Peter Quinn The Catholic Imagination March 31, 2005 Thank you for the invitation to today’s ceremony. I’m honored to be part of this dedication of a statue in honor of my patron saint. This Jersey City St. Peter certainly bears almost no resemblance to the emaciated version of the saint across the river, outside Fordham University Law School, at Lincoln Center. That St. Peter has the “lean and hungry look” of a lawyer, svelte, fit and ready for the next class-action suit. All he’s wearing is a loin cloth or, in today’s parlance, a thong. I’m not sure if it’s a fashion statement by the Jesuit community of Manhattan or the sculptor’s best guess at the garb of a Galilean fisherman.
The Jersey City Peter is far more substantial than Fordham’s. He’s a tribute to the ethnic restaurants and eating styles of this town–a pasta and cerveza crowd–and perhaps to the gustatory proclivities of the reverend president, Father Loughran, at least in the days before he took up the South Beach Diet. Father Loughran is the main reason I’m here. Twenty-three years ago this fall, he presided at my wedding and apparently got the words and rubrics right because it’s been a happy union, more for better than worse, and produced two beautiful children who, of course, look like their mother. The elder of those two children is now attending a Jesuit college in Boston, which I won’t name here today but whose tuition requirements have prompted, in part, my need to write books, deliver talks and collect the monetary rewards attached. In fact, I’ve come to suspect that the term “Jesuit higher education” refers as much to the ever-upward trend of fees and tuitions as to the ethical or intellectual elevation of young minds. The topic Father Loughran has asked me to address is “The Catholic Imagination.” He didn’t pose it as a question: Is there a Catholic imagination? Nor did he suggest a plurality of possibilities, as in “The Catholic Imaginations.”
Right away, I’m struck by the drawbacks in discussing what is better experienced than analyzed. But if I follow that line of logic and propose that for the next fifteen minutes or so we each retreat into personal reveries, silently following the restless, ceaseless flickerings of our minds–which some are undoubtedly already doing–Father Loughran would be in his right to withhold my honorarium. I can’t prevent anyone from spacing out….. so to those floating deeper into the mists of mental fantasy, I say, “Bon voyage.” For those of you still with me, herewith my take on “The Catholic Imagination.” Prior to Vatican II, I think, it was easier to conceive of a single Catholic imagination, especially here in the U.S. where the church forged a unified religious entity from a welter of disparate ethnic groups. We Catholics proudly distinguished ourselves from the plethora of Protestant denominations through the uniformity of our rituals, dogmas and, most visibly, our shared sacramentals–rosaries, religious statues and the habits of old, the distinctive dress of priests, nuns and brothers. That outward uniformity still retains its popularity in two places: Hollywood, which often seems at a loss for identifying anything as Catholic unless clothed in costumes that have been part of wardrobe departments since “Going My Way”….. And EWTN, often referred to as the Catholic Channel, where the old habits are well, still habitual.
Even at the height of the Tridentine regimen, beneath the carapace of outward conformity there existed different emphases and viewpoints which, at a minimum, reflected what John O’Malley has described in his book of the same title as “four cultures of the West.” O’Malley encapsulates those cultures as the prophetic, academic, literary and liturgical. Each has shaped and been shaped by the church, and each enjoyed a dominant moment. Although these cultures have sometimes overlapped and intermingled, they’ve also given rise to distinct imaginations as different as a monk’s cell is from a chapel in the style of the high baroque. Though founded in Jerusalem, the Church undertook, in O’Malley’s words, a “massive appropriation…of the cultural reality of the Greco-Roman world.” Here is St. Gregory the Great on the catholic education he received at the hands of Origen: “For us there was nothing forbidden, nothing hidden, nothing inaccessible. We were allowed to learn every doctrine, Greek and non-Greek, both spiritual and secular, both divine and human. With the utmost freedom we went into everything and examined it thoroughly, taking our fill of enjoying the pleasures of the soul.”
