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Paul Fitzgerald. Doing theology in the city. - volver índice -
Cross Currents. New Rochelle. Spring 2001

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Volume: 51, Issue: 1, Pagination: 83-114, ISSN: 00111953

Subject Terms: Students// Cities // Jesus Christ // Theology // Low income groups // Learning // Community service

Abstract:

Fitzgerald invites his undergraduate theology students to walk with the poor and to learn about their faith amid their struggles to survive. He states that in following Christ's example and moving among the poor people of the city, through their involvement in community service, students are challenged to see, hear, and encounter Christ again and again, and thus they become better theologians of the Christian faith.
Copyright Association for Religion and Intellectual Life Spring 2001

Full Text:

The author invites students to walk with the poor and to learn about their faith amid their struggles to survive.

The task of theology is often a lonely endeavor. The hush of the library or the archives, the still of the chapel, and the quiet discipline of one's desk are places where theological research and writing unfold, most often in solitary concentration. The classroom on the protected college campus or seminary, the academic conference in large hotels, and even the cherished conversation in the homes of colleagues do open the theologian to other minds and hearts so that theories and insights may be tested in dialogue. However, these exchanges are often located in affluent social contexts which cannot reveal the full import of the self-revealing Word of God. Certainly, the tradition holds that Christian theology is always done in the context of the thinking and worshiping Church, so the theologian is never alone in her or his work. More recently, theologians have become more intentional about the social and cultural contexts within which they theologize. Following the original example of Jesus and the more recent examples of Liberation Theology, Christian theologians have been moving among the poor, especially the urban poor, in order to discover and articulate a new word about God.

There is, I believe, a scriptural invitation to this type of socially contextualized theology in the seventeenth chapter of Matthew's Gospel, the account of the Transfiguration of Jesus. In an isolated place, high above the tumult of the towns and villages, Peter, James, and John accompanied Christ to a divine summit meeting. There they saw him in glory, and with him were Moses and Elijah. This epiphany gave the disciples a glimpse of the Word's relation to the Law and the Prophets. Perhaps in order better to investigate and contemplate this, the three disciples asked Jesus' permission to set up tents, that they might remain in splendid isolation on the mountaintop of revelation. Their request was left hanging on their lips by the voice of the Father, who identified Jesus as the beloved Son, the favored one, the one to whom they should listen. Awestruck, they fell to the ground. When they opened their eyes, they saw only Jesus, and at once he set off, back down the mountain. In order to fulfill their desires both to remain with him and to understand who he was, the disciples had to leave the epiphany on the mountaintop and follow Jesus down into the villages. To make sense of the faith-vision (i.e., to theologize), the disciples had to accompany Jesus into the homes of sick and suffering people, into the palaces of pride and injustice, into the temple grounds of plots and confusion. These are the places Jesus desired to be. It was here, in the context of Jesus' interaction with people -- especially the poor - that the disciples searched for the meaning of the Christ event.

Like these first disciples, contemporary Christian theologians who wish to say something meaningful about Jesus are invited to follow him out of the library, the chapel, even the university, and into the city, where he still moves among the people. In the city, we are challenged to see and hear and encounter Christ again and again, "in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men's faces."1 If we do so, then the Christ whom we discover anew in the lives of the poor and through the eyes of the marginalized will be the Christ whom we teach. Therefore, the city affords all students of theology, whether professors or undergraduates, a similar opportunity to contextualize their theological study within living human communities that reveal unique and essential aspects of the Christian tradition as well as offer a way into the ongoing Christ event.

Service-Learning Placements for Undergraduates

"My head spun amid the deafening screams and the frenzy of activity." "I was nauseated by the stench of urine and sweat." "My stomach was knotted in fear as I saw these unkempt men approaching." These are the reported reactions of undergraduate students on their first day working at, respectively, a family shelter, a convalescent hospital, and a soup kitchen. For the length of an academic term they were participant-observers, playing with the children of very poor parents, conversing at the bedsides of the dying, and serving meals to the homeless. These students were also learning theology: gathering data, testing hypotheses, discarding inapt models and stumbling upon new insights as they participated in an undergraduate course in Catholic Social Doctrine that I teach at Santa Clara University. Over the space of a few months, the poor people who had previously floated on the margins of the students' worldview moved to the center of their attention and concern. "Since these children deserve a good education, love and support from society, their families should be strengthened." "The dying should not be abandoned by society, even if their families have disappeared." "We can only solve the problem of homelessness if we truly empathize with these people, hearing their stories and weaving them into the story of the whole community." When asked to ground these prudential judgments and social prescriptions in theological language, students readily adopted and adapted the narratives that Jesus used to describe the Kingdom, or the theological language in the Book of Genesis that describes human persons as created in the image of God. The innovative articulations of these undergraduates, gained by coupling rigorous study with social engagement in the worlds of the poor, are fine testimony to the effectiveness of service-learning for teaching theology to college students.

Over the past few decades, service-learning has become a common feature in the curricula of many colleges and universities across America.2 There are many forms and a great range of intended outcomes for various service-learning programs, so we must begin by making some distinctions and narrowing our focus. Here I mean to explore the value of a respectful presence among the urban poor that allows for the development of true conversation about the subject matter of theological study. Such participation in human communities serves as an essential context wherein the Judeo-Christian tradition in general, and the Roman Catholic theological tradition in particular, can be engaged, appropriated, and, indeed, extended by students. These persons enter into true dialogue with essential texts, the professor, classmates and interlocutors gained by means of a service-learning placement. A placement at a social service agency allows students to grapple not only with the "what" of poverty-and not simply with the "how" of social or political remedy-but also with the "why" of faith-based ethical advocacy for human persons in difficulty. In fact, it is this third level of articulation that is most difficult for students: they need help articulating the normativity that undergirds their real generosity and their deeply felt sense of justice. Sustained dialogue with poor people on the margins of society is marvelously effective in bringing students to explicit clarity about the hardest questions of faith and justice.

Service-learning differs from the many forms of volunteerism which students may have performed during their High School years in that service-learning is always linked to an academic course that includes a rigorous intellectual discipline.3 The subject matter of the academic component of the course (e.g., Modern Languages or Anthropology or Law) will determine the hermeneutic that should structure the interactions at the placement. Service-learning differs from internship or practicum (where already mastered classroom knowledge is then applied) because the experience at the service-learning placement has a real, normative role in the interpretation of theories discussed in class. The experience at the placement affects how students interpret texts and how they judge their interpretations. In the case of theology, key hermeneutics for the whole exercise arise from the central questions, concerns, and symbols of the faith tradition-from the mysterious and gracious movement of God into our lives, our cares, and our commitments. Communities of the poor provide an essential and inalienable learning environment for the theology student. As the students serve the poor, the "poor" - who always have and always will play a central role in salvation history -serve as hosts and teachers to the students.

The insights which support this new teaching strategy are not new. Five centuries ago Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), was already employing social context as an essential component of theological reasoning. In 1545, when Pope Paul III convened the Council of Trent, he asked Ignatius to send him three Jesuits who would serve as the Pope's personal theologians at the council. Diego Lainez, Alfonso Salmeron, and Pierre Favre were sent, but the latter died en route from Spain and was replaced by Claude Le Jay. Ignatius instructed them to be "slow and amiable of speech... listen closely, the better to understand the speaker's point of view... give countervailing reasons [to your own propositions] in order not to appear partial or to inconvenience anyone...."4 In a word, Ignatius wanted his men to listen attentively to others, be sensitive to their ideas and opinions, and to put forth their own positions in a spirit of true humility. To give them the proper context within which to develop and maintain purity of heart as they participated in theological debate at the highest level of the Catholic Church, Ignatius directed the three Jesuit delegates to live with and like the poor of the town, hear their confessions, preach in the streets, and tend the sick in the most wretched of the towns hospitals.

Beyond the value of poverty as a context for the development of humility and piety, I believe that Ignatius saw an added value. He knew that social context affects how a person reads Scripture and tradition; it must also affect how one does theology. In his method of prayer, Ignatius developed the use of the imagination so that he might place himself into the full social reality of the Gospels scenes (often marked by great poverty, illness, social exclusion, injustice, etc.), the better to appreciate and come to know intimately the fullness of the Christ event. In the movement from contemplation to action he had a similar desire for rootedness in the social context of the poor. In his mystical encounter with God at La Stoma (in a wayside chapel on the road to Rome) Ignatius asked the Father to place him with the Son -with Christ poor, Christ crucified, Chhrist scorned and discounted - so that Ignatius might gustary sentir, taste and sense the world from Christ's vantage point. Ignatius had fallen in love with God become human, a kenotic God, Emmanuel. In the spiritual tradition which Ignatius founded, the person discerning her or his vocation asks for the grace to stand with Christ's poor, to serve them, to befriend them, and to listen to their expressions of faith so as to be closer to Christ among the poor. This holy desire dovetails nicely with the strategy of service-learning. To enter into reflective and prayerful dialogue with the poor furnishes the student with the possibility of seeing Christ through the eyes of those among whom Christ wished to be.

Service placements at, for example, senior centers, shelters for battered women, and AIDS hospices afford students the opportunity to develop relationships with people "in poverty," broadly conceived. Multiple visits give students the chance to go beyond first fears and initial impressions. Extended conversations allow trust to grow in the hearts of visitors and hosts alike. Students gain confidence in their abilities to enter into conversation with people in situations very different from their own. With time, students can go beyond pleasantries to a level of dialogue that allows for theological reflection with, and not just on or about, the poor. Service-learning placements also give theology students an entree into multiple cultural worlds so that they can become conscious of their own cultural biases even as they learn about other possible worldviews.

