This week, a book is being published that features an array of authors writing about how their relationship to certain saints helps them navigate the Catholic Church and its crises today. The book is titled Not Less Than Everything: Catholic Writers on Heroes of Conscience, from Joan of Arc to Oscar Romero (HarperCollins, 2013), and is edited by Catherine Wolff.

In it, you will find chapters by renowned theologians Lisa Sowle Cahill (on Mary Magdelene) and Charles Curran (on Bernard Haering), respected Catholic public intellectuals like Joan Chittister (on Hildegard von Bingen) and Cathleen Kaveny (Mother Mary MacKillop), and some very well-known Catholic writers, like Mary Gordon (on Simone Weil), James Carroll (Isaac Hecker), and Colm Toibin (Gerard Manley Hopkins).

My chapter in the collection is on Ignatius of Loyola, and is titled “Curated Free-Fall.” Here is the opening of my essay:

*

Some twenty years ago, in Kansas City, Missouri, I was on a religious quest in young adulthood, trying to reconnect with the Catholicism of my youth while tasting other religious fruits. The beginning of my attempt to reconstruct my faith was playing in a Christian rock band sponsored by a Pentecostal church. In that band, the women outnumbered the men, and as I look back, women were crucial traveling companions on my quest, although I never dated Catholics. Protestants, Jews, agnostics, atheists, yes. A Jewish girlfriend challenged me that I knew nothing about Jesus if I had not been to Israel and studied the Torah. So I traveled to Israel, hoping that getting close to the monotheistic “source” would help me figure out what was true about religion as much as which religion was true. Two other girlfriends took me to two different Southern Baptist churches (this was Missouri, remember), and I started to learn about the Bible and a personal Jesus. Just for good measure, my most influential professors in college were robust atheists. For a suburban Catholic, this was a lot of re-sorting in just a few years. A new stage of my religious education was underway, but I was confused about where this left my Catholicism.

The religious part of my life has for a long time been complemented by the rock and roll part. The conclusion of my childhood (more…)

Recently, I finished writing a chapter on Ignatius of Loyola for a forthcoming book that focuses on the importance of the saints in the context of the Catholic Church in crisis. (The book is edited by Catherine Wolff and is called Not Less Than Everything: Catholic Writers on Heroes of Conscience (HarperCollins, 2013)).

While writing this chapter, I was confronted again with the ways in which Ignatius’ old life survived, after his “conversion,” in his new life. Often, stories of conversion emphasize the discontinuities between old ways and new ways. In the story of Ignatius, 16th century Basque mystic and founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), some contemporary research makes us more attentive to the continuities.

One of those continuities is his taste for combat. Early in his life, he is a courageous and sometimes foolish fighter, frequently eager to vanquish foes with force. Once he dedicates his life to Christ, that zeal for weaponry does not die but is funneled differently. He takes to characterizing Christian life as a battle of the forces of Christ against the forces of Satan, and he continued to struggle against his own impulses to command and defeat others. This is no simple criticism of Ignatius but rather an attempt to contribute to a reframing of what his conversion was about. (A rethinking of conversion is on the way on many fronts in contemporary theology.)

I had Ignatius’ famous story in mind as I recently listened again to Ace Frehley’s “Rock Soldiers,” in which Frehley addresses his fans, from the far side of a “conversion,” as soldiers for rock and roll. Frehley was a guitarist for KISS who took up a solo career in the 1980s and had a hit with this tune in 1987. In “Rock Soldiers,” Frehley tells the apparently autobiographical story of a car accident he had in the early 1980s. The path to the accident is marked by an internal battle about how (and even, like Ignatius at one point, whether) to live: He goes speeding down the road “With a trooper in my mirror, and Satan on my right.” Here is the video:

It is a conversion story (“my only high was just a lie / and now I’m glad I saw”), replete with an explicit reference to beating the devil. Its arc is similar to that of Ignatius and thousands of other such stories in and out of religion: dissolute young adulthood,

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I am in Amsterdam for the biennial meeting of the International Academy of Practical Theology (IAPT), a gathering of more than a hundred scholars of practical theology from around the world.

Whatever else one thinks of Amsterdam, its notoriety as a tolerant arena for the play of desires — intellectual, culinary, herbal, sexual — is well-established. Indeed, the theme for the IAPT this year is “City of Desires: A Place for God?” Plenary addresses and numerous conference papers will explore the theme of desire from theological perspectives, especially rooting the questions in everyday urban life and pastoral work. A draft conference book is here; abstracts for many of the papers are here.

After falling for the musical “Passing Strange” a few years ago, I cannot think of Amsterdam, desire and theology without reference to it. (Earlier, I wrote three posts on the musical: one, two, three.) In these two clips you can see the ”pilgrim” discovering Amsterdam, and receiving — and singing in — a set of “secular” keys to the kingdom. Speaking of “the pilgrim,” the rock musical “Passing Strange” is one way to approach, in contemporary Western society, the significance of Ignatius Loyola’s injunction, throughout the sixteenth century manual called the Spiritual Exercises, to “ask for what I desire.” One need not equate desire with God to trust a loving attention to desire and its befriending as a path to God.

This will be my third biennial, having attended Berlin (2007) and Chicago (2009), and on the flight over from New York, I noticed the same questions arising in me as before the last two biennials: How do I explain to international colleagues what practical theology is for me? On the surface, a commitment to practice might seem to join all practical theologians, but the second one steps into international

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I’ve found that the advantage of changing musical technologies as an adult is an ability to appreciate what is being lost and gained, and how the patterns of life get rearranged in the process. And because I anticipate that this will happen, I’m reluctant to make the change. Perhaps also because my bent toward life is more meditative and slow-turning rather than readily adaptable. The way I inhabit the rock world in particular and everyday life in general is colored by my taste for the monastic life. During a period in my life when I was more free to go away on retreats on a regular basis, I often chose Benedictine monasteries. The vow of stability speaks to something about finding what poet Mary Gordon describes as the call “announcing your place in the family of things,” the consolation of consolations, a place in this world. (Christian rock association: remember this tune from Michael W. Smith? It deserves a separate entry here, and it shall have one.)

The Dionysian spirituality in which I have been schooled from Foucault and Certeau to Van Halen

to Lacuna Coil

has somehow found a resonance with the Benedictine zest for plantedness.

(And I mean more than the Benedictine often “planted” backstage at rock shows.)

Perhaps this particular way of holding Socratic atoposness in a through-line of releasement, that I call the house of dispossession, this is one reason that Ignatius Loyola and his more radical interpreters have been of interest to me over the last fourteen years in which I’ve been involved in Jesuit higher education.

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