What was true for the upper classes was true for the lower as well, especially the pagani–the paisanos or country people–whose minds, practices and imaginations incorporated much of their pre-Christian heritage. As a child, during summers on Eastern Long Island, I remember my parents making sure we children went into the water on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, a practice I’m sure was rooted in pre-Christian Ireland. College-educated professionals, my parents were modern enough not to advertise what we were doing, which occasionally left our Protestant neighbors wondering why those Catholic children were in the water on a rainy chilly August day. The expression of the Catholic imagination in western culture has been carried out in staggering variety, in high art and folk art, in the classicism of St. Peter’s in Rome and the modernism of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, in the mysticism of St. Teresa of Avila and the existentialism of Gabriel Marcel. Here in America, if Catholicism has produced little memorable in the way of architecture, or music, or painting, it has nurtured the imaginations of some notable literary figures. Paul Elie’s recent book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, is a strikingly incisive examination of four of those writers: Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Elie weaves their stories together masterfully, never confusing the reader or leaving loose ends. He distills what they sought and found in the Catholic Church as, quote, “a place of pilgrimage, a home and a destination, where city and world meet, where the self encounters the other, where personal experience and the testimony of the ages can be reconciled.” In Elie’s incisive telling of these writers’ lives it becomes apparent that imagination was a vital component of their Catholic faith.
Dorothy Day, for instance, seems to have read and reread Dickens and Dostoyevsky with the same intensity and scrutiny that she did scripture, finding parables to guide her life. Elie also makes clear that for these writers in particular–and by extension, I believe, for Catholics in general–imagination is a means toward an end that isn’t merely enjoyment or entertainment. These are side effects. The end is enlightenment, to find in our world of death, disappointment and conflict–of catastrophes visited on us by nature and our own moral blindness–to find there some confirmation or indication of the divine presence. Imagination isn’t the same as faith. There are plenty of imaginative atheists and agnostics. And it isn’t the same as mental relaxation, a trip through the fun house of the subconscious, the rigors of intellectual inquiry thrown aside in favor of treating your mind to a day at the beach. The subconscious is lazy and disordered, for sure. That’s why it’s such hard work to turn what’s found there into something capable of conveying meaning, and resonating with our shared human experiences and expectations. It’s been reported that while writing “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Eugene O’Neill would emerge from his study at the end of each session drained and tearful. On the other end of the spectrum, the comedian Fred Allen said that he’d recommend a career as a humor writer only to those who “aspire to spending their lives in a salt mine.”
Flannery O’Connor described writing a novel as, quote, “a terrible experience.” Having used up twenty years to produce two novels, I find this a rare instance of O’Connor indulging in understatement. Turning the mud of the imagination into the clay of popular entertainment or the more lasting substance of art is hard labor. That’s true across the board, for believer and nonbeliever alike. What’s different for the Catholic artist is the context of that labor. It’s not a matter of dressing up a product of the imagination in the traditional trappings of Catholic practice. Often, I think, especially in the movies, films get categorized as “Catholic” because there’s a crucifix on the wall or somebody’s wearing a miraculous medal. I’ve seen references to Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Wrong Man” as his most “Catholic film.” But, as far as I can tell the only thing Catholic about it is Henry Fonda fingering his beads during his trial and staring at a picture of the Sacred Heart when his innocence is about to be proven. Martin Scorcese is commonly identified as a Catholic filmmaker but, as I see it, more often than not what people mean by this is the rich texture of his movies, the color, movement and ritual, which I’d ascribe as much to Scorcese’s love of opera as his Catholicism. What do I mean, then, by “the context” in which Catholic artists labor to express faith through imagination? Not strict adherence to dogma, although I can’t imagine a Catholic artist who rejects the touchstone of Christ’s divinity and the basic tenets of the creed. The context is the set of shared presumptions about the world and human behavior with which Catholics in general and Catholic artists in particular approach the seemingly disjointed, sometimes absurd, often disturbing experience of reality. Here, in the first decade of the 21 st century, in a post-Holocaust, post-Cold War world and post-Vatican II church and post-modern society–we seem to be in a post-everything era–let me suggest three elements that are common to “the Catholic imagination.” Nota bene: I said “common to,” not define.