A large part of university-level theological study is devoted to making belief more complex. Late adolescents and young adults typically discover at some point that the theological articulations learned in childhood are no longer adequate as they reconsider major life questions in the light of adult faith. Contextualized theological study helps students to move beyond simple answers to complex questions. It also helps students outgrow naive belief in their own objectivity. This sometimes painful, often disconcerting process is advanced by the give and take of true dialogue. Service-learning placements help students to avoid the lurking danger of complete relativism, the postmodern mistrust of all meta-narrative and any normativity, and the surrender to utilitarian individualism. Christian faith proposes norms and principles that do in fact claim a certain absolute priority because of the ultimacy of the One who is self-revelatory. The cry of the poor for justice and for bread, as challenging as it may be (especially if it obliges a person to renounce advantage, comfort, and power voluntarily), gains credibility and attractiveness when it is heard directly from the poor, and from poor people whose humanity has become manifest through sustained conversation.

In my experience, Catholic social doctrine becomes intuitively compelling when it is engaged from the vantage points of the poor and within specific social contexts of human marginalization and suffering. The proximity to crisis and tragedy brings an urgency to the examination of that hierarchy of truths about God and the world that are revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The practical solutions to social problems may not be easy, and the specific demands of God may not be clear, but students' experience of struggling with difficult theological questions in the context of the real social world of the poor underlines the seriousness of the questions and the value of their pursuit. Further, learning to theologize in conversation with the poor is itself creative-the back and forth reveals added layers of meaning about God and humankind, even as it affirms the perduring mystery of God.

The reciprocal movement between the service placement and the classroom mirrors an important aspect of the training that the Society of Jesus organizes for its own men in formation. Jesuits in training (often called Scholastics) begin with a two-year novitiate program. Even as they are deepening their habits of prayer and reflection, they engage in transformative experiments that cross political, economic, and cultural boarders. This process of placing themselves among "the poor," broadly understood, is continued and deepened during Philosophy Studies and during the period of practical work that follows, often called "regency." All these experiments provide a great deal of personally important experience to be reflected upon in spiritual direction. These years of engagement and reflection lay a good foundation for a more sophisticated and variegated hermeneutic with which to engage theological studies, which follow upon the years of regency. All undergraduate students can profit from this kind of "back and forth" of service and study that is so deeply a part of Jesuit spirituality, a programmatic way to foster the Ignatian ideal of the "contemplative in action." Service-learning supports the possibility that a person's original intentions of generosity can be married to intellectually sharpened, academically probed skills and insights so that practice can become praxis and sentiment can become strategy. The importance of actual engagement in real social situations is crucial; developmental theorists Thomas Cook and Brian Flay remark that we are more likely to act ourselves into new ways of thinking than think ourselves into new ways of acting.5

The benefits of contextualized theology studies extend well beyond the desired goal of a better understanding of the tradition. For those students who are and will remain practicing Roman Catholics, a developed theological sensitivity to the catholicity of the faith (i.e., its unity in diversity, or better, its universality through its complexity) will make them agents for ever deeper communion in an ever more multicultural Catholic Church. The multiplicity of Catholicisms in North America has long been the fact and is more recently becoming the accepted norm. Greater sensitivity to, and curiosity about, the great richness of diverse cultural instantiations of Catholicism requires an ever greater ability for members of the Church (both for folks from mainstream society and for those upwardly mobile students from historically marginalized communities who will enter the mainstream thanks to a good education) to be able to read, enter into, appreciate, and learn from other cultures. Beyond the Catholic Church, the ever greater and more appreciated multiculturalism of North American society means that these same habits of the mind and patterns of the heart will be ever more essential for all our students, who will assume positions of influence in professional and civic life after graduation.

I live and work in the Santa Clara Valley, known worldwide as the Silicon Valley, formerly known as the Valley of the Heart's Delight. In one of the richest places on earth, I invite students to walk with the poor and to learn about their faith amid their struggles to survive. The students make a conscious choice to shift their gaze from the richest, the fastest, and the latest to the poorest, the slowest, and the least connected. In so doing, the students move to the margins of society, to those blank spaces which normally funnel our attention toward the "important text" at the center of the page. In this they do as Christ did when he took women, children, foreigners, and the sick from the edge of the crowd and stood them in the midst of the assembly. Jesus did this to actualize the Reign of God, for the effects of his actions were to remind his hearers of the inalienable humanity of the poor. This type of action was both pastoral and prophetic, for it was both for the good of the person and for the well being of the whole human family.6 By engaging in service-learning placements, students confront the self-revelation of God in Scripture and the tradition in conversation with the people at the agencies where they are working. The placement gives them questions to ask the texts; the texts challenge them to see the fuller reality of the people at their placement, to see what is and intuit what ought to be. In the great conversation that envelops the placement and the classroom, students theologize in the difficult overlap between multiple contexts: their own personal histories, the life world of the poor, and the culture of inquiry in the university. What they tend to discover is that the poor continue to have a certain pride of place in the greater communal discernment of the past, the present and the future of God's steadfast, saving love.

The important work of theological education is, in my view, essentially the formation of men and women for adult membership in the Church, a vocation to active participation in the Church's primary mission, the evangelization of culture -i.e., to bring the Word and the world into fruitful conversation. This involves not merely the transfer of information, nor simply the inculcation of skills, nor only the sharpening of prudential judgment, though all these are essential elements. There is also a passion for the truth of God that can and must be imparted, and I believe that it must first be modeled. Living human communities can do this. It is transformative to listen to human beings telling their stories in their own homes, in their own churches, in their own neighborhoods. It is absolutely fascinating to hear people speak of a God who is close to them, even as they struggle to make sense of scandalous human sin and God's irrevocable promise.

The Work of Theology

The teaching church is also the learning church, just as every good teacher remains a good learner. What theologians ask students to do must also be integral to the life and work of the theologian. Since it involves human communities, theologizing in the context of the urban poor requires careful consideration. The poor are not the subject of research in the classical sense of controlled experiments and objective observation, nor is the movement into these communities the same as a trip to the library, to the archives, or even a short visit to a distant and exotic land. Institutionally structured, ongoing relationships between university-based theologians and urban communities of the poor invite the development of participant observation, fellowship in worship, and sustained dialogue which supports a common exploration of the meaning of faith. As St. Anselm continues to remind us, theology is faith seeking understanding, and ever more so, we know that this search takes place in the context of the specific communities to which we belong. Memberships in such communities are limiting and freeing at the same time, as Karl Mannheim reminds us.7 A person's point of view is always partial, always biased, for there is no Archimedean point, no vantage outside of social reality to afford us an objective view of our selves and our world. We can only view reality from within a life-world, and so we can only hope to make our view more complex, and critique our bias, if and as we move into other life worlds. Perhaps we can venture no further than the boarder areas of these new-tous life-worlds. Modesty and candor impose on us the admission that we cannot be fully at home in multiple cultural worlds, but we can live the discomfort of being a regular guest in the world of the urban poor. There we may yet discover some new fruit that grows on the grafted limb of the tree at the juncture of two worlds. Through the engagement of multiple perspectives, and especially through perspectives that integrate lived faith commitments into their very being, we can gain a more catholic view, a more nuanced and complex view, and thereby a greater understanding of the truth beyond ourselves, a truth that attracts and impels us, a truth that grasps us fully even as we only grasp at it.

Many theologians have come to know the value of contextualized, hermeneutically self- and community-conscious research and writing. No finer example can be found than Bill O'Neill's work on the inclusion of the poor in the tasks of Christian Social Ethics.8 He makes the following point, which I think is key: "The epistemic or hermeneutical privilege of the poor, we may say, rests not in canonizing a particular point of view, but rather in revealing the partiality of [all] illusory or coerced consensus-- the `systematic distortions' [quoting Habermas] of our communicative interaction."9 If the theologian remains ensconced in the library or the archives and does theology in conversation solely with one's peers, the fruit of this research would most likely engage crucial questions from within a single culture, most probably a middle class, academic, modern or postmodern one. There are, of course, other worlds just across town, life-worlds which we ignore at our peril.

Roberto Goizueta tells the story of a rather urbane abbot, the rector of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico City, who was forced to resign his post in July 1996 following the huge public uproar that ensued when he was publicly quoted as dismissing the historical reality of Juan Diego. More than impolitic, this event illustrates the dangers of theologizing apart from the lived faith of the Church, and apart from the faith commitments of the people at the base of the Church. Goizueta opines that any theology done apart from the lived experience of the poor will fail to grasp the fullness and the integrity of the Christian tradition. "The increased attention to popular religion as praxis, as the starting point of theology, brings to light those aspects of [Gustavo] Gutierrez's method too often underappreciated in the past, namely, the specifically Christian aspects of his definition of theology: `critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word."'10

To do theology in the context of communities changes the way we do theology, changes our concerns, exposes our biases, and suggests new avenues of exploration. Don Browning talks about this under the rubric of Practical Theology, an approach to theologizing that brings practical concerns into the process from the outset. "The theologian does not stand before God, Scripture, and the historic witness of the Church like an empty slate or Lockean tabula rasa ready to be determined, filled up, and then plugged into a concrete, practical situation. A more accurate description goes like this. We come to the theological task with questions shaped by the secular and religious practices in which we are implicated - sometimes uncomfortably."11 By placing ourselves in the social context of the urban poor, we can surface preexisting theories, biases, assumptions that undergird and influence the theology which we have done. Further, by participating in the religious practices of the poor, we can open ourselves up to new ways of viewing the world, new ways of conceiving God.

Browning goes on to suggest that it is in moments of crisis, when religious theory and practice are so out of joint that they are unable to afford solutions to major community problems, that we are forced to construct a new integrity of theory and practice. This reconstruction begins with practice, with the lived faith of the community. While I agree with him, I think too that there is a way that members of the middle class can and often do avoid facing the many current crises of the poor: high crime rates, high poverty rates, high incarceration rates, high rates of illness and low access to medical care, decent education, economic opportunity, social respect, and political power. By agreeing to leave our protected enclaves, we can proactively move into social settings where our theologizing may become rooted in the lived faith of urban communities of the poor, and there we can seek for a new integration of theory and practice. We can purposefully choose to enter the crises in which the poor live. We can give them a preferential place not only in our care but also in our thought.

