Questing for Understanding: Persons, Places, Passions

By David B. Burrell

Trying to articulate the ways in which one's life meshes with one's own time can be perilous, yet friends have encouraged me to do just that. Nevertheless, for one oriented to serving others as teacher and mentor in a context of faith, writing about oneself seems unnatural. Yet the "self" we have been given to share embodies many others as well. So many of the encounters narrated here will open into friendships. Moreover, what spices those encounters are the places and passions they embody, so the story that emerges is hardly my own. Different places often unveiled different faith communities, each of which has altered, if not transformed, the "self" narrated here. In that respect, and in many others, my story is not mine but that of the times our generation has inhabited. Finally, it has been my religious community of Holy Cross that made these multiple transformations possible, so it is only fitting to dedicate the work to that community and the rich exchanges it continues to effect among women and men.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781621894094

David B. Burrell

David B. Burrell, CSC, Hesburgh Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame, has served as Professor of Comparative Theology at Tangaza College, Nairobi. His most recent work is Towards a Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology (2011).

Book preview

Questing for Understanding

Persons, Places, Passions

David B. Burrell, CSC

QUESTING FOR UNDERSTANDING

Persons, Places, Passions

Copyright © 2012 David B. Burrell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible with Revised New Testament © 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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ISBN 13: 978-1-61097-686-2

EISBN 13: 978-1-62189-409-4

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Burrell, David B.

Questing for understanding : persons, places, passions / David B. Burrell.

viii + 122 p. ; 23 cm. —Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 13: 978-1-61097-686-2

1. Burrell, David B. 2. Theologians­—United States—Biography. I. Title.

BX4827.B90 P45 2012

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

These reflections, which owe so much to so many

and notably to my religious community,

are best dedicated to

Elena Malits, CSC,

in gratitude for her accompaniment

Encourage one another daily . . . to become partners of Christ, holding the beginning of the reality firm until the end.

Hebrews 3:13–14, NAB

Exhort one another every day . . . For we have become partners of Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end.

Hebrews 3:13–14, NRSV

Introduction

Orientations—Persons, Places, Passions

Following the encouragement of others, I offer this extended reflection on the life and times that have been mine. I hesitated to do so for some time, since that is not the sort of thing those of us called to serve others ever intended to do. Yet we are enjoined—thank God and the rule of the Congregation of Holy Cross—to set aside time each year for assessing our personal encounter with that God, so passing the three-quarter century mark on the first of March 2008 alerted me to the upheavals that have attended a life that long, so emboldened me to try to articulate them. I have always been chary of people who composed their story at a relatively early age, for only God knows what might ensue for them—in sh’Allah! The same could be true at seventy-five years, of course, but that mark has a way of bringing a recollected self to the fore. Yet while Augustine alerted us to the perils of such a venture, he also showed us how using what one recollects to praise God can be salutary for all. The very process of recollecting surfaces the trickster in us all, to remind us what tenuous and distorting access we have to ourselves: others will ever know us far better than we can know ourselves! So I have let these recollections emerge over time, returning to the specific places that have helped define me, amending the account each time. In that sense, reflections of this sort never end until we submit them to an editor; they remain revisable, a task that friends may continue after their publication.

So each of us becomes what mathematicians call a point of accumulation, bringing the cross-currents of our times to a focus by the way we respond to them, appropriating them as we suffer them. Those privy to my annual Christmas letters over the decade at Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem have become acutely aware of the transformation effected by suffering through the apparently intractable (if simply resolvable) conflict in the Holy Land. My own passage from endemic American optimism to an explicitly theological hope has been a painful one, brought about by the longsuffering of all who taught me to lay down the optimist’s idiom of coping to suffer with them. If Tantur offers the most salient locale, the role it has played led me to identify my own passage in terms of places and people rather than simple chronology. Let us hope that pattern of people and places might help others profit from these reflections as well, for there can be no other point to composing them.

