changes are highlighted in bold type, bold text without an endnote indicates a word missing from the official translation but present in the Italian original):

“Thank you, Ma’am. Regarding the question on sharing the Lord’s Supper, it is not easy for me to answer you, especially in front of a theologian like Cardinal Kasper! I’m afraid! I think the Lord told us² when he gave us this command: “Do this in memory of me”. And when we share in the Lord’s Supper, we remember and imitate,³ we do the same thing that the Lord Jesus did. And the there will be the Lord’s Supper, there will be the final banquet in the New Jerusalem,⁴ but this will be the last one. Instead on the journey, I ask myself⁵ — and I don’t know how to answer, but I am making your question my own — I ask myself: “Is sharing the Lord’s Supper the end of a journey or is it the viaticum for walking together? I leave the question to the theologians, to those who understand. It is true that in a certain sense sharing is saying that there are no differences between us, that we have the same doctrine — I underline the word, a difficult word to understand — but I ask myself: but don’t we have the same Baptism? And if we have the same Baptism, we have to walk together. You are a witness to a journey that is also profound⁶ because it is a conjugal journey, a journey properly of the family⁷, of human love and of shared faith. We have the same Baptism. When you feel you are a sinner — I too feel I am quite a sinner — when your husband feels he is a sinner, you go before the Lord and ask forgiveness; your husband does the same and goes to the priest and asks for⁸ absolution. They are remedies for⁹ keeping Baptism alive. When you pray together, that Baptism grows, it becomes strong; when you teach your children who Jesus is, why Jesus came, what Jesus did, you do the same, whether in Lutheran language or in Catholic language¹⁰, but it is the same. The question: and the Supper? There are questions to which only if one is honest with oneself and with the few theological “lights” that I have, one must respond the same, you see. “This is my Body, this is my Blood”, said the Lord, “do this in memory of me”, and this is a viaticum that helps us to walk¹¹. I had a great friendship with an Episcopalian bishop, 48 years old, married with two children, and he had this concern: a Catholic wife, Catholic children, and he a bishop. He accompanied his wife and children to Mass on Sundays and then went to worship with his community. It was a step of participating in the Lord’s Supper. Then he passed on, the Lord called him, a just man. I respond to your question only with a question: how can I do [things] with my husband¹², so that the Lord’s Supper may accompany me on my way¹³? It is a problem to which each person must respond. A pastor friend of mine said to me: “We believe that the Lord is present there. He is present. You believe that the Lord is present. So what is the difference?” — “Well, there are explanations, interpretations...”. Life is greater than explanations and interpretations. Always refer to Baptism: “One faith, one baptism, one Lord”, as Paul tells us, and from there draw the consequences¹⁴. I would never dare give permission to do this because it is not my competence¹⁵. One Baptism, one Lord, one faith. Speak with the Lord and go forward. I do not dare say more.”

From the perspective of translation it could be argued that 14/15 of my changes don’t do much to the resulting meaning, and I would agree with that. My objective there was only to make subtle changes of nuance and not to suggest that what an English reader would understand from the original translation would be different in essence from what an Italian reader would get from reading the official, Italian transcript.

However, I made one rather substantial and important change: the translation of the Italian “competenza” as “competence” instead of as “authority” as in the official English version. Since the English language contains the word “competence”, which not only has the same origin, but also the same meaning and polysemic scope as the Italian “competenza” (i.e., it is not a so-called “false friend”), choosing a synonym for it that narrows meaning and changes polysemy is, to my mind, an unnecessary change to Francis’ words. Further, to map “competenza” to “authority” is particularly serious in the case of the pope, who enjoys “supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church” (cf. Cann. 331-334).

Rendering “competenza” as authority leaves Francis’ words sounding like giving permission for intercommunion is something he cannot do. This is certainly a possible interpretation of “competenza”. Another is that he meant that this decision is not for him to make, that he does have the power to make it, but that the most “competent” party is the person who faces this situation directly. I believe that if Francis had wanted to get the former interpretation across, he could have used another Italian word that was equally open to him: “autorità”. But he didn’t.

Instead he did the following, which, to my mind, is more consistent with my translation: he presents the choice of two interpretations of the Eucharist - as sign of having arrived at the end of a journey (the Eschaton, the New Jerusalem), or as a viaticum (provisions for a journey - that which gives the sustenance needed for journeying). Having presented the two alternatives, Francis then comes down on the side of the latter. He links his choice to Jesus’ words from the Last Supper and, importantly, he also does so on the basis that we, Christians are all journeying together on the one journey, which our shared baptism opens to us and to which it introduces us. Francis further underlines this oneness of journey - the journey that needs a viaticum - by repeating St. Paul’s kerygmatic “One faith, one baptism, one Lord” not once but twice in the course of his answer. Now, why doesn’t he just use his authority to permit what his interlocutor asks? I believe it is because the answer depends on where one is on this journey, on whether one is on this one, shared journey or not.

“One faith, one baptism, one Lord.”

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¹ For a start, the question is not translated in the official English version, which only provides the following account: “Then Anke de Bernardinis, the wife of a Roman Catholic, expressed sorrow at “not being able to partake together in the Lord’s Supper” and asked: “What more can we do to reach communion on this point?”.”
² Italian: “ci ha detto”; English: “gave us [the answer]”.
³ Italian: “la Cena del Signore, ricordiamo e imitiamo,”; English: “, remember and emulate the Lord’s Supper,”.
⁴ Italian: “E la Cena del Signore ci sarà, il banchetto finale nella Nuova Gerusalemme ci sarà”; English: “And the Lord’s Supper will be, the final banquet will there be in the New Jerusalem”
⁵ Italian: “mi domando”; English: “I wonder”
⁶ Italian: “un cammino anche profondo”; English: “an even profound journey”
⁷ Italian: “un cammino proprio di famiglia”; English: “truly a family journey”
⁸ Italian: “chiede”; English: “requests”
⁹ Italian: “rimedi per”; English: “ways of”
¹⁰ Italian: “in lingua luterana che in lingua cattolica”; English: “in Lutheran or Catholic terms”
¹¹ Italian: “che ci aiuta a camminare”; English: “which helps us to journey”
¹² Italian: “come posso fare con mio marito”; English: “how can I participate with my husband”
¹³ Italian: “strada”; English: “path”
¹⁴ Italian: “e di là prendete le conseguenze”; English: “and take the outcome from there”
¹⁵ Italian: “non è mia competenza”; English: “I do not have the authority”