What I am suggesting is that, by placing our students and ourselves with the poor, and by sharing faith with them, we will enrich our theological thinking to address problems in new ways and find new solutions. Christian theologians fulfill their vocation by remaining with Christ and searching for new words that will say something meaningful about Christ. In the twenty-fifth chapter of his Gospel, Matthew reports Jesus' clear conviction that he remains always present among the hungry, the naked, the imprisoned, the ill. Indeed, Jesus identifies with them in an absolute and categorical manner. Today's cities are the places wherein students of theology can encounter Christ again, where they can test out in rigor and dialogue the insights and the intuitions they first heard whispered on the mountaintops of retreat and withdrawal.

Notes

1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., "As Kingfishers catch fire" in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 90.

2. For a fine general introduction to this rapidly growing field, see Barbara Jacoby and Associates eds., Service-Learning in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996). For up-to-date research on the effectiveness of service-learning, see Janet Eyler and Dwight E. Giles Jr.,'s extensive work, including Where's the Learning in Service-Learning? (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).

3. Service-learning differs from community service (even if the latter contains a schedule of reading, reflection and discussion) most clearly in that students are primarily seeking understanding of a given academic question (Psychology, Sociology, Theology). Students are serving to learn and not learning to serve.

4. Quoted by Jean Lacouture in Jesuits: A Multibiography (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995), 80. On the apostolic strategy of Ignatius and his early companions, see John W O'Malley, S.J., The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). On the importance of the urban setting for Jesuit ministries, see Thomas M. Lucas, Landmarking: City, Church and Jesuit Urban Strategy (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1997).

5. Thomas Cook and Brain Flay, "The Persistence of Experimentally Induced Attitude Change" in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. L. Berkowitz, V, II (New York: Academic Press, 1978).

6. In his encounter with Jesus, Zacchaeus gains grace not only for himself but for his entire household, to which has come the Reign of God (Luke 19:1-10).

7. Still the best treatment of the social embeddedness of all human thought, see his classic Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, first published in 1936 in German. There is a fine English translation by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

8. "No Amnesty for Sorrow: The Privilege of the Poor in Christian Social Ethics" Theological Studies 55, no. 4 (December 1994): 638-56.

9. Ibid., 648.

10. R. Goizueta, "A Ressourcement from the Margins: U.S. Latino Popular Catholicism as Lived Religion" in Theology and Lived Christianity, ed. D. Hammond, Annual Publication of the College Theology Society, vol. 45 (Mystic, Conn.: Bayard, 2000), 13.

11. Don Browning, A Fundamental Practical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 5-6.

Paul Fitzgerald, S.J., is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University in California. He recently published L'Eglise comme lieu de formation d'une conscience de la concitoyennete.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.- volver índice -

Michael Raposa. Self-control. - volver índice -
American Journal of Theology & Philosophy. West Lafayette. Sep 2000

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Volume: 21, Issue: 3, Pagination: 257-268, ISSN: 01943448

Subject Terms: Philosophy // Theology // Behavior // Bible // Exegesis & hermeneutics // Religion

Personal Names: Paul, Saint (5?-67? AD), Peirce, Charles Sanders

Abstract:

Charles Peirce and St Paul both attached a certain religious significance to the concept of self-control, without denying its applicability to any form of human behavior governed by ideals or standards. Raposa examines the religious value attached to the capacity for self-control and explores some specifically religious strategies for developing that capacity.
Copyright American Journal of Theology & Philosophy Sep 2000

Full Text:

SELF-CONTROL-*1

I.

It might be possible to have too much self-control. That is a hypothesis worth evaluating, although I do not intend to pursue it here. The more commonplace assumption is that self-control is a desirable quality, so that the person lacking it is in a problematic condition. Moreover, the experience of lacking it is a curious phenomenon that itself merits philosophical attention. Consider the testimony of two philosophers who probably have very little in common, apart from their general agreement on this issue.

St. Paul repeatedly emphasized the importance of self-control, and to a much greater degree in the spiritual life than in worldly pursuits. "Every athlete exercises self-control in all things" he observed in his first letter to the Corinthians. "They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable."2 Paul's language here is prescriptive and hortatory rather than simply descriptive, since the problem of self-control (a philosophical problem, but more immediately and acutely, a practical one) is typically manifested in the gap between intentions and actions. "I do not understand my own actions" Paul announced as a prelude to one of his more famous confessions. "For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate .... I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do."3

Now one of the more poignant features of Charles Peirce's biography is the importance that he also attached to self-control, both as a personal quality and as a philosophical concept, even while he was convinced that the lack of it was his most desperate character flaw. In a later commentary on one of his earliest philosophical essays, Peirce portrayed self-control as involving a "love of what is good for all on the whole."4 He identified it with the "essence of Christianity" and described it as "perfect freedom," indeed, as "the only freedom of which man has any reason to be proud." Yet Peirce was not at all proud of the fact that he himself possessed insufficient "moral self- control," a failing for which he at least partially blamed his father.5 While Benjamin Peirce took great pains to challenge his son intellectually, he apparently neglected to discipline him in other respects, so that Charles was to remark from the perspective of his later years, that as a youth he "was brought up with far too loose a rein."6 Not all of the dark secrets in Peirce's life have been exposed; but some of the tragic personal consequences of his inability to control his behavior, whether it be his temper or his use of intoxicants or the incautious spending of money, have been well-documented.7

Peirce and Paul both attached a certain religious significance to the concept of self-control, without denying its applicability to any form of human behavior governed by ideals or standards (like athletics, in Paul's example). I want briefly to assess the religious value attached to the capacity for self-control, as well as to begin exploring some specifically religious strategies for developing that capacity (most especially, those classified as meditative disciplines). At the same time, I want to expose some of the peculiarities of this concept. What does it mean, after all, to control the "self'? Exactly whom or what is one attempting to control and who does the controlling? How is this accomplished? And how does one fail to accomplish it? In what way does an act of self-control differ from control exerted over other persons, or over objects and events in the world? How can the exercise of self-- control itself be conceived as the most effective means for controlling others? Conversely, is it possible to surrender oneself to the will of another while still maintaining self-control, the "perfect freedom" that Peirce described?

II

My intention is to raise these questions as a starting point for inquiry, rather than to offer carefully articulated answers to each of them here. It should be noted, further, that this whole set of questions presupposes an even larger one about what it means to be a self in the first place. But I would not want the requirement of a complete and settled answer to that question to become an obstacle blocking the road to further investigation; on the contrary, having no clear idea of what one is talking about should serve as a stimulus rather than an obstacle to inquiry.

This much does seem clear. Self-control is a matter of deliberate, rational behavior, of thinking, choosing and then acting on one's choices, all of which takes time. So one of the ways to approach the question about "who controls whom?" is to conceive of the one who controls as acting upon some future version of the self. Even in cases where one struggles in the 'here and now' to control some powerful impulse or desire, a process of deliberation is taking place, however hasty and desperate it may be, in an attempt to control the immediate future. If desire proceeds unchecked to motivate conduct, if one acts impulsively, then the game is already over before any element of self-control can be brought into play.

It is possible, of course, to think about self-control as something that one exercises in the moment, that is, at the very moment when one is confronted with some temptation or moved to act in a way contrary to one's ideals, one's best judgment. One is able to overcome the present urge to act in anger, for example, perhaps because of the predictable negative consequences of such behavior (raising one's blood pressure, endangering a friendship, the possibility of retaliation, etc.) or because such behavior violates some code of moral or social propriety. Similarly, one politely refuses the cocktail now being offered by one's host, after a quick calculation concerning level of fatigue, alcohol already consumed, and the long ride home. Here is a form of freedom or of self-control manifested as a decision, as a particular act of choosing in the present moment. But notice that even in this form, self-control presupposes a kind of dialogue between the present self and the self who will act in the immediate future. Furthermore, it can often entail deliberations requiring a person to imaginatively conceive of the distant future, of the remote effects and long-term consequences of behavior.

Peirce himself did not tend to think of self-control as a form of freedom most perfectly manifested in specific acts of volition, of deciding either to refrain from doing what one judges to be wrong or to do the right thing. On his account, self-control operates at a distance, shaping particular future actions and decisions indirectly, by working more immediately to effect specific changes within the self. It is primarily an exercise in habit formation, sometimes also a matter of dissolving old habits deemed inappropriate or ineffective, of eradicating vices. On such a view, that person is most free who does the right thing at any given moment without having, in some heroic act of volitional exertion, to subdue temptations or overcome moral inertia. This freedom is experienced as a kind of ease in action rather than as a deliberate choosing; but in fact it will be rooted in a whole series of deliberate choices that one has made about the sort of person that one wants to be or to become.