I am a lover, blessed from birth, it seems, by a propensity to love whatever I am engaged in. So whatever others may have called accomplishments were less goals sought than emergent passions forged by each engagement. In the narrative that follows I try to give due expression to this extraordinary gift. For such a propensity may be regarded as purely temperamental, which Aristotle called natural virtue since it requires little or no effort. In that vein, some have dubbed it pathological optimism, but there is more to it: a gifted sense to discern what is worthy of love from what is not. Probably the fruit of a healthy family formation, it can hardly be that natural after all.

Yet this discerning sense is quite spontaneous, reflected in persons and endeavors to which I have been attracted. So we can only be grateful for something eluding explanation yet which has never ceased to keep me from self-destructing, as misjudgments in eros would invariably surface before capturing me. For as little as this can be accounted for, we might as well speak of a guardian angel, as examples of caring cumulate, in circumstances small and great. I have learned from Arab friends—Christian or Muslim—to simply exclaim, Alhamdulillah!: May God be praised! What else is there to say? As our Holy Cross ordination class celebrated fifty years of priesthood in 2010, I found myself parrying American expressions of congratulations by recalling that fifty years can hardly be regarded as an accomplishment; all is gift: Alhamdulillah!

Diverse ways of being a lover have emerged over time, as I learned to take heart from the valedictory observation of John of the Cross: At the evening of our lives we shall be judged on love—a lapidary summation of Matthew 25. The innate propensity to love anything in which I have been engaged ineluctably led to becoming an inveterate achiever, however, so the psyche was forced to administer the corrective of falling in love. As we shall see, it was the gentle yet insistent therapy of a Jungian guide, Helen Luke, which led me to listen to the psyche to help discern among competing loves. So this narrative will monitor competing loves, attempting to articulate how each contributes to fashioning an ever more discerning lover, through one miscue after another, yet leading forward in sinuous ways: Alhamdulillah! Yet the achiever will not die, evidenced in a burning desire to seek the most notable promontory, to climb the highest mountain. So when obvious promontories were unavailable, others would be substituted. When asked at a relatively young age (thirty-eight) to chair the Department of Theology at Notre Dame, I also accepted a Routledge contract to undertake a contemporary study of Thomas Aquinas (in their Arguments of the Philosophers series), conscious of the need to keep honing habits of intellectual inquiry. These developed in undergraduate life at Notre Dame and were then fostered by our mentor in Rome, Bernard Lonergan, whom I tried to thank by putting his groundbreaking set of articles on word in Aquinas into book format, the result being Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (1967). (His letter of appreciation noted more than a few typos!)

We shall explore the richness of the learning period afforded university administration in due time, but in retrospect the most telling countercurrent to administrative prowess was less the projected study of Aquinas as it was the spiritual mentorship of Helen Luke, whose community of Apple Farm (in Three Rivers, Michigan) will figure as a signal station among those stations in the inner journey that this itinerary singles out to articulate and celebrate. Yet engaging in university administration at one level can easily anticipate further levels to come, and in my case that prospect could easily titillate an achieving self by the prospect of becoming president of Notre Dame, a position reserved for members of the Congregation of Holy Cross. Three of us contemporaries were coming to be regarded (in the seventies) as promising candidates. Yet this proved less a distraction from administrative or intellectual work than it was an albatross, yet one from which events would liberate me to aspire to different heights. At the same time, however, generous and stimulating colleagues helped me maintain my focus on the tasks at hand, including Ernan McMullin, Stan Hauerwas, Joe Blenkinsopp, Robert Wilken, John Howard Yoder, among others, of whom more later. Finally, in following this story as it unfolds, the narrative will endeavor to honor Carl Jung’s observation that the story of our lives will always be the story of our times.

