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#33 — Is and Is Not

Friday 22 March 2013

If God is, then everything else is not, writes Weil:

If we find fullness of joy in the thought that God is, we must find the same fullness in the knowledge that we ourselves are not, for it is the same thought. And this knowledge is extended to your sensibility only through suffering and death (84).

If God is, then everything else — including our suffering and death — is not. It’s a paradox of monotheism in general and Christianity in particular: when we speak of “God being,” we’re not using the verb “to be” in the same sense we do when speaking of our everyday reality. God’s “is” is not the “is” of the book that “is on my table.” God’s “is” is the “is” — the ground of every other “is,” and perhaps more appropriate written “Is.” Thomas Halik, explaining Meister Eckhart’s thought, expresses it thus:

He is “nothing” in a world of beings, because God is not a being among beings. And Eckhart goes on to declare that you must become “nothing” if you wish to encounter him. If you want to be “something” (that is, mean something, have something, know something, in short, be fixated on individual beings and the world of things), then you are not free to encounter Him (Night of the Confessor, 22).

God’s “is” can only be thought to be “nothing” in terms of our “is” because His is outside ours, the grounding of ours, the “Is.” Thus God gives Moses the name, “I Am.”

#30 — Transposition

Tuesday 19 March 2013

Weil on transposition:

We believe we are rising because, while keeping the same base inclinations (for instance: the desire to triumph over others), we have given them a noble object. We should, on the contrary, rise by attaching noble inclinations to lowly objects.

My thoughts — bed…

(Yet another cheat…)

#24 — Time and Incarnation

Tuesday 12 March 2013

There is always a relationship with time to be taken into account. We must get rid of the illusion of possessing time. We must become incarnate.

The desire to possess time and the realization that it’s an utter impossibility is one of the marks of the transition to adulthood we all go through. It was a troubling time for me, as it is for most, because it means, on some level, the relinquishing of the idea of eternal youth. Perhaps that’s what the acceptance of one’s on mortality is about in some way.

It’s just this desire to possess time that Adam Duritz sings about in “A Long December,” a song that haunted me as I thought about things past that would never return.

And it’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass

We can’t hold on to these or any other moments, and the continual effort to do so would only be a sign that we’re not maturing, emotionally or spiritually.

#23 — Creation

Monday 11 March 2013

Creation: good broken up into pieces and scattered throughout evil.

Some days, I hate my job. That’s nothing new, I guess, but some days, working with over a hundred eighth-graders and dealing with all their hormone-driven nonsense, feeling that the evil — for lack of a better term, though it is hyperbolic — vastly outweighs the good, pondering whether teaching is not “good broken up into pieces and scattered throughout evil,” I want to stand up and say something like this:

I don’t care. I don’t care who called you a name. I don’t care who’s tapping a pencil and bothering you. I don’t care if you left your pencil in your last class. I don’t care if you didn’t have a pencil to begin with. I don’t care if you think last night’s baseball game was great. I don’t care if you’ve lost your book. I don’t care if you like someone. I don’t care if someone teased you about your haircut. I don’t care if you forgot to do your homework. I don’t care if you left your book at home. I don’t care if you don’t like someone. I don’t care if someone beside you passed gas. I don’t care who’s spreading rumors about you. I don’t care if the person seated behind you is tapping your desk with her foot. I don’t care if someone told you shut up. I don’t care if you’ll forget what you were going to say if you don’t say it now, to someone seated on the other side of the room. I don’t care if someone made a comment about your shoes. I don’t care if someone threatened to pour milk on your head. I don’t care if you wanted to talk to him. I don’t care if you don’t want to work with him or with her. I don’t care if someone made a joke about your grades. I don’t care if you needed some attention and so continually cut up in class. I don’t care if someone threw your book in the garbage on the way out. I don’t care about any of your childish, kindergarten problems.

All of these statements have been true. Sometimes many of them have been true at the same moment; at other times, only a handful. Usually, the moment passes and I remember that I do care. Of course, some of these things are so trivial that my concern matches their triviality, but I think you’re still too young to understand that fully. Still, the moment most of them become true most of the time or, heaven forbid, all of them are true all of the time will be the moment I realize I must leave teaching.

I thought for a moment this afternoon that that was the case.