On this Peircean view, "the power of self-control is certainly not a power over what one is doing at the very instant the operation of self-- control is commenced."8 It is more appropriately conceived as the general form that a person gives to his or her life and actions, the gradual "building up a character."9 It is the "capacity for rising to an extended view of a practical subject instead of seeing only temporary urgency."' Freedom exercised in this way will impart to future actions a "fixed character... measured by the absence of the feeling of self-reproach."11

This general Peircean perspective is one that I am inclined to adopt. It incorporates a semiotic view of the self, that is, the idea of the self as a continuous stream of semiosis, a "living inferential metaboly of symbols." As such, the self is engaged in the ongoing interpretation of itself to itself. Insofar as this process is deliberate and self-controlled, it will acquire a certain general character, so that "the vir is begotten."12 To be a self, in this particular sense, is both to have ideals (some of which might certainly be religious), and gradually to embody these ideals through the development of appropriate habits, thus shaping future conduct, imparting to it a discernible form and consistency. One can conceive of such an ideal as a type of symbol, of specific habits of conduct as the interpretations (interpretants) of that symbol. Consequently, persons or selves are complex symbols, and their meaning is displayed in the consistency of self-controlled behavior.13

III

Perceptions and emotions appear to be the sorts of things over which one has very little control. Seeing the ladder leaning against the wall is not a matter of deciding what I want to see or deliberating about what I ought to see; if I am looking at the ladder, paying attention and my view is not obscured, then I just see it. Of course, Peirce contributed as much as any other modern philosopher to the project of undermining those varieties of empiricism grounded in the problematic assumption that we "just see" things. Perceptual judgments are forms of hypothetical or abductive inference; these inferences can be faulty and so they ought to be subjected to critical scrutiny. But the key point here is that, as inferences, they are unconscious, immediate, and largely uncontrollable.

A similar view of feelings and emotions can be articulated. People talk about the importance of "controlling their emotions." But the point of such talk often seems to be to underscore the necessity of not acting rashly on the basis of what one feels. I can control what I do in a way that I cannot control what I feel, so that it might seem excessively scrupulous to submit my emotions to the same sort of moral evaluation that my actions are required to undergo.

On any theory of self-control that limits its exercise to acts of volition performed in the present moment, it would be reasonable to conclude that perceptions and emotions are not subject to a great deal of self-control; but that is not the perspective that I have been sketching and endorsing here. I want to argue that how one perceives something and what one feels in a given situation can be morally meaningful phenomena, vulnerable to criticism. One's ideals about the sort of person one ought to become guide the deliberate process of shaping the self into just such a person. Perceptions and emotions are interpretive responses to persons, things, and events that, while they may be largely uncontrollable at the moment of their occurrence, can be dramatically shaped in the long run by those habits of thought and feeling that I choose to inculcate.

It may take more than a little bit of brainwashing for me to learn not to see the ladder as a ladder. But I might be able to train myself to see snow in the way that an Eskimo sees it or to hear music in the way that my music teacher does, and whatever else one might conclude about such examples, they are not obviously instances of "brainwashing." In the same way, one's feeling responses to things can be modified over time through the controlled formation of new habitual responses, so that someone might learn to enjoy rather than to fear riding on roller coasters, or develop a genuine sympathy and affection for a person previously disdained. It is my perspective that religiously meaningful experiences, religious feelings and perceptions, are nourished by habits of interpretation that may be more or less well developed in any given individual.14 One has to be the sort of person who would tend to experience things and situations in just such a religiously meaningful fashion. (This observation does not settle the debate about whether or not it is a good thing to be that sort of person.) In any event, the development of habits is a process that can to some extent be controlled, by others seeking to shape one's behavior of course, but also by oneself. 15

To say that self-control involves a process of habit formation is not yet to say very much about how that process typically unfolds, or about the variety of possible strategies designed to facilitate the process. (There must be such strategies, after all, if the strengthening of habits is to be considered a deliberate and rational process.) Already it is possible, however, to say something about what it means for a person either to succeed or to fail in exercising self-control. If "ought implies can" then it might seem implausible to argue that a person ought to perceive or feel or act in a way that is precluded by that person's present dispositions and capabilities. But on the view that the properly self-controlled person will take responsibility for the development of dispositions and capabilities deemed necessary for appropriate future conduct, talk about failure in such a case, even potentially moral failure, does not necessarily seem out of line.

This is not to contend that such a harsh judgment is always going to be a correct or even a fair one. The problem of self-control, as it is manifested in human experience, is more complex than any brief analysis could ever suggest. Only an omniscient person could predict the demands on future behavior with sufficient clarity to develop the capacity to resist all possible temptations, the disposition to think and act properly in all conceivable situations. To display that degree of "ease" in behavior would be inhuman. It seems inevitable, no matter how well-disciplined a person might be, that he or she will experience contingencies that challenge his or her power of self-control. Such a case will require the flexing of sheer volitional muscle right on the spot if the present challenge is to be overcome. Nevertheless, this muscle, this will power, is also the kind of thing that one might be able to exercise and develop over time. And so while it is reasonable to conclude that maintaining self-control is not always easy, it is important to observe that the difficulty will be considerably greater for the person who never prepares for or thinks about the future.

IV

A good deal of that sort of preparation, Peirce believed, takes place in the imagination. Indeed, the highest grade of self-control, on his account, is achieved when a person can "control his self-control. When this point is reached, much or all of the training will be conducted in the imagination. ,16 It is a type of training that involves the deliberate formation of habits of action by imagining a particular kind of occasion as a "stimulus" and then thinking about what the consequences of various actions performed in that situation would be. Some of these will be endorsed as appropriate, given their compatibility with the ideals and values of the person doing the imagining. Repeated imaginings, Peirce believed, will dispose a person actually to perform the right action when such an occasion arises. Peirce concluded that giving this "general shape to our actual future conduct is what we call a resolve."17

Systems of religious meditation display an intricate logic that I could not possibly hope to unravel in any brief account; moreover, that logic varies with differing systems. But Peirce's discussion of a kind of training in self-control that takes place through the exercise of the imagination supplies an important perspective on at least some of those religious practices. In isolation, his talk about the effect that repeated imaginings will have on future behavior is too vague to be anything more than suggestive. It needs to be supplemented by an account of what happens whenever we pay attention to anything at all, whether in the imagination or in our everyday experience of the world.

Meditation might be described as the practice of paying attention. It is a process of deliberation that differs from other forms of reasoning in that it is explicitly designed to be self-reflexive and self-transforming. Here is a prescribed method of thinking about things, of paying attention to them, in a way intended to produce in the thinker new habits of thought, feeling, and action. Paying attention, in itself, may seem like an easy thing to do if one just decides to do it, a task not involving any special skill or training. But experience shows that it can be extraordinarily difficult to accomplish. I may intend to pay attention to x, only to find myself repeatedly distracted, soon confessing like St. Paul that, despite my best intentions, "I cannot do it." The possible explanations for this failure are multifarious. 18 But my present interest is in the sort of thing that happens when one succeeds.

One's attention can be aroused by something because it is interesting. But Peirce also observed that we can generate interest in something by paying attention to it. Attention increases the "subjective intensity" of our consciousness of a thing. This is a "temporary condition;" that is, the intensity will soon diminish, but only because the idea of that thing will become linked in consciousness to other ideas, acquiring a greater generality and, thus, an ability to shape conduct.19 Consider Peirce's analysis:

This is what constitutes the fixation of attention. Contemplation consists in our using our self-control to remove us from the forcible intrusion of other thoughts, and in considering the interesting bearings of what may lie hidden in the icon, so as to cause the subjective intensity of it to increase.

Attention is the power of connecting one thought with another. It is an essentially inductive process, involving the formation of a habit.21 This is what happens whenever attention is aroused by certain related aspects of experience. I bum my hand several times on a hot frying pan and it demands my attention. I very soon develop a belief that the painful burning sensation will be linked to touching the frying pan under precisely these conditions. And that belief is a habit of action shaping my future behavior with respect to frying pans. Now to the extent that attention can be controlled, this inductive process can also be controlled. Such control extends not only to the actual but also to the imagined elements of experience. For example, by attending in the imagination to the idea of certain actions performed in conjunction with certain circumstances, a disposition can be formed to execute those actions whenever the corresponding circumstances arise. This is how, on Peirce's account, the power of attention is utilized in imagination to develop self-control. But notice that this process itself requires self-- control, the ability to detach or remove oneself from the "forcible intrusion" into consciousness of various thoughts (what Peirce regarded as a form of "abstraction"), in order to discern and attend to some meaningful pattern in experience.

Resolutions to act will be strengthened if accompanied by certain habitual feelings. These, too, can be exercised in the imagination and that is precisely the sort of strategy vividly exemplified by Ignatius of Loyola in the meditations sketched in his Spiritual Exercises.22 Emotions as well as actions can be inductively linked to specific types of events, objects, persons or experiences. This is not so much a matter of programming oneself to have certain feelings under certain circumstances, no matter how artificial or inappropriate they may seem. Rather, it is a matter of noticing "what may lie hidden in the icon," of attending to selected details and patterns in experience that may otherwise remain hidden below the threshold of consciousness.

How is it possible to develop an affection for the person that I had previously disliked, without that affection being disingenuous? Whenever I encounter or imagine that person, I identify and attend to specific attractive or praiseworthy features of her character. Paying attention to these positive features does not require suppressing or ignoring certain negative characteristics; it does require noticing what I had failed or neglected to notice before, by attending in a deliberate fashion. (Alternatively, I may pursue the Buddhist strategy of becoming mindful of the various ways in which and the extent to which she experiences suffering.)23 Observing these features will elicit certain feelings that can be developed into a habitual response to that person, a gradual transformation of emotions and perceptions. It takes practice, and that practice requires exercising self-control, but this is tantamount to "brainwashing" myself only if that means that I have succeeded in transforming myself into the kind of person that I wanted to become in the first place.

V

The decision to become a particular sort of person is one guided by selected models, values or ideals, some of which, as already noted, may be religious in origin. This possibility underscores the potentially religious significance of developing the capacity for self-control. It also clearly suggests that developing self-control is not a project typically carried out by solitary individuals in isolation from various communities of belief and interpretation. (A somewhat romantic image of the religious devotee retreating into seclusion in order to pursue meditative disciplines can serve to reinforce such a distorted perspective.) Indeed, the self is socially constituted in multiple respects. Not only are many of the ideological resources available for such a project communal in origin, but many of the practices employed to develop self-control are rooted in the traditions of a community, organized and monitored by communal authorities. One of the central goals of religious or moral education is the training of individuals to be self-controlled persons of a certain kind. Moreover, this goal is considered praiseworthy not simply or even primarily because self-controlled persons will display a certain form of behavior in private; their social behavior also will be transformed, appropriate ideals becoming embodied in actual conduct, in habits of action and inter-action, thus sustaining and enriching communal life.

