“To love reality and not live in the imagination”

Thank you all for your prayers, kind words and thoughtfulness.

Regular posting will resume on Monday with the continuation of the series on Ratzinger and the Fathers.  Only after that will I feel more at liberty to write about the things that’ve been on my mind since my mother’s death and my return to Malaysia.

Here is a quotation I’ve been turning over and over these last two weeks.  It is fodder for a future post, for sure, and I hope that we can ponder it together for that future discussion.

The worst thing that can happen is for Aristotelians to become Aristotelians, because then they start reading Aristotle, but they’re no longer in linked with reality to touch reality, to listen to people, to see the world evolving and so on….And you see, the big thing for me is to love reality and not live in the imagination, not live in what could have been or what should have been or what can be to this reality, and somewhere to love reality and then discover that God is present in the reality.

Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, in his interview on Speaking of Faith

Memory Eternal: Clara Teh, 1951-2008

While standing in line to board my flight to Malaysia at the Los Angeles International Airport last Monday night, my sister called from Malaysia with the news that my mother had died several hours before from a severe lung infection. She died at 10:30 a.m. on May 20th (Malaysian time). I only arrived in my hometown of Klang on Wednesday afternoon (after a very long flight), one day after my mom’s last breath. The funeral Mass was celebrated the next day.

The past few days have been a blur, and sometimes I still find myself wishing that this is only a bad dream. My dad, my sister and I are doing our best to cope with the shock. Yesterday, my sister found a receipt from when she took my mom to the clinic because of a slight fever, several days before her hospitalization. No one expected the death of my mom less than a week later.

Just a few weeks ago I was explaining to a friend the deeply communal nature of mourning in Chinese culture. Since the day of my mom’s death, our home has become a hub of activity, with a steady stream of relatives and friends who’ve come to help with the mourning rituals and funeral arrangements as well as to eat and drink with us and keep us company late into the night. Between the moments of tears and grief there have also been laughter and remembering. Also, in crying with us, they make my dad, my sister and I look less stupid for wailing our hearts out.

And so, I find myself back in Malaysia indefinitely, still unprepared to face the conspicuous absence of my own mother in the home in which she raised me. For this reason, this weblog will be on an extended hiatus until I have a better sense of what it is that I’m supposed to do here. I feel obliged to finish my series on Ratzinger and the Fathers before too long, but am too disoriented to think and write anything worth your time.

So I beg your patience, and thank you for your prayers for me and my family during this difficult season.

This picture of my sister Erinn, my dad and my mom was taken last Christmas.

With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the soul of Thy servant Clara
where sickness and sorrow are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting!

Hiatus

Friends and readers,

My mom is very ill with a lung infection that is causing extreme breathing difficulties for her. She has been in the hospital since last Wednesday, and her condition has worsened since then. The doctors are not sure what is causing the infection, and she isn’t responding to medications.

I will be leaving Denver tomorrow evening to go home to Malaysia and be with my family. This departure will effectively terminate my application for permanent residence in the United States, so I’m taking this move as one for good—at least for now. I made the decision yesterday (Saturday), and have only today and some of tomorrow to pack up my apartment, say goodbye, and tie up loose ends here in this country.

I ask for your prayers for my mom especially, but also for my dad and my sister who are doing their best to cope with this sudden downturn in her health. Her name is Clare.

Needless to say, I won’t be posting here for a week or two, or until some semblance of order is restored at home. Thank you for reading, and for your prayers.

W.H.

“Accept us, Holy Father, as we are”

. . . [C]ommunion with Rome does not separate us from our Orthodox ecclesial reality. We say this with profound humility, a deep ecumenical awareness and a touch of humour: we are an Orthodox Catholic Church. . . . We would like to live, in the very heart of the Catholic Church, a life that could be accepted by Orthodoxy. Let us do so, Most Holy Father. That is the key to all real progress along the ecumenical way. Accept us, Holy Father, as we are: Eastern Orthodox, who want to live our full and complete Eastern Orthodox tradition in full communion with Rome.

Gregorios III, Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, to Benedict XVI, Pope of Rome (May 8, 2008)

I first read these words of Patriarch Gregorios III at Eirenikon a few days ago, and have been thinking about them since. “Orthodox in communion with Rome”…some Eastern Catholics are the only ones to believe that this is even possible. I’m glad to say that I’m one of them. Not easy, and some days very hard—but possible.