Yet sensitivity to those times can be enhanced or blocked by the places we inhabit, so (for example) preoccupation with the stimulation of study in Rome in the late fifties effectively insulated me from world-shaping events in Hungary at the same time. So close yet so far! The unyielding linkage between place and time would lead me to seek to be in the right place at the right time, giving the impression of a peripatetic life when travel became more feasible. I have been unable to resist calls to be in what seemed to be the right place at the right time, so these opportunities invariably expanded my appreciation of the human dimension of the events taking place. Invariably these displacements have nourished an intellectual desire better to understand, using them to learn the language of the place, the better to meet people whose lives displayed what that place had to teach. As a result, I am a poor tourist, bored looking at the outside of monumental buildings, yearning rather to be invited into a family for tea. So I am grateful that I can now enjoy a number of destinations, whose call keeps me from needing to travel elsewhere. I relish sharing those persons and places again and again.

Yet while Jung never ceases to remind us that the story of our lives will always be the story of our times, he insisted as well that it remains our task to discover how that is the case, and how that story renders people and places significant. So a personal story can never be one’s own. At the outset of a new phase of life, in service to the Holy Cross district of East Africa, it seemed fitting to follow the suggestion of many friends to compose my story. Family comes first and looms large in setting out to trace the genealogy of becoming the lover I have become. Reared ecumenically by an English Catholic mother and a Scottish Presbyterian father, whose mother had had him baptized Anglican in Montana, my life was tracked by these realities, but in a different key from most American Catholics, whose ecclesial affiliations were often ethnic: Irish, Italian, German, or Irish-Italian (Itralian). Ours was less dramatic, more Anglo-Saxon, yet on arriving in Rome to study theology in 1956 at twenty-three, I would realize how uptight and Waspish were my sensibilities, though now mysteriously ripe for immersion in Latin culture. As students at the University of Notre Dame, some of us had already been primed by the witness of a Holy Cross priest, born in Germany, who had studied theology in France in the thirties, and who had alerted us to intercultural exposure. The following four years would also prepare us for the Second Vatican Council, beginning five years later, whose fresh air we welcomed, for it confirmed the superior education we received at the Gregorian in the late fifties. In the summer of 1958, I would make final vows in the Congregation of Holy Cross in the German-speaking Südtirol region of Italy, only to be ordained to the priesthood in Rome a year and half later, with my parents as witnesses.

Upon completing undergraduate studies at Notre Dame I had drifted into the Congregation nearly by default. Increasingly haunted by the thought that the Lord might want me to serve God’s people as a priest, I had relished the intellectual milieu of the newfound General Program of Liberal Studies, modeled on the fabled College of the University of Chicago. Yet in the end I was moved mysteriously to turn down two fellowships for graduate study in Europe to cast my lot with Holy Cross, keenly sensing that it was now or never to follow up the nagging thought of serving God as a priest. (No telling whom I might meet in Europe!) The witness of Holy Cross priests at Notre Dame had hardly proved stellar to us, but I followed the witness of the German-American mentor just mentioned, Louis J. Putz, CSC. He had always exhibited gratitude to a community that allowed him to be and to act as unusually and creatively as he did. Knowing how to stroke a young man’s ego, he gently reminded me, You have learned a lot at Notre Dame! I probably also needed to distinguish myself from the Saint Louis family of my mother, replete with Jesuits, as well as a few experiences with American Dominicans, who invariably presented themselves as possessing the truth, which portended a very dull life.

Serendipitously, I was before long to find a family in Holy Cross, whose nineteenth-century founder, Basil Moreau, intended it to be a microcosm of church: male and female, lay and clerical. I soon came to feel that he masked the radicality of this prospect even from himself by the pious image of the holy family—priests as Jesus, sisters as Mary, and brothers as Joseph. Yet it proved a pregnant image as well. In the 1850s Rome did not permit a canonical mix of men and women, yet as the church has become sensitized to the need always to present a male and female face, our familial structure came gradually to fulfillment, especially in Asia, Africa, and South America. In North America, the astounding success of religious communities engaged in education and health care in the early twentieth century certainly helped Catholics make an imprint in a resolutely Protestant society, yet these very works tended as well to segregate men from women into single-sex institutions. A