Attending to the social dimensions of self-control raises intriguing questions about the relationship between self-control, being controlled by others, and the control of that which lies beyond the self. These questions are intriguing enough to merit exploration, although I can only barely initiate that process of inquiry here.

Consider the hypothesis that the more self-control a person possesses, the more control that person will be capable of extending over others, while also being less vulnerable to the negative effects of control exerted by others. A part of this hypothesis resonates with the Confucianist notion that an enormous power is embodied in the moral example of the virtuous, self-controlled individual; self-transformation is the most dramatic means for effecting significant and positive changes in the family, in society, and in the world.24 The hypothesis is also affirmed by the religious ideologies informing the practice of selected Asian martial disciplines, like aikido and tai chi chuan. Those ideologies suggest that no direct attempt to counter the hostile actions of a powerful aggressor with violent reactions will be successful; rather, perfect self-- control, in thought, emotion and action, is the key to exercising control over such an aggressor.25

Peirce's own idealistic metaphysics also provides a home for his hypothesis. Without self-control, he conjectured, "the resolves and exercises of the inner world could not effect the real determinations and habits of the outer world." There is a very tangible sense, of course, in which one is directly and immediately capable of controlling things beyond oneself, like when I simply reach out and open the front door of my house. But Peirce was especially interested in what he regarded as the more powerful but "indirect action of the inner world upon the outer through the operation of habits."26 (On Peirce's account, efficient causes should operate as the instruments of final causes; individual acts of volition have an enduring effect when they serve some greater purpose.)

Both St. Paul and Peirce concluded that self-control is a form of freedom, yet they each conceived of that freedom, in religious terms, as submission to the will of God. It is a tricky and a potentially dangerous business, both in this religious context and within the context of human relationships, closely to identify freedom with submission to the will of another. It might feel tremendously liberating to abdicate the responsibility for achieving self-control by allowing oneself to be controlled by another. But that can hardly be the form of perfect freedom that Peirce linked with the "service of Christ." In fact, it would seem to be the very opposite of genuine self-control.

One of the paradoxes of self-control, nevertheless, is exposed by this observation that one can achieve an authentic form of freedom by actually surrendering one's autonomy, by binding oneself to the will of another. The paradox is softened, once again, by shifting attention away from volition exercised over choices immediately available to a consideration of objectives that can only be achieved in the long run. If the development of self-control is a matter of gradual habit formation, then submission to the authority of some religious teacher or sage or Deity might readily be conceived as a powerful method of self-- transformation (despite the fact that it involves, most immediately, a necessary sacrifice of autonomy).

Of course, the judgment that acts of obedience would be likely to produce these desirable long-term effects is one requiring, in any given case, a certain power of discernment. It also presupposes an awareness or recognition of the value of achieving a habit of detachment. There is a vast religious literature devoted to talk about detachment, the disciplined rising above egoistic desires, impulses and perspectives in order to achieve "a love of what is good for all on the whole." If painful at first, such detachment is eventually to be experienced as a freedom from the hegemony of egoistic desires. Self-control, in its most perfect form, is synonymous with this power of detachment. It is a removing of oneself from the distracting, potentially enslaving influence of specific impulses, a habitual readiness to pay attention to whatever is judged to matter most.

There are clues available in Peirce's writings as to what he himself may have been suggesting with his talk about self-control as a form of freedom. He was not a proponent of submission to authority as a felicitous method for fixing belief.27 Yet he did advocate, in his only extended discussion of the logic of meditation or Musement, the practice of submitting in free and open attentiveness of heart and mind to the divine communication embedded in the universes of experience.28 This "lively give and take of communion between self and self' is a free yet self-controlled form of playfulness; in a rather literal sense, for Peirce, it is a kind of falling in love.

There is a qualified sense in which both acts of contemplation and of love can require the surrender of control to another. Both also require careful attention to that other (the beloved or the object of contemplation). And each has the potential to effect a dramatic transformation of the self. The condition of being in love is a binding of oneself to another that can, nevertheless and somewhat paradoxically, feel like perfect freedom. This can play itself out in a degenerate form when it involves the surrender to "temporary urgencies," a temporary feeling of liberation that results in enslavement. But it might also take the form of a rising above these urgencies in order to embrace an "extended view" of things, a love that endures in the long run precisely because it is freely given and self-controlled.

This essay was presented at the Highlands Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought summer seminar "The Pragmatic Century: Conversations with Richard Bernstein," June, 2000.

1 More than thirty years ago, Richard Bernstein published his important early essay on Peirce's philosophy, "Action, Conduct, and Self-Control," in a volume that he edited entitled Perspectives on Peirce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). Some years later, Robert Neville published his philosophical meditations on the nature and purpose of spiritual discipline in a marvelous little book entitled Soldier, Sage, Saint (New York: Fordham University Press, 1978). My own reflections on self-control are indebted, in a variety of ways, to these earlier philosophical investigations.

2 1 Corinthians 9:25 All quotations of Paul are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

3 Romans 7: 15, 18-19

4 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935, 1958), vol. 5, paragraph 339 (hereafter, cited in the conventional form as "CP 5:339"), note #1; see also CP 5:402, note #3.

5. See Joseph Brent's commentary in his Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), especially 13-15. Also, consult Paul Weiss's earlier "Biography of Charles S. Peirce" in Bernstein, Perspectives, 9.

6 Charles Sanders Peirce, Semeiotic and Significs: The Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. Charles S. Hardwick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). See Peirce's letter to Lady Welby dated March 14, 1909, especially the passages on pages 112 and 114.

7 For example, by both Brent and Weiss, in the biographical studies cited above.

8 Peirce, CP 8:320

9 Peirce, CP 4:611

10 Peirce, CP 5:339, n. 1.

11 Peirce, CP 5:418

12 Peirce, CP 5.402, n. 3.

13 Peirce, CP 5:310-17 and 6:270

14 That perspective is articulated both in my commentary on Peirce's Neglected Argument, in chapter five of Peirce's Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), and in the Peircean meditations on religious boredom and insight that form the substance of chapters four and five of Boredom and the Religious Imagination (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999).

15 Peter Van Ness has analyzed spiritual discipline as both a method of habit formation and a means of resisting the attempt by others to control us by controlling our habits of perception and action; see his Spirituality, Diversion, and Decadence: the Contemporary Predicament (Albany: The State University of New York Press, 1992).

16 Pcc CP 5:533; see" also, 5:538

17 Peirce, CP 5:538

18 I explore some potential causes of the failure to pay attention in Boredom and the Religious Imagination, especially in chapter two.

19 Consider Peirce's statement and interpretation of the "Law of Mind" in CP 6:104ff.

20 Peirce, CP 7:555

21 Peirce, CP 5:295-298

22 This strategy is perhaps most visible in the first week of the exercises, when Ignatius' purpose is to arouse in the exercitant a sense of sinfulness and feelings of sorrow for sin, conjoined with a resolution to reform. See The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, ed. Louis J. Puhl (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1951).

23 Consider Thich Nhat Hanh's proposals for transforming attitudes and perceptions by cultivating an awareness of the suffering of others, in Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993), especially chapters five through ten.

24 Consult Tu Wei-ming's brilliant essay on "Confucianism" in Our Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma, (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 141-227.

25 I explore and assess these ideologies, briefly, in an essay on "Pragmatism, Budo, and the Spiritual Exercises: The Moral Equivalent of War," American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 20 (May 1999): 105-21, and more extensively, in a forthcoming book on Meditation and the Martial Arts.

26 Peirce, CP 5:493

27 Peirce's critique of the "method of authority" appears in his famous essay on "The Fixation of Belief', CP 5:379-81.

28 Peirce, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," CP 6:452-93; but see, especially, 6:454 and 6:458-467.

Michael Raposa / Lehigh University

Michael Raposa is Professor in the Department of Religion Studies at Lehigh. University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.- volver índice -

Marie Anne Mayeski. Women and their mothers: Rejecting and reclaiming the tradition of the saints. - volver índice -
Anglican Theological Review. Evanston. Spring 2001
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Volume: 83, Issue: 2, Pagination: 223-238, ISSN: 00033286

Subject Terms: Saints // Women // Traditions // Christianity

Abstract:

Without doubt, many women have experienced great difficulty when attempting to reclaim the stories of their spiritual mothers, the saints. However, Mayeski believes that the reclaiming of the stories of female ancestors is both possible and necessary, and she finds in the work of recent feminist scholars suggestions and methods that can prove helpful in the spiritual journey.
Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Spring 2001

Full Text:

Many women, both young and middle-aged, seem to live their lives as if their mothers were looking over their shoulders. "My mother would die," they say, "if she could see the way I keep my house." Or with rueful mock despair, they ask themselves how their mothers always managed to keep the house in order, put fresh cookies in the cookie jar, sort and fold the laundry, get a variety of children to an even wider variety of lessons and still get a hot balanced supper on the table promptly at 6:00 p.m. Even when they have chosen significantly different goals for themselves, women are often still haunted by a sense that they have failed to become the full women they perceive their mothers to have been.

Does this same sense of inadequacy haunt women as they pursue their inner and spiritual lives? Do the models of earlier Christian women, the saints and writers who were so prominent a part of religious education in an earlier time, haunt rather than inspire women? Perhaps our earthly mothers, in their desire to protect and nurture their daughters, did not sufficiently share their struggles and anxieties; in the midst of our own struggles, we find it difficult to identify with them. Most certainly, the hagiographical tradition did not usually provide stories of women who struggled and made compromises; the lives of the saints revealed only the great holiness that was finally achieved. And the holiness that they imaged was often narrow in its conception, seemingly more appropriate to an earlier age than ours, and so stereo-- typed as to leave no room for individual personality, gifts and challenges. Is that tradition beyond retrieval?

