There is a saying attributed to Saint Francis that I have heard frequently in more than three decades as a non-Catholic professor in Catholic higher education: Preach the Gospel—use words if necessary. If you google the statement, the items at the top of the search results are mostly attempts to establish that despite the popularity of the attribution, Francis never said this. Not only did he not say it, some deniers argue, it would be misleading and problematic if he had said it. “It is impossible to preach without words. The Gospel is inherently verbal.” Of course, it is impossible to know from a distance of eight centuries whether Francis ever suggested that preaching is more about how you live than what you say—but it certainly is compatible with many things that we know he did say. Quoting a good friend and mentor from my early years of teaching, “if he didn’t say it, he should have.”
I was taught from a very early age that “real” Christians are enthusiastic about their faith; a natural expression of this enthusiasm is to tell other people about it. “Enthusiasm” comes from two Greek words that mean “God in you” or “infused with the divine.” During the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries in this country, “enthusiasm” in a religious sense meant speaking in tongues, being “slain in the spirit,” and any number of other unusual indications that God was in the house. In many corners of religious activity, that still holds true.
In the religious world of my youth, we called telling other people about our faith “witnessing,” letting others know that, among other things, they would be going to hell if they did not invite Jesus into their hearts as their personal Lord and Savior. Witnessing was a requirement, whether the witnessed wanted to hear about our enthusiasm or not. Our youth group would occasionally spend a Saturday morning distributing pamphlets and tracts containing our particular version of Christianity’s propaganda either in front of the grocery store downtown or in people’s mailboxes. I always opted for mailbox duty and often left my entire wad of pamphlets in the first mailbox.
I have always attributed my constitutional resistance to and hatred of witnessing to my extreme introversion—and I’m sure that played a big part in it. But over the years I have come to believe that not only is aggressive, in-your-face religion anathema to introverts, but it is also anathema to Christianity itself. Years ago, I came across the following from Annie Dillard in Holy the Firm—she could have been describing the church I grew up in.
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? . . . On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? . . . The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
Tell me about it. In My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman observes that “the casual way that American Christians have of talking about God is not simply dispiriting, but is, for some sensibilities, actively destructive. There are times when silence is not only the highest, but the only possible, piety.” Perhaps this is what Saint Francis meant when, in the saying he never said, he advised believers to preach with their lives and rely on words as the last resort. Worth remembering the next time you are bitten by the witnessing bug.
Tomáš Halik’s Patience with God was the final text in my Faith and Doubt colloquium last srping, recommended by my teaching partner (who is a Dominican priest in the Political Science department). Halik is a Czech Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian, ordained in the “underground” Catholic church while Czechoslovakia was still under the thumb of the former Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, he was first confused, then appalled the first time he saw a mega-Christian evangelist on American television.
[I hoped] for a long time that it was just a comedy program caricaturing religion. I didn’t want to believe that someone could seriously believe that it is possible to talk about God with such vulgar matter-of-factness and propagate the Gospel as if it were some reliable brand of automobile.
Halik asks early on in his book what it takes to bring someone closer to Christ, and therefore to God. He worries that “it isn’t quite as easy as certain enthusiastic Christians believe,” simply because “truth is too fragile to be chanted on the street.”
I spent many years of my adult life hesitant to call myself a Christian in public for a number of reasons, not the least being that in our culture the word “Christian” often means something like the dog-and-pony show that Tomáš Halik watched on television, or worse, white MAGA nationalism. It wasn’t until a transformational sabbatical semester over a decade ago that I began making my faith public—this blog has been the primary vehicle for my “coming out party.”
As friends and colleagues on campus began to read my blog and listened to a couple of post-sabbatical presentations I made on campus, their reactions were interesting. “I had no idea about your background and faith,” several said, “but given what I know about you from the past many years, it makes perfect sense.” Perhaps I had been living out the advice that Saint Francis never gave—my life with my colleagues over the previous fifteen years or so was congruent with the Christian words I was now writing and saying.