The cultural history of the Catholic Church and the works of imagination it has given rise to are beyond anyone’s ability to summarize in a short talk such as this. I make no claim to exclusivity or finality. Use your imaginations to add or subtract to the list as you wish. The first two–sin and holiness–probably seem obvious. The third–mercy–might seem less obvious but, for me, divine mercy, which runs so counter to the prevailing spirit of religious and secular fundamentalism, resonates at the center of the Catholic imagination. Let me start where we all start: with sin. There is neither Catholic faith nor imagination without it. Sin, says the dictionary, shares its roots with the old English verb to be. We are sinful from the moment of our conception, the Church teaches, imperfectable. Sin separates us from God and one another. But it is also the cause of our redemption, and it is an invitation to free ourselves from the tyranny of the perfect, to accept ourselves as we are, broken, fragile, constantly in need of forgiveness and the capacity to forgive others.
The prayer of the Easter Vigil describes Adam’s primal sin, the root of our imperfection, as “O happy fault, that merited so great a redeemer.” Adam’s sin, the “felix culpa,” isn’t condemned but celebrated as “certe necessarium”–“truly necessary.” The human experience, as Catholicism sees it, isn’t split into two distinct, exclusive halves, the sinful and the unsinful. Graham Greene prefaces his novel The Heart of the Matter with a quote from Charles Péguy that asserts the sinner is more of a Christian than anybody except the saint. I was reminded of this while reading the reviews of Norman Sherry’s third volume of Greene’s biography. They paid a great deal of attention to his sex life. In several instances, the implication was, Here was a so-called Catholic writer who spent most of his life in flagrant violation of the church’s teachings. How hypocritical. And how typical. Too bad, I thought to myself, that Greene wasn’t around to read these reviews and chuckle at their fundamental misreading of Catholic teaching, that sin, indeed, was, is, and will always be the heart of the matter, the root of our longing, inseparable from our humanity and our search for redemption. In his astute analysis of 17 th century English Puritanism, The Company of Saints, Michael Walzer traced the rise of our modern political parties to the Puritans’ sense of organization which removed traditional bounds of class and geography to unite its followers around a shared and transcendent idea of election, of being drawn together by their uniqueness. The Catholic imagination is, to some degree, the mirror image of The Company of Saints.
Although referred to as a communion of saints, the Church is more truly a communion of sinners, pope, peasant and Ph.D. in the same boat, members of that greatest democracy of them all–the classless, sexless, numberless democracy of sin. For Catholics, sin is ubiquitous. But so is forgiveness. Hell exists. But it might be empty. Evil is real but mingles with good, and no human being is either all good or all evil. We are mixtures of both, and who is saved or damned is beyond our knowing. Thomas Merton put it this way: “In the end it comes down to the old story that we are sinners, but that this is our hope because sinners are the ones who attract to themselves the infinite compassion of God.” Side by side with sin is holiness. That, I think, is the conundrum of the Incarnation. The fallen world has been raised up. The redemption isn’t an event far off in the future. It’s already taken place. The profane has been made sacred. Think of the gospel from a few weeks ago, when Jesus spits in the dust and makes mud with which to cure the blind man. Spit and mud turned into the stuff of miracles. The Incarnation doesn’t get much more basic than that.
Catholicism has the most materially rich culture of any western religion. The reason, in part, is the way it was grafted onto the classical as well as popular culture of the Greco-Roman world. But the grafting was made possible because of the Catholic understanding of the Incarnation, which not only licenses but impels us to seek God in the material, even in mud and spit. The materialism of Catholicism is materialism with a difference. It isn’t a mirror that reflects back on us, but a looking glass–of the type Lewis Carroll wrote about–a window on another world, another reality. We feel the water and oil used in the sacraments, taste the bread and wine, not just to enjoy them for what they are, but to plumb our belief that they aren’t just what they seem to be but, in ways that defy the limits of language, signs of God’s real presence among us. I know a playwright, a lapsed Catholic, who is raising his children Catholic because he believes the church is the only institution left to awaken the imagination of the young to a sense of holy mystery–or, as he calls it, “sacred enchantment”–that affirms a realm of realities which can’t be contained by reason. I’m not holding up this playwright as a role model. He’s got the true order of things precisely backwards, at least from a faith perspective, making belief an instrument of imagination, rather than vice versa. Yet, in his hope that the church can offer his children an intimation of the world as a place of sacred enchantment, that will teach them to know they stand on holy ground, he has a more Catholic imagination than many Catholics I know. Look around.