Without doubt, many women have experienced great difficulty when attempting to reclaim the stories of their spiritual mothers, the saints. Feminist writers have documented the ways in which the Christian tradition has inhibited authentic maturation and, therefore, genuine holiness in women. Joann Wolski Conn, for example, speaks of Christian teaching as "legitimating and even promoting restrictive heteronomy rather than mature autonomy for women,"1 though her own work successfully retrieves the insights and texts of women mystics. But many women have had the stories of their mothers in the faith interpreted for them; they have not always been encouraged to enter imaginatively into these stories from the perspective of their own experience. If this interpretation by others is allowed to stand, then the stories of the saints will, for the most part, be lost to women today. But I believe that the reclaiming of the stories of our female ancestors is both possible and necessary, and I find in the work of recent feminist scholars suggestions and methods that can prove helpful in the spiritual journey.

Perhaps the most important step in that retrieval is an understanding of the lives of women saints within a revised historical framework. A lack of such understanding has been one of the primary ways in which the lives of earlier Christian women have been distorted. The preponderance of women religious among the saints, for instance, has been used to support the teaching that religious life was objectively a superior vocation to that of marriage or of the single life. It was not generally understood that, in the limited range of options open to women throughout most of Christian history, religious life was the only choice that gave a measure of social as well as spiritual freedom. In convents, women had access to education, were somewhat free from day-to-day control by men, were not threatened by the physical dangers of childbearing, and could express their gifts for administration and ministry. Added to the religious and spiritual benefits of religious life, these human possibilities made the choice of consecrated virginity extremely attractive to women whose only other option was an arranged marriage.

Similarly, those aspects of a woman saint's life that made her an individual with a very particular set of challenges to overcome were often suppressed in order to highlight the way in which she fit the general pattern of holiness. Every founder of a religious congregation was praised for her love of God and neighbor, her service to the Church, and, especially, her obedience. It was rarely brought to the attention of young women that the first Daughters of Charity had willingly given up the legal status of religious life in order to engage in social tasks that had previously been outside the scope of women's activity. Nor was it common knowledge that Teresa of Avila had to do battle with the superiors of the Carmelite order so that she could enact the reform that was dear to her heart. In the retelling of her story, Clare of Assisi became a passive follower of Francis, just another nun committed to the cloister; her battle to live in the same absolute poverty as her friend and to serve the neighbor as freely as he did was overlooked.

Certain virtues considered appropriate to women were culled from the narratives of women saints, even if their historical lives had to be stretched to illustrate these virtues. Humility, silence and obedience were highlighted as the virtues pertinent to women; furthermore, these virtues were almost always explained in passive terms. Humility was distorted to mean "thinking little of oneself." Silence was praised over speaking out for the truth. Obedience almost always meant the noncritical acceptance of all authority; women were not often schooled in a prudent discrimination between levels of authority and were not reminded of the Christian moral principle that obedience to God must take precedence over obedience to human authority. Those who read the life of Catherine Benincasa were encouraged to imitate her extreme acts of self-denial; they were not exhorted to take their prophetic vision directly to the pope as she did. The life of Teresa of Avila was taught in a way that emphasized her cloistered silence and contemplative prayer; her sense of humor, her love of dancing, her forthright and confrontational manner with those who opposed her were not given much emphasis. Therese of Lisieux is remembered as the originator of "the little way," the quiet nun who let dirty water be splashed in her face without complaint; forgotten (or never understood) was her intellectual independence in asserting the tenderness and mercy of God in a Catholic world preoccupied with rigid religious rules.2

Rediscovering the Stories

Such a narrow interpretation of "feminine" virtues does not survive a genuine dialogue with the real stories and the actual texts of the women who have gone before us in the Christian tradition. One of the most powerful suggestions for the reclamation of such stories came to me from Elizabeth Stone, an associate professor of media studies at Fordham, The College at Lincoln Center. Writing in the alumnae/i magazine in Fall, 1990, Stone describes the way in which family stories are often reimagined, or actually reinvented, for present needs.3 Acknowledging that such stories exist primarily to shape in us those values held dear by our parents and grandparents, Stone asserts that they can be used in other ways, that they "allow us a special sort of creativity. They're like a secret locket with a hidden key that we can use in service of our own freedom" (p. 17). Stone has collected the stories that people reinvent for themselves and concludes from her study of them that the more distant the ancestor, the more pliable the stories are to the processes of the imagination. At the moment when a person needs to imagine a new future for herself, to break new ground and, perhaps, to break a few of the family's restrictions, an ancestor's story can provide a pattern for newness that still keeps one anchored in the family. As Stone puts it, "An ancestor who can be fashioned as a precursor to oneself is useful, because issues about family loyalty or betrayal can then be sidestepped" (p. 18).

Stone's work suggests that if ancestral stories are to prove helpful and liberating, it is the imagination that is necessary to unlock them. Often, it is not the story of the woman saint, but the way in which it has been interpreted that has burdened the woman who reads it with the weight of unrealistic and patriarchal expectations. The imagination is a potent force for breaking through those expectations to find what is surprising and yet perennially true. Various teachers of the spiritual life have explored its power. The teaching of Ignatius of Loyola is generally well known. An earlier teacher, the twelfth-century Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx, also believed that through the use of the imagination Scripture itself could yield a wide variety of possible meanings for both life and theology.4 In a treatise he wrote for his sister who had become a recluse, he suggested that she enter into the various scenes of the gospel story and become an actor in the drama taking place before the mind's eye. Such an imaginative exercise would allow her to expand the limitations of her own life and explore her capabilities for living in intimacy with Christ. If Aelred believed that such freedom could be taken with the biblical text, he would have understood the necessity of reimagining the stories of our ancestors, biological and spiritual. He would have agreed with Stone that "We can never know our ancestors after all-not well, anyway. Of necessity, they are our own homely inventions. Yet though we have largely imagined them [Aelred would have said, because we have largely imagined them], their magic is that they shed light on much that was previously unknown, dark and dangerous."5

The first step for women in reclaiming the stories of the saints and traditional models is, then, the way of the imagination. Sometimes this involves a kind of "deconstruction" of the story that removes the embroidery some devout narrator has added to emphasize the pattern of sanctity sanctioned by the Church or by social conventions. Then we must fill in the bare bones that remain; we must get into the skin, as it were, of the saint and reconstruct the tensions, the issues, the conflicts and achievements of those who have preceded us in the journey of faith. To do this, we need to be as close as possible to the real story.

Unlike the stories of our biological ancestors, which generally come to us through the oral tradition, the lives of the saints have been bequeathed to us through written texts. In the early centuries of the Church, Perpetua the martyr kept a prison journal that has endured, and the travel journal of Egeria the pilgrim is also extant. Throughout the Middle Ages, the lives of women saints were committed to parchment, most often by men and women who knew them personally or lived within the first century after them. Some few letters the saints wrote themselves have also survived. From the twelfth century onward, there are many autobiographies, contemporary biographies, letters and treatises to which we have access. No matter how laden the texts may be with patriarchal assumptions and the burden of earlier interpretations, they still provide a remarkable entree to the stories of the ancestors. To unlock those texts requires, first, the use of what Elisabeth Schassler Fiorenza calls "a hermeneutics of suspicion."6 The texts must be read with the assumption that they have been distorted by patriarchal attitudes and the broadest possible ranges of sources and information must be used for reconstructing them. If such a critical reading is successful, it may give access to the woman's authentic story and then the imagination can provide empathetic contact with that story, allowing it to be read, in Stone's words, "in the service of our freedom." A specific example can illuminate how the dialogue between imagination and historical context bears fruit for contemporary lives.

In the very first text written by a woman in the Christian tradition we meet the martyr Perpetua and gain remarkable access to her inner life.7 Perpetua was a Carthaginian martyr of the very early third century and, along with her maid Felicity, was long remembered in the Tridentine canon of the Roman Catholic Mass. In her description of her days in prison, she explores her ordeal. Perpetua records her struggle between the desire to please her father and the conviction that she must live up to her own conscience. Intertwined with this dilemma is Perpetua's sense of responsibility for her child and the guilt engendered when she realizes that her public witness to Christian truth will deprive her infant son of his mother. Finally, there is evidence of real fear, less of the physical pain to come than of her weakness in confronting it. It is the manner in which Perpetua deals with these tensions and the candor with which she narrates the stages of her growing autonomy that engage the interest of women today and create a sense of empathy with her. An understanding of historical context enables the reader to grasp the force of patriarchal obligations and how thoroughly Perpetua's defiance of civil law would affect her family, who stood to lose their estates and their standing in the community. It also illuminates other aspects of Perpetua's risk. The new faith was as yet marginal; Perpetua's adherence to it (the adherence of a catechumen) was not an obvious choice nor yet one that received social approbation. Her gender excluded her from serious consideration in her society and she lacked the cachet of virginity that would have increased her standing in the Christian community. All that we know about her historical context, therefore, sharpens the tensions that she faced.

Before Perpetua can be free to give herself in martyrdom, her emotional conflicts must be resolved. This happens primarily through a sequence of dreams or visions.8 In these, the choices that lie before her take flesh, as it were, through the power of the imagination, as do the Christian doctrines in which she is to find consolation. She envisions the ways in which the saving power of God will sustain her family; she imagines herself succeeding at the tremendous challenge of the arena. There is even some suggestion that she "sees" a kind of reconciliation with her father. After each of these visions, she "wakes up" refreshed and strengthened for the next stage of the ordeal, having been healed of anxieties that debilitated, even paralyzed, her. According to the women's history scholar Elizabeth Petroff, Perpetua uses her "visionary imagination to work through, comprehend, and transcend the grief and violence of the outer world.9 Through her imagination and its power to mediate the transcendent to her, she also touches the depths of her selfhood and finds the strength and desire to make a full and autonomous choice. Perpetua's maternal voice, as it comes to us through her text, does not speak words of warning but bids us imagine a new future while we reach out for God in the darkness, the struggle and even the violence of daily life. Her voice is demanding as mothers' voices usually are, but she demands only what she asks of herself: to be herself and thereby to be authentically another Christ. Perpetua is just one example of a woman saint waiting to be reclaimed by women who struggle toward human and spiritual maturity.

