A Balancing Act – Chris Gleeson SJ

I pen this editorial on a superb day at Sevenhill where, as one retreatant has quipped, the Australian Jesuits’ DNA resides. As so often happens, I am writing with the light of some inspiration I have just received on the Combined Jesuit School Councils’ Retreat.

Maryanne Confoy RSC is our retreat director, a pocket dynamo if ever I have encountered one, and she has cast many spiritual and theological pearls before us this morning. One of her lines remains with me: ‘If we are locked into self-righteousness, God cannot find us.’

In 2011, visiting Israeli writer Amos Oz declared that fanaticism is the most urgent issue of our times. How true that is! Thus it has always been and remains so. Even worse, there is so much extremism under the guise of religion, so that many atrocities and barbarisms are being perpetrated across the globe under the false mask of ‘martyrdom’.

Kathleen Norris is a splendid American Protestant writer, a poet in fact, who reminds us that religion etymologically ‘is linked to the words ligature (bandage) and ligament (connection), words having both negative and positive connotations, offering both bondage and freedom of movement’ (Dakota, p133). This is similar to what Richard Holloway, the retired Bishop of Edinburgh, said in a Radio National ‘Encounter’ program several years ago. He related the story of the British playwright, Dennis Potter, who was dying of cancer and was asked in a television interview whether his imminent death had brought a new religious intensity or a recovery of boyhood faith. Potter’s reply was: ‘Religion to me has always been the wound, not the bandage.’ (‘Inns on Roads’, Radio National Encounter, 23 December 2001)

When religion focuses exclusively on orthodoxy and doctrinal formulation, it can so easily become the bandage, the ligature. ‘Christianity’, Norris affirms, ‘is at its worst when it becomes defensive. Often, enshrining orthodoxy into words has caused more trouble, more pain, more evil in the world than it was worth’ (Amazing Grace, p222). The easy answers of religious fundamentalism ‘are about control more than grace’ (Dakota, p95).

Understood correctly, religion should be about connection, about the ligament. Accordingly, influential cartoonist Michael Leunig once described prayer as a ritual of connection. It is worth recalling that the word ‘belief’ means simply ‘to give one’s heart to.’ In recent times, however, the term has been impoverished by taking on the narrow intellectual meaning of a head-over-heart assent (Amazing Grace, p62). To keep proper perspective, however, it is important – in Kathleen Norris’s words again – to view religious belief ‘as a relationship, like a deep friendship, or a marriage, something that I could plunge into, not knowing exactly what I was doing or what would be demanded of me in the long run’ (Amazing Grace, p.66). That is why she can see all the events of her life, large or small, leading and connecting her to God.

Religious fundamentalists, however, those fanatics and extremists believing they are doing good for God, have lost their sense of balance in life. In wanting to control God, they have taken on a dangerous idolatry. In their self-righteousness God cannot find them.

In early May I was acting rector for a brief time at St Aloysius’ College, Milsons Point. One of my delightful duties was to attend a Junior School assembly where, after a multitude of assemblies over the years, I had a first-time experience. Will Arnold, a diminutive but courageous Year 3 boy, strode to the front and proceeded to treat us with a splendid tap-dancing performance as part of the assembly program. It must not have been easy to perform in front of his peers, and the highly polished wooden floor of the college chapel sanctuary did not help matters, but Will was unperturbed. He excelled in his balancing routine.

All of us, of course, are jugglers or balancers in life. Like all balancers, we sometimes fall, but we should remember that, where we stumble, there we find our opportunity. With our feet firmly planted on the ground and our eyes on the stars, all of us are continually striving to balance, and by example, teach others to balance – values and freedom, rights and responsibilities, mind and heart, thinking and feeling, involvement and detachment, male and female, the body and spirit, giving and receiving, inheritance and ownership, the formal and intimate, the conservative and innovative. Where any of these elements are allowed to get out of balance, there we lose proper perspective. To have enough is enough. Happiness is ‘enoughness’ as Tony de Mello SJ once wrote.

For years and years I thought the season of Lent was about giving up something I liked. However, that provocative and challenging spiritual writer, Joan Chittister, offers us a different ‘take’ on this idea of abnegation. In her spiritual diary, Called to Question, she writes:

‘Religions themselves sin against creation. They begin to preach a spirituality of denial, rather than a spirituality of balance. They infest the world with a spirituality of fear rather than a spirituality of joy. They want people to give things up, rather than to learn to use them rightly. They don’t admit it, but sacrifice is easier than balance.’

Those who have experienced the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola encounter the need for balance from the very first Exercise – what we know as ‘The First Principle and Foundation’. Here is my favourite translation from Gerard W Hughes’ God of Surprises:

‘Before the world was made we were chosen to live in God’s presence by praising, reverencing, and serving Him in and through his creation. As everything on the face of the earth exists to help us to do this, we must appreciate and make use of everything that helps, and rid ourselves of anything that is destructive to our living in love in his presence. Therefore, we must be so poised (detached/indifferent/balanced) that we do not cling to any created thing as though it were our ultimate good, but remain open to the possibility that love may demand of us poverty rather than riches, sickness rather than health, dishonour rather than honour, a short life rather than a long one, because God alone is our security, refuge and strength. We can be so detached from any created thing only if we have a stronger attachment; therefore our one dominating desire and fundamental choice must be to live in love in his presence.’

That in a nutshell is Ignatian balance. And in our beautiful world troubled by extremism, fanaticism, and fundamentalism, don’t we need more of it! Let us end with Michael Leunig’s prayer or balance from his book A Common Prayer:

‘Dear God,

We pray for balance and exchange.
Balance us like trees. As the roots of a tree shall equal its branches, so must the inner life be equal to the outer life. And as the leaves shall nourish the roots, so shall the roots give nourishment to the leaves.

Without equality and exchange of nourishment there can be no growth and no love.

Amen.’