Where once the Catholic imagination found profound expression in the material–in painting, building, sculpting–it has largely receded into irrelevance. Catholic material culture is more a heritage than a living tradition, a concern of curators more than creative artists. Is this because we’ve ceased to see the world as a holy place? Maybe not entirely. Yet, to some degree, I think, the ascendancy of scientific rationalism, which in so many ways has helped us lead better lives, has also stripped the universe of holiness and left Catholics as much as non-Catholics with a sense of the vast and brutally indifferent universe we inhabit. The prima facie evidence would certainly seem to support that view: brothels filled with children, tsunamis, war, ethnic cleansing, an entire continent ravaged by AIDS, a billion members of our species who live every day on the borderline of starvation. In fact, in my view, it is in its emphasis on God’s mercy, and in the way that this mercy is expressed, not just in the person of Jesus Christ but in the presence of the Virgin Mary and the intervention of the saints, that the Catholic mind and imagination stands apart. Almost twenty years ago, in his book The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy wrote, “It crossed my mind that people at war have the same need of each other. What would a passionate liberal or conservative do without the other?” The war Walker Percy referred to rages on more bitterly than ever, to the point where polar views of religious right and secular left frame much of the argument over belief, morality and public policy as well as offer an opportunity to point up what I see as a centerpiece of the Catholic imagination. Both sides are easy to parody, which is not my intent. Fundamentalism is often used as an umbrella term to caricature an entire group of believers as idiots, bigots and reactionaries.
While these categories are undoubtedly present, they can also be found, to one degree or another, in most mass movements and belief systems. Not all fundamentalists come in for ridicule. Fundamentalism of the quietest Mennonite type is often admired and respected by those who otherwise scoff at literal readings of religious texts. As long as they stick to their knitting–or quilting–and appear socially quaint instead of politically querulous, they’re acceptable. While all fundamentalists share a belief in the literal truth of scripture, the Anabaptist branch is even more literal than the conservative political branch, rejecting all forms of violence in obedience to Jesus’s injunction to love our enemies and turn the other cheek. The literalness of political fundamentalism seems especially focused on the most symbol-rich book in the Christian scriptures, The Book of Revelation, which is interpreted as an exact road map of God’s plan for this world. What God has in store, as they say in Texas, ain’t pretty, at least for the bulk of humanity left behind after the rapture, when the anti-Christ will romp across the landscape and bring to bloody conclusion the evil and unholy ways of the human race. It’s easy to lump together in a single, indistinguishable mass of fanatics a movement that includes pacifists, social progressives and people of real charity. Yet, while acknowledging the nuances of fundamentalism–itself in some measure a reaction to a highly aggressive form of secularism–it’s impossible to ignore how many of its proponents substitute certainty for mystery, and revenge for mercy.
In its extreme version–the version, unfortunately, that prevails among fundamentalist televangelists and radio preachers–God seems a supersized version of us humans, bigger, more powerful, nastier, more vindictive and dyspeptic, a sort of cosmic Ian Paisley armed with atomic weapons. The secular left is no less insistent on stripping away the mystery of God. Here, too, God is judged by human standards, and He doesn’t measure up. The mystery of divine love is solved. It’s a myth. Secularism claims toleration as its central tenet. But it’s a qualified toleration. It says, Go ahead and believe what you will just as long as it has no affect on any significant part of your public life, is never asserted outside of church and remains a private eccentricity. Not all secularists behave this way. There are nonbelievers who’ve reached their agnosticism after hard struggle and, at the same time, respect the rights of believers to make their case in the public square. Nat Hentoff is an example. More often than not, however, secularists are contemptuous of any public expression of belief and eager not just to separate church and state but to make the church isolated, and irrelevant. I encountered this attitude a few years ago while at lunch with a fellow novelist and editor. In the middle of a good-natured discussion of our backgrounds, I mentioned that I was a Catholic. He laughed. “You’re not still a Catholic?” he asked. “Still,” I said, “Sometimes very still.” This time he didn’t laugh. “A practicing Catholic?” “Yes,” I said. I knew our discussion had hit a roadblock. “A believing Catholic?” When I answered positively for the third time, the conversation steered back to literary matters, but I could read his reaction in his face. There was surprise as well as disappointment, as if entire areas of potential conversation had been closed off and our lunch was going to be less relaxed and open than he’d first supposed. At present, a prime flash point for the conflict between fundamentalists and secularists is the teaching of Darwinism in the schools. It is this passionate controversy that puts into sharpest relief the centrality of divine mercy to the Catholic imagination as well as faith.