Perpetua's story occurs very early in the Christian tradition and there is a great deal to be said in favor of reclaiming these early stories. In the first place, they are generally less well known to us than the stories of, say, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, or Margaret Mary Alacoque. We can read their stories with fresh eyes and without the layers of earlier interpretations. More importantly, perhaps, the earliest centuries of the Church, though they were thoroughly patriarchal and even misogynist, were still somewhat fluid in social structure and doctrine, so that women who were persistent could assert themselves. As a general principle, the more chaotic the historical context, the more opportunity there is for people on the fringe to move toward the center and, from the fourth to the twelfth centuries, there was, if not precisely chaos, much instability in the world in which Christianity was being shaped. Then, too, following the principle laid down by Stone that the more distant the ancestors, the more open their stories are to reinvention, these early women saints' lives, often spare and suggestive, are very pliable to the workings of contemporary imagination.

Here, again, recent scholarship is helpful to spirituality. Good English translations, often with careful historical and critical introductions, are making these stories available. Sainted Women of the Dark Ages,10 for instance, offers the stories of eighteen women from the sixth to the seventh centuries in Gaul. These are the women who, in the words of the editor Jo Ann McNamara, "participated in Gaul's violent transformation" (p. 1) from pagan tribal domains to Christian kingdoms. Their struggle to control their own destinies, their efforts to shape political forces and ensure the rights of their families, their precarious survival in a violent world, all this finds familiar echoes in the lives of those who read with critical judgment, with empathy and with imagination.

Benedicta Ward has also reclaimed a group of unusual "mothers" in her book Harlots of the Desert,11 a collection of translations and interpretations of the lives of converted prostitutes in early Christian times. These are stories of struggle and tension, of light that flickers against a real darkness. Like the story of the Magdalene on which they are modeled, they dramatize the way in which great sin is often the starting point of a life of holiness. The power of these women's stories is enhanced by the fact that they were originally told by the desert monks and were preserved in monastic sources. The harlots become vivid examples of what monks needed to remember: "the reality and force of sexual desire in human experience" and the "clear realization that such desire has a true and central role in human life as desire for God .... (p. 102). The women in Ward's stories all teach the pious but often complacent monks to understand divine mercy, the fundamental truth of all spirituality. The stories of the harlots vividly demonstrate that wisdom, not innocence, is the essence of Christian holiness and, though innocence may lead to wisdom, it is not the only path. Their stories reclaimed, the harlots of the desert are mothers indeed, whose words can powerfully echo in the minds of their daughters today.

Many of the women whom we meet in ancient stories struggled to take responsibility for their lives, spoke out in defense of the faith within them, rejected false claims of civil and domestic authority, and suffered the inner turmoil that besets all who would be faithful to God's personal call. These holy women often transformed traditional feminine vocations into opportunities for ministerial action. In the late fifth century, Clotilde, an orphaned Catholic princess at a pagan court, was given in marriage to Clovis, the pagan king of the Franks. She used her arranged marriage as an opportunity to convert Clovis and, with him, his entire tribe; her example was followed by a line of Christian princesses who eventually brought the faith to the Visigoths and the Anglo-Saxon tribes of England.12 Not for these women a passive acceptance of their disposability in the political world. Denied the possibility of participating in the official ministry of the Church, they reinvented the early ministry of "wandering" preacher; they turned their obligation to marry in a foreign land into an opportunity for evangelizing pagan Europe.

A critical and imaginative reading of women's texts greatly expands the understanding of Christian virtues. In this context, the work of Julian of Norwich, an English anchorite of the fourteenth century, is a particularly refreshing discovery. Throughout a long life of prayer and the spiritual direction of others, Julian came to understand salvation quite differently from the way in which it was being presented to ordinary Christians in her day. The fourteenth century reeked of morbidity; people were obsessed with death and a frenetic attempt to escape it. She rejected the prevailing model of salvation that too often produced scrupulosity and extreme forms of passion piety (often involving self-mutilation). In her work, entitled Shewings,13 she proposed an alternative understanding of how the immense love of God, at work in Christ, overcomes sin and death to redeem all of material creation, which itself originated in love. Her expositions of God's work and the proper human response (culled from her visions but also from her work as spiritual director) are filled with metaphor and parable. Although we do not know whether she knew Aelred's text, she followed his prescriptions for fruitful meditation, entering into the biblical mysteries through the power of her imagination and conveying her wisdom in language that provokes the imaginative and affective response of later readers.


Julian struggled, in loyalty, to reconcile her own experience with the prevailing orthodoxy, but she refused to deny the experience and insight that were hers. In spite of the atmosphere of suspicion created by the Inquisition, she trusted in her own understanding of how God's love triumphs even over sin; she trusted in her own interpretation of scripture and of the doctrinal tradition. Concerned for the spiritual distress of others, she published her work, giving herself a public face when such publicity, especially for a woman who dared to do theology, represented a real threat.14 Her example expands our understanding of humility; far from diminishing herself, Julian affirms her experience and insight. She is a witness for women today who struggle to trust their own religious experience and to believe that they are called to share their wisdom with the whole Church. As an anchorite, she had chosen a life of silence and yet she teaches her daughters to speak out with honesty and courage.

As Julian significantly enlarges the ascetical notion of humility, so many saints can revise our understanding of obedience, helping us to reclaim the full and energetic meaning of its New Testament roots. If one reads the letters of Teresa of Avila,15 for instance, one encounters a vigorous and cunning administrator who had to negotiate moments of extreme crisis in the reform of Carmel. Her letters reveal that, though she acted always through the channels that religious authorities set up and observed all the legalities imposed, she took every avenue open to her to press for the full autonomy of Reformed Carmelite women. She was a daughter of her age and of chivalric Spain; her letters are filled with the flowery courtesies and elevated rhetoric that mark the style of the period. But a courteous style cannot hide her persistence and determination. The Reform had been unpopular with the majority of Carmelites from the beginning. They understood that the austerities and idealism of the Reformers were an implicit condemnation of their own accommodations with the Rule and had accused Teresa of "innovations"-a serious charge in the atmosphere created by the Protestant Reformation. Teresa had managed to keep her reform alive through the support of influential friends, but in 1577 she lost her strongest protector when the papal nuncio Odmaneto died. He was replaced by an unsympathetic Cardinal Sega who called Teresa "a restless gadabout," declared her disobedient and contumacious, and accused her of inventing evil doctrines. He condemned her for defying the prohibition of the Council of Trent by leaving her cloister and for disobeying the explicit command of St. Paul by teaching.

Frustrated by the restrictions imposed upon her, Teresa continues to act behind the scenes, writing endless letters of advice to the men who were friendly to her cause but who did not always act in ways she found appropriate or sufficiently effective. She agonizes that she is not free to do what she has told other people to do; she suggests that one of her advocates go directly to the King of Spain on her behalf. She berates her agents for not following her advice. When finally she achieves the desired separation of her Reformed Carmelites from the larger body, she is dismayed at the Rule that the male Carmelites draft for her nuns. Again she writes: the Rule they have given does not allow the nuns the necessary spiritual freedom to choose their own preachers and confessors. Details have been included about the kind of fabric to be used in nuns' habits and what kinds of food are forbidden on their table; additional prayer obligations have been imposed. Teresa resists all such patriarchal interference and is not above a subtle threat when she writes asking that her complaints be conveyed to the man designated as her superior:

If he were not to leave us free in this respect, we should have to see about getting sanction from Rome, for I realize the great importance of such freedom to the sisters' happiness, as well as the dreadful unhappiness that arises in other convents where there are too many restrictions in spiritual things. A soul restricted in such a way cannot render effective service to God... (Letter 351, February 21, 1581, to Jeronimo Gracian).

This is the obedience of one who will not accept anything less from her earthly superiors than acquiescence to the will of God as she has come to understand it through prayer and practical experience. To that will she is herself tirelessly committed and, although she was ever respectful in manner, she was fierce in protecting the spiritual freedom of women.

Reclaiming Mary as Mother

If we speak of all the women saints as our "mothers" in the faith, certainly Mary has functioned most obviously and most consistently as the Christian maternal image par excellence. To reclaim her story is both more important and more difficult because her story has been subject to extensive manipulation by the tradition at all its stages. Without much historical or scriptural foundation, Christian imagination has been free to turn Mary into a variety of images and models. Although devotion to Mary began with restrained affirmations of her unique relationship to Christ, it was not long before the figure of Mary was turned into the model of particular virtues and of particular states of life, often at variance with even the little historical information known. Aelred of Rievaulx, for example, in his homilies for Marian feasts, shows her as the perfect model of the monk. But most often she became the image of perfect womanhood, on a pedestal and beyond the tensions and violence of daily life, the quintessential feminine: virginal yet generative, silent and humble. This is the image of Mary that has most come under attack by contemporary feminists. Marina Warner in Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary,16 though she misreads some of the historical evidence, speaks for those who reject this interpretation of Mary, and the popularity of her book testifies to the extent of distaste for it.