A Place for the Fathers (Part III)

The Ecumenical Significance of the Fathers

Thus far, Cardinal Ratzinger has argued that significance of the Fathers in theology has been diminished by modern developments in the Catholic understanding of Scripture (the introduction of the historical-critical method) as well as Tradition (the two views of tradition covered in Part II).

In continuing his quest for a place for the Fathers in modern Catholic theology, Ratzinger considers their importance from an ecumenical standpoint:

Even if the Fathers seem to be losing stature as interpreters of Holy Scripture and witnesses to tradition, do they not, at least, have a distinguished ecumenical significance. Thomas Aquinas and the other great Scholastics of the thirteenth century are “Fathers” of a specifically Roman Catholic theology from which the Christian churches of the Reformation consider themselves completely separated and which, for the churches of the East, also expresses an alien mentality. But the teachers of the ancient Church represent a common past that, precisely as such, may well be a promise for the future (Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 140).

Since they were theologians in a time when the Church was yet undivided, the Fathers constitute a heritage shared by the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches.

“Whereas the theology of the Eastern Churches has never aspired to be anything but a patristic theology” (p. 140), Ratzinger says, the churches of the West, both Catholic and Protestant, have developed their respective theologies in particular ways that are not accepted by the other side. Indeed, the great influence of medieval Scholasticism on Catholic theology was one of the sore points for Protestant theologians during the Reformation.

With candor, Ratzinger acknowledges that Catholic theology since the Middle Ages has been definitively shaped by someone other than the Fathers, although this person’s influence was in some way grounded in patristic thought:

For we must admit, on the one hand, that even for Catholic theology, the so-called Fathers of the Church have, for a long time, been “Fathers” only in an indirect sense, whereas the real “Father” of the form that ultimately dominated nineteenth-century theology was Thomas Aquinas, with his classic systematization of the thirteenth-century doctrina media, which…was in its turn based on the “authority” of the Fathers (p. 142). [Emphasis added.]

A similar situation arose within Protestantism:

On the other hand, it is evident that Protestant theology is also not without its “Fathers”, insofar as the leaders of the Reformation have, for it, a position comparable to the role of the Fathers of the Church. The perspective from which Scripture is studied and the point of departure for ecclesial life bear their mark and are inconceivable without them (p. 142).

These observations lead him to this, in my opinion, extremely insightful conclusion:

Indeed, we must go a step farther and say that the division of the Church is revealed above all in the fact that the Fathers of the one side are not the Fathers of the other. And the ever more observable inability of one side to understand the other even in language and mode of thought stems from the fact that each has learned to think and speak at the knees of totally different Fathers. The differences among the sects do not have their source in the New Testament. They arise from the fact that the New Testament is read under the tutelage of different Fathers (p. 143). [Emphasis added.]

Here, then, is how I would sum up Ratzinger’s evaluation of the situation:

• The separated churches have each been shaped under the teaching of different “Fathers”.
• The Eastern Churches, whose theology “has never aspired to be anything but a patristic theology” (p. 140), have been and continue to be committed to the Fathers of the Church properly speaking.
• In the West, however, things are quite different. Catholic theology, since the Middle Ages, has been dominated by one “Father”, Thomas Aquinas, whose influence can still be felt today. The Protestant churches, for their part, have been shaped by their own “Fathers”—the leaders of the Reformation through whose lens Protestant Christians continue to read Scripture and practice their faith (Luther, Melanchton, Calvin, etc.).

Ratzinger is, first of all, concerned with the situation in the West. In order to truly hear and see each other once again, Western Christians (Catholics and Protestants) will have to learn and understand each other’s Fathers, but the ecumenical impasse remains: this quest for mutual understanding will not make the Fathers of one group the Fathers of the other.

Who would deny that Thomas Aquinas and Luther are each Father of only one part of Christianity? …. And so the question remains: If these Fathers can be Fathers for only a part of Christianity, must we not turn our attention to those who were once Fathers of all?

The solution is for Catholics and Protestants to both return to their common Fathers—the Fathers of the ancient and undivided Church. Happily, this orientation toward the Fathers, as Ratzinger stated earlier, has always been the posture of the Eastern Churches. In the return to patristic theology, then, lies the hope for the reconciliation, first of all, of the Catholic and Protestant Churches in the West, and then of this whole Western Church with the Eastern Churches.

Even if the Fathers’ importance as exegetes and bearers of tradition have been called into question in modern Catholic theology, their ecumenical priority still stands unchallenged. They remain the teachers of a once-unified Church, and therefore constitute the shared heritage of all Christians. As such, these Fathers are the ones to whom the separated Churches must return in order to find their way to each other.

[This series will be continued on Monday.]