The argument is obviously more than a dispute over a single scientific theory. It’s a contest over how to view existence. The Reverend Terry Fox, pastor of the largest Southern Baptist church in the Midwest, recently told the WashingtonPost that the struggle over evolution is “the essential front in America’s culture war.” According to Fox, “If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die.” On the other side, the Grey Lady on 43 rd Street works herself into thundering editorial dudgeon every time some school board in Smallville tries to modify the teaching of Darwinism by reference to the notion of “intelligent design.” Ironies abound in this controversy. Many of the same people who attack evolution simultaneously back an agenda that in its worship of free markets, free trade and globalization supports an economic form of “survival of the fittest,” a phrase Herbert Spenser coined and Darwin endorsed. Within the liberal camp, many people, while still espousing social justice and solidarity, seem to exhibit a growing faith in a neo-eugenicist ethic that rests on a belief in the power of science to engineer the next stages of human evolution, weeding out diseases of mind and body and reaching for lives of physical and mental health before unimaginable.
In the words of Dr. Sherwin Nuland, “This is genuinely terrifying stuff. Not since the first half of the twentieth century have prominent thinkers been so starry-eyed at the thought of controlling the future of our species, or at least that privileged portion of it that will have the financial, cultural, and other wherewithal to take advantage of the offer being presented…” In the eyes of some bioethicists, all human behavior reflects evolutionary adaptations that have been translated into our genetic structure. Thus there’s a selfish gene, and a cooperative gene, on and on, a gene for every occasion from altruism to xenophobia. The idea of the soul, of each life carrying with it a spark of the divine, a defining essence, is a religious tenet that, we are told, has no place in this scientific equation. Darwin himself, while he believed charity and mercy had a social value in human relationships, could find no basis for them in nature. The utter lack of mercy, he wrote, would be “about the blackest fact in natural history” were it not for the truth that natural selection and species survival necessitate the ruthless and relentless destruction of individuals.
Fundamentalists are correct, I think, in their perception of Darwinism’s corrosive effects on the moral sanctions that protect and respect the individual human person. But their response is to retreat into an untenable defense of the bible as a work of science and to offer a view of the human future that is every bit as brutal and merciless as Darwin’s, with sinners and nonbelievers wiped out in a catastrophe of the kind that rendered dinosaurs extinct. We contemporary Catholics mostly tiptoe around the problem, I think. While we accept the scientific validity of Darwinism, with all it says about the brute realities of existence, we quietly maintain, simultaneously, a benign view of nature, its cruelty and violence more aberration than rule, with a loving God somehow in charge. Ironically, it was Gerard Manly Hopkins–like Darwin, a former Anglican divinity student–who marked his entry into the Catholic Church with the imaginative triumph of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a poem-cum-credo that confronts head-on the raw facts of nature and their faith-draining, hope-breaking implications. In the high summer of Victorian England, the Anglican clergy was rife with amateur naturalists who looked at creation as reflecting the order, stability and good sense which a hierarchical God imposed on it. Darwin rejected that model of nature, and so did Hopkins. The context of Hopkins’s poem is a tribute to five German nuns driven into exile by Bismarck’s anti-Catholic legislation, who drowned when their ship–The Deutschland–was wrecked off the coast of Wales in 1875. Today, after a century that included two world wars, which killed upwards of 60 million people, the mass murder of European Jews, the gulags of Soviet Russia, the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, and other assorted persecutions and state-sponsored programs of collective homicide, Hopkins’s concern for five nuns might seem quaint, even trivial. But in language as strong, original and rich as any in the English tongue, Hopkins forces us to face the nasty and inevitable end we all face: “…flame/Fang, or flood goes death on Drum… Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though flower the same, Wave with the meadow, forget that there must The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.” Hopkins doesn’t sugarcoat the shipwreck, instead putting front and center the murderous capacity of the world to destroy fragile human beings: “…the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow, Setting Eastnortheast in cursed quarter, the wind: Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-snivellèd snow Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deep.” Men and women die senselessly. Children perish before their parents’ eyes. Prayers for a miraculous delivery go unanswered. The innocent are destroyed along with the sinful: They fought with God’s cold– And they could not and fell to the deck (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled With the sea-romp over the wreck. Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble, The woman’s wailing, the crying of child without check…”