Christian Wiman writes that “Nothing kills credibility like excessive enthusiasm. Nothing poisons truth so quickly as an assurance that one has found it.” Certainty is, after all, the opposite of faith. If you are inclined to “witness,” remember that you are not selling a car. You are drawing attention to a way of life.
SCBH
ISTINA JE PREVIŠE KRHKA DA BI SE UZVIKIVALA NA ULICI
Postoji izreka koja se pripisuje Svetom Franji, a koju sam često čuo tokom više od tri decenije rada kao ne-katolik u katoličkom visokom obrazovanju: Propovijedaj jevanđelje — koristi riječi ako je neophodno. Ako ukucate ovu izjavu na Guglu, većina rezultata su pokušaji da se utvrdi da, uprkos popularnosti te tvrdnje, Franjo to zapravo nikada nije rekao. Neki čak tvrde da ne samo da to nije rekao, nego bi bilo problematično i pogrešno da jeste. „Nemoguće je propovijedati bez riječi. Jevanđelje je po svojoj prirodi verbalno.” Naravno, nemoguće je s osam vjekova distance znati da li je Franjo ikada sugerisao da je propovijedanje više način života nego ono što izgovaramo — ali to svakako jeste u skladu s mnogim stvarima za koje znamo da ih je zaista rekao. Kako je govorio jedan moj dobar prijatelj i mentor iz ranih nastavničkih dana: „Ako to nije rekao, trebalo je da kaže.”
Od najranijeg djetinjstva učili su me da su „pravi” hrišćani entuzijastični u svojoj vjeri; prirodan izraz tog entuzijazma jeste da o tome govore s drugima. „Entuzijazam” potiče od dvije grčke riječi koje znače „Bog u tebi” ili „prožet božanskim”. Tokom „Velikih probuđenja” u 18. i 19. vijeku u ovoj zemlji, „entuzijazam” u vjerskom smislu značio je govor u jezicima, „padanje u duhu” i brojne druge neobične manifestacije Božijeg prisustva. Na mnogim mjestima gdje se održavaju vjerske aktivnosti to i dalje važi.
U vjerskom svijetu moje mladosti, govoriti drugima o svojoj vjeri zvali smo „svjedočenje” — što je uključivalo i to da, između ostalog, drugima saopštimo da će završiti u paklu ako ne pozovu Isusa u svoje srce kao ličnog Gospoda i Spasitelja. Svjedočenje je bilo obaveza, bez obzira na to da li su oni kojima svjedočimo željeli da čuju o našem entuzijazmu ili ne. Naša omladinska grupa bi povremeno provela subotnje jutro dijeleći pamflete i traktate sa našom verzijom hrišćanske propagande — ispred lokalne prodavnice ili ubacujući ih u poštanske sandučiće. Uvijek sam birao dužnost na sandučićima i često bih cijelu hrpu pamfleta ostavljao već u prvom sandučetu.
Oduvijek sam svoju urođenu odbojnost prema svjedočenju pripisivao svojoj ekstremnoj introvertnosti — i sigurno je to imalo veliki uticaj. Ali, tokom godina počeo sam da vjerujem da ne samo da je agresivna, napadna religioznost nešto što je introvertima odbojno, nego i da je to u suprotnosti sa samim hrišćanstvom. Prije mnogo godina naišao sam na sljedeće riječi Eni Dilar u Holy the Firm — i kao da je opisivala crkvu u kojoj sam odrastao:
Zašto mi, ljudi u crkvama, djelujemo kao veseli, bezbrižni turisti na organizovanom obilasku Apsolutnog? … Uglavnom, ne smatram da su hrišćani, sada van katakombi, dovoljno svjesni okolnosti. Ima li iko iole predstavu o kakvoj se sili radi kada je tako nehajno prizivamo? … Crkve su djeca koja se igraju na podu sa svojim hemijskim setovima, praveći mješavinu kojom bi mogli da raznesu jedno nedjeljno jutro. Ludost je nositi slamnate šešire i baršunaste kape u crkvi — svi bismo trebali nositi kacige. Redari bi trebalo da dijele pojaseve za spasavanje i signalne rakete; trebalo bi da nas privežu za klupe. Jer bog koji spava možda se jednoga dana probudi i uvrijedi, ili nas bog koji se budi povede tamo odakle se više nikada ne možemo vratiti.