Yet, Mary will not go away. Something about her story continues to provoke Catholic attention and to invite reinvention. Never was this more publicly evident than on December 30, 1991, when Mary made the cover of Time magazine. The accompanying story (pp. 62-65) was entitled "Handmaid or Feminist?" and explored the wide range of interpretations of Mary given by today's Christians. Noting that "a grassroots revival of faith in the Virgin is taking place worldwide," the author, Richard N. Ostling, explored the increased number of "claimed sightings of the Virgin," the papal praise of Mary for "her submissiveness" and the revisionist views of Mary as "an active heroine" and "a crusader for social justice." The wide range of interpretations explored by Time gives further support to Elizabeth Stone's principle that the more distant from us our ancestors are, the greater the freedom and variety with which we reinvent them!

This diversity and freedom mark the work of scholars as well. Even while Vatican Council II was debating the position of Mary in official Catholic theology, two of the major conciliar theologians published careful analyses of orthodox Marian teaching. In "Mary and the Apostolate,"17 Karl Rahner culled the patristic sources to explore the theme of Mary as a model for apostolic Christians and for pastoral practice. Committed to a sacramental understanding of salvation, Edward Schillebeeckx saw Mary as the "universal partner" of all those engaged in appropriating the salvific work of Christ.18 Recent theologians, especially those who write from a liberationist perspective, have reflected on the actual experience of Christians. For Gustavo Gutierrez in The God of Life,19 for example, there are two starting points of Marian theology: the devotion to Mary as among the Latin American poor and the existential situation of women as the "doubly oppressed." Gutierrez believes that Mary discloses the true historical situation of women as well as the New Testament's prophetic subversion of patriarchal manipulation. An even more trenchant critique of Mariology as the exaltation of the "eternal feminine" is to be found in the writings of Rosemary Radford Ruether. In Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology,20 Ruether indicts the tradition of Marian teaching which "functions ... primarily to reflect and express the ideology of the patriarchal feminine" (p. 149). In contrast, Ruether promotes Mary as the instrument of God's liberating revolution in history, with political and economic implications for the division of society into rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed, male and female. Ruether sees the task of liberating women as the test case of the Church's fidelity to its own identity. These contemporary interpretations of the person and theology of Mary demonstrate clearly both the rejection and the reclamation of the mother-image that is the focus of this essay.

While the work of these theologians is helpful to spirituality, there is another, more direct, way in which the reality of Mary as mother is being reclaimed by women today-the way of action. How many times have women realized that, although they may have rejected their mother's advice and made very different choices, they nonetheless find themselves acting out their mothers' values, sometimes even the concrete patterns of their mothers' lives? Often enough it is in times of crisis that they discover strengths and commitments deep within themselves that they later recognize as having been planted by the maternal influence; often, such experiences lead the daughter to appreciate anew the real character of the mother she had not previously understood fully. Something similar is, I believe, going on around us in the lives of mothers today who, like Mary at the foot of the cross, face the sudden and malicious murders of their children. In the Gospel of John, we read of Mary's remarkable response to her son's execution, accepting another in the place of her dying son. In obedience to the explicit command of the Lord, Mary takes into her maternal care one who is outside the bonds of blood but her child in the faith. This is the pattern that I find recurring in the lives of courageous Christian women who discover, in the midst of death, a strength and commitment to life possible only through grace.

One of my colleagues, Professor Graciela Limon, has written a novel based on her experience with Hispanic women in East Los Angeles, about a mother of El Salvador. In the novel, entitled In Search of Bernabe,21 the heroine is Luz Delcano, the mother of two sons; one son has become a soldier in the hated National Guard, the other son "disappears." Hearing rumors that her second son may have escaped to Los Angeles, the mother makes the difficult trek to the north and, losing herself in the large community of the undocumented, searches for her son, Bernabe. After a series of adventures, she is discovered by the immigration service and deported to Tijuana where she links up with a young woman coyote, Petra Traslavina, who is struggling to help others get to California. Together they minister to each other and to others until, having heard yet another rumor, the mother returns to El Salvador. There she finds her son at last, slaughtered and abandoned on the trash heap of the disappeared called Mt. El Playon. As Limon narrates the scene of the reunion, the mother picks up the broken body of her son and mourns over it with great pathos. Limon, a Catholic, acknowledges that the image of Mary as Pieta informed her description of the mourning scene, but, more powerfully to me at least, it is subsequent events that make Luz Delcano's story a reclamation of the image of Mary. Having buried her son right there on Mt. El Playon, Luz returns to the young coyote, taking another child as her own and continuing her maternal role in the life of someone joined to her by faith and commitment rather than by blood. In Limon's novel, the biblical story of Rachel weeping for her children is explicitly recalled, but there are echoes, too, of the Johannine crucifixion scene; Mary is given a new "son" by the one she loses and, as John tells us, from that day they took each other as their own.

Admittedly, this is fiction, but the story Limon narrates is culled from her experience with real Hispanic women in East Los Angeles and the pattern she describes of the mother of a slaughtered son is repeated endlessly. In Laws of Heaven22 the journalist Michael Gallagher tells the story of Marietta Jaeger whose daughter Susie had been kidnapped and brutally killed. During the year that her daughter is missing, Jaeger discovers that the way out of her pain is through forgiveness. Having been able, through an extraordinary chain of events, to face her daughter's murderer and forgive him, she becomes active against capital punishment. Through the death of her child, she finds a way to work for the life of other people's children. Having stood, like Mary, at the foot of a horrific cross, she has accepted other children into her care. Mothers in South Central Los Angeles, who have lost their sons and daughters to gang violence and random shootings, have organized themselves, in a variety of ways, to stop the violence and save other children. Some have formed a group called Mothers Against Gang Violence to begin reclaiming their streets and neighborhoods. One has opened a storefront cultural center where AfricanAmerican children can learn the riches of their culture and receive tutoring and support in their efforts to stay alive and to live well. All of these women, consciously or not, have reclaimed by their actions the image of Mary, the sorrowful mother of God, the woman of faith committed to the lives of the vulnerable.

The task of reclaiming the tradition of our mothers in the faith is at once a joyful and a painful task. It is painful insofar as it requires us to put aside or grow beyond our vaunted independence and autonomy and to understand anew how much of our lives are indeed given. As we reread the stories of our maternal ancestors with new eyes and with empathic imaginations, we will discover their sufferings and sometimes be forced to acknowledge that their lives were irremediably narrowed and truncated. We will find in them, whatever their successes, some real failures; we will suffer anew as we face the possibility that our own deepest goals and desires may elude us in the end, through no fault of our own. But ultimately it is a joyful task. As we discover, reinvent and reclaim our mothers' stories, through imagination, historical study, or in action, we will tap into new resources for our own spiritual growth. In these stories, we will learn new ways of courage, cunning and commitment; we will find women not so different from us, whatever their social or historical context. The spiritual journey is a personal one, to be sure, but it need not be taken in isolation. Most women have found companions on that journey and have been pleasantly surprised to find that those who join them in the search for the transforming experience of God's saving presence come from every denomination, undeterred from companionship by doctrinal differences. By reclaiming the tradition of the saintly mothers, these women can also discover a companionship that reaches far back in time. They will be given access to new roads to God by the pathfinders who followed their own lights and their own experience. At the very least, they will be given the comfort of little lights, flickering ahead of them, on what is often a journey through darkness.

1 "Women's Spirituality: Restriction and Reconstruction" in Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development, ed. by Joann Wolski Conn (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 12.

2 See Joann Wolski Conn, "Therese of Lisieux from a Feminist Perspective," in Conn (ed.), Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development, pp. 317-- 325.

3 Elizabeth Stone, "Family Stories: Why they Matter" in Fordham 23, 2 (Fall, 1990), pp. 17-19.

4 See Marie Anne Mayeski, "A Twelfth-Century View of the Imagination: Aelred of Rievaulx," in Noble Piety and Reformed Monasticism, Cistercian Studies Series: 65, ed. by E. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1981), pp. 123-- 129.

5 Stone, P. 19.

6 Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1990), pp. 56 ff.

7 See Marie Anne Mayeski, Women: Models of Liberation (Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed & Ward, 1988), pp. 1-30.

8 The Latin text reads in each case "ostensum est mihi hoc," though the words " visio" or "visiones" are used elsewhere in the text. See Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, n.d.), pp. 106-131. English translators have variously used "dream" or "vision" to translate the phrase.

9 Medieval Women's Visionary Literature, ed. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 63.

10 Edited and translated by Jo Ann McNamara and John E. Halberg, with E. Gordon Whatley (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992).

11 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications Inc., 1987).

12 Jo Ann McNamara, "Living Sermons: Consecrated Women and the Conversion of Gaul," in Peaceweavers, Cistercian Studies Series, 72, Lillian Thomas Shank and John A. Nichols, eds. (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications Inc, 1987), pp. 19-37. See also Bede, Historic Ecclesiastica I, 25 and Richard E. Sullivan, "The Papacy and Missionary Activity in the Early Middle Ages," Medieval Studies 17 (1955), pp. 46-106.

13 There are several editions of Julian's work available. The most helpful is that translated and edited by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A. and James Walsh, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).

14 See Joan M. Nuth, Wisdom's Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Nor:Lich (New York: Crossroad, 1991) and Mayeski, Women: Models of Liberation, pp. 82-108.

15 The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus (3 vols.), trans. and ed. by E. Allison Peers (Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1950).

16 New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

17 In The Christian Commitment, Cecily Hastings, trans. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), pp. 114-135. Rahner also published a full-length study entitled Mary, Mother of the Lord, W J. O'Hara, trans. (Frieburg: Herder, 1962).

18 Mary, Mother of the Redemption. Published in Holland in 1954, it was translated by N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964).

19 Matthew J. O'Connell, trans. (New York: Orbis Books, 1991), esp. pp. 164-186.

20 Boston: Beacon Press, 1983, pp. 139-158.

21 Houston: University of Houston Press, 1993.

22 New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992, pp. 226-243.

Marie Anne Mayeski is Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

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