Herein, I think, is the post-modern consciousness as it sees our human predicament today: alone amid the cold indifference of the universe, ether without end, stars dying and being born in a random, ultimately purposeless process of following out the cosmic consequences of the Big Bang. Hopkins doesn’t end there, however. The very power of his language–language, as Flannery O’Connor described it, “heightened and unlike itself”–the momentum it builds, the way it causes the mind to move past the single meaning of words, and beyond what is on the page, is every bit as magical as the work of that other contemporary of Darwin’s, Lewis Carroll. The truth, Hopkins said, isn’t found by looking away from nature but by looking deeper, by following belief with imagination, by seeking God not apart from pain, doubt, despair, death, but in the midst of it, riding “time like riding a river.” Sin and holiness meet here, in Hopkins’s imagination, not in a single end-of-time eschaton, but in the existence of each person, in introspection that doesn’t end in egotism but allows us to sense the limitless reach of the Incarnation: “The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall; Staunching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind; Ground of being, and granite of it: past all Grasp God, throned behind Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides…” For Hopkins, this sovereignty, though often terrifying as death always is, teaches the human heart not so much to seek God’s mercy as submit to it: “Wring thy rebel, dogged in den, Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm….. With an anvil-ding And with fire in him forge thy will Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring Through him, melt him but master him still….. Make mercy in all of us, out of us all Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.” In the poem, Hopkins uses the word mercy five times: “Five! The find and sake/ And cipher of suffering Christ,” he tells us. This isn’t a cipher to be decoded, nor a mystery to be solved, but a truth that can only be denied or accepted. The whole Catholic faith and imagination springs from this acceptance, this reconciliation of worldliness and holiness in the Incarnation that makes us givers and receivers of mercy, both. And once accepted, how is it possible for the Catholic imagination not to embrace and explore the human condition honestly, to seek God in our loves and lusts, in our nobility and squalor, in our infinite ability to break each other’s hearts?
In his writings, Gabriel Marcel imagined a “metaphysic of hope” by which Christians’ belief in the eternal significance of every human life is a bulwark against a Malthusian ethic of reproductive profligacy that robs the individual of any meaning other than in furthering the survival of the species. Anticipating Marcel, and the mass destruction of human life carried out in the name of eugenic perfection, ethnic purity and the economic millennium, Hopkins imagines in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” what I would call a “metaphysic of mercy.” In Hopkins’s telling, the shipwreck is neither an act of divine retribution against a godless crew nor a small but revealing glimpse of nature’s pitiless contempt for single lives. Hopkins poses this question: “Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy Not reeve even them in?” Several stanzas later, he answers with this vision of a God who acts “With a mercy that outrides The all of water, an ark For the listener, for the lingerer with a love glides Lower than death and the dark; A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison, The-last-breath penitent spirits–the uttermost mark Our passion-plunged giant risen, The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.”
If I had to choose a single part of the Catholic imagination to give to the non-Catholic world as representative of the rest, it would be the Christ that Hopkins describes. The instinct toward mercy, the instinct Darwin couldn’t find in nature, is for Hopkins the purpose of Christ’s presence among us, the essence of his human manifestation; and the lashings of storms and man-made savagery should cause us not to avert our eyes or find God absent or see His intent as revenge or retribution but seek Him amid the chaos, the pain, this God of ours who goes “lower than death and the dark,” to “the uttermost mark,” to the farthest depths, “with a mercy that outrides the all of water” to gather us in. And here in this time of division in the church, of corruption and suspicion and scandal, if I had to choose one part of the Catholic imagination for Catholics to cherish and explore and, above all, to make part of our dealings with one another, it would be the Christ Hopkins envisions for us: Our passion-plunged giant risen…Let him easter in us!! Thank you.