Da, to je tako. U My Bright Abyss, hrišćanski pjesnik Kristijan Vajman primećuje da „neozbiljan način na koji američki hrišćani govore o Bogu nije samo obeshrabrujući, već je — za neke — aktivno destruktivan. Postoje trenuci kada tišina nije samo najviši, već i jedini mogući oblik pobožnosti.” Možda je upravo to Sveti Franjo imao na umu kada je, u izreci koju nikada nije izgovorio, savjetovao vjernike da propovijedaju svojim životom, a riječi koriste tek kao posljednju opciju. Vrijedi se toga sjetiti sljedeći put kada vas ujede „buba svjedočenja”.
Knjiga Strpljenje s Bogom Tomaša Halika bila je posljednji tekst na mom kolokvijumu „Vjera i sumnja” prošlog proljeća, koji je preporučio moj kolega u nastavi (dominikanac i profesor političkih nauka). Halik je češki rimokatolički sveštenik, filozof i teolog, koji je rukopoložen u „podzemnoj” katoličkoj crkvi dok je Čehoslovačka još bila pod kontrolom bivšeg Sovjetskog Saveza. Nije iznenađenje da je bio prvo zbunjen, a zatim zgrožen, kada je prvi put vidio američkog mega-evangelistu na televiziji.
[Dugo sam se nadao] da je to samo neka humoristička emisija koja karikira religiju. Nisam želio da vjerujem da neko ozbiljno misli da je moguće govoriti o Bogu s tolikom vulgarnom prizemnošću i širiti jevanđelje kao da je riječ o nekom pouzdanom brendu automobila.
Halik još na početku svoje knjige postavlja pitanje šta je zaista potrebno da bi se neko približio Hristu, a time i Bogu. Zabrinut je da „to ipak nije tako lako kao što to neki entuzijastični hrišćani vjeruju”, jednostavno zato što je „istina previše krhka da bi se uzvikivala na ulici”.
Godinama sam bio nesiguran da li da se u javnosti izjasnim kao hrišćanin, iz više razloga — ne najmanje bitan je bio taj što u našem društvu riječ „hrišćanin” često znači nešto nalik na cirkus koji je Tomaš Halik gledao na televiziji — ili još gore, bijeli MAGA nacionalizam. Tek tokom jednog transformativnog sabatskog semestra, prije više od decenije, počeo sam javno da izražavam svoju vjeru — ovaj blog je postao glavno sredstvo mog „izlaska u javnost”.
Kako su prijatelji i kolege na fakultetu počeli da čitaju moj blog i slušali neka od predavanja koja sam držao nakon sabatskog odsustva, njihove reakcije su bile zanimljive. „Nisam imao pojma o tvojoj prošlosti i vjeri”, rekli su neki, „ali s obzirom na ono što znam o tebi svih ovih godina, to potpuno ima smisla.” Možda sam, nesvjesno, živio u skladu sa savjetom koji Sveti Franjo nikada nije dao — moj život s kolegama tokom prethodnih petnaestak godina bio je u skladu s hrišćanskim riječima koje sada pišem i izgovaram.
Kristijan Vajman piše da „Ništa ne ubija kredibilitet kao pretjerani entuzijazam. Ništa ne truje istinu tako brzo kao uvjerenje da je neko pronašao istinu.” Sigurnost je, u krajnjoj liniji, suprotnost vjeri. Ako imate poriv da „svjedočite”, sjetite se da ne prodajete automobil. Vi skrećete pažnju na način života.
Vens Morgan
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