#21 — Filling and Creating Emptiness

Friday 8 March 2013

To harm a person is to receive something from him. […] We have gained in importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness by creating one in somebody else (50).

Perhaps the best example of filling an emptiness by creating one in another is bullying. Working at a middle school, I’m witness to many major and minor instances of bullying on a daily basis, and it seems to be getting only worse. Statisticians tell us that’s definitely the case, but even if they weren’t providing empirical evidence, I get enough anecdotal evidence daily to make a strong case.

As a teacher, I find I have to walk a thin line. On the one hand, we’ve seen the headlines of recent years, this or that tragic suicide traced back to prolonged bullying, actions that have created situations in which some people feel suicide is the only alternative. Bullying, then, is literally a deadly serious, and as the authority figure in the room or hallways, I have a responsibility to put an end to it when I encounter it. Yet most bullying today is not like the bullying I occasionally encountered. Today’s bullying, ban and large, is verbal. Indeed, there is a whole category of bullying that could be only mental: cyber bullying. In other words, a lot of bullying is of the type “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Yet the truth is, words do hurt. Still, we need resilient, self-assured kids who can take care of themselves and who know how to avoid internalizing the stupid little comments they hear and will hear, in one form or another, throughout life, so I don’t want to help kids become dependent on me — or anyone else — to swoop in and save the day every single time says something mean and bullying.

And so when I do encounter something that I judge to be relatively minor but still behavior that could be considered “bullying,” I try to strike a balance. I deal with the individual who said the hateful words, but I spend more time talking to the person to whom he or she directed the words. (That was a long way to get around saying “victim.” It was a conscious choice.) I tell her that there are individuals who only feel good about themselves when making others feel bad. To quote Weil, these individuals have “gained in importance,” but only in their own mind.

#19 — Refusal

Wednesday 6 March 2013

Weil writes,

God gave me being in order that I should give it back to him. It is like one of those traps whereby the characters are tested in fairy stories and tales of initiation. If I accept this gift, it is bad and fatal; its virtue becomes apparent through my refusal of it. God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization.

It’s not something I pretend to understand. Even with a conversion to Catholicism and resulting reading and studying, the whole reason for a deity to create anything confuses me. If God is perfect, why create anything? What does that provide a perfect being that said being doesn’t already possess?

#16 — Imagination and Fiction

Saturday 2 March 2013

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. Rare indeed are the true contacts with good and evil.

Weil’s words read like a quote out of The Matrix or Inception, and it’s easy to brush them off as metaphorical theorizing:

And it’s easy to pass it onto the “madding crowd” and insist that we ourselves are not imagining things, not asleep. We are fully aware of the reality around us and can separate it from wish and fantasy, but the materialistic hordes around us can’t. It’s easy to think that way.

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Afternoon at Bounce House

Surely, with rarefied reality all around us — the screams of delight of children at play, the hard crack of a helmet against plexiglass, a blast of cold air when we get out of the car — we are awake.

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A visit to the ice next to the Bounce House

Of course Weil doesn’t mean anything so cinematic. She’s simply pointing out our uncanny ability to deceive ourselves and fall for the farce completely, to create worlds out of our irrational fears and project them on everyone and everything, to believe that the way we see the world is the way everyone sees it and indeed the only true way to perceive it. I see the effects of this every day at school: some students have mastered already the art of fully deceiving themselves, convinced that they can do no wrong and that all the trouble they find themselves in can easily be laid at the doorstep of others (read: adults; read: teachers).

I’m not sure what the kick (to borrow a term from Inception) for this dream might be, especially when we’re not even sure we can kick ourselves awake. Perhaps awareness is the first and, paradoxically, last step. An afternoon spent with the Girl at a birthday party followed by a bit of first-time exposure to live hockey should be enough to separate fiction from good, imagination from evil.

That’s the secular answer.

I think Weil might not entirely agree, though. Like Inception, we need someone who doesn’t share that same reality, someone who’s at a level higher (literally in the film and in Catholicism too, I suppose) to help jar us out of the fictions we create for ourselves.

#15 — Temptation and Energy

Friday 1 March 2013

The use of temptations. It depends on the relative strength of the soul and of time. To go on for a long time contemplating the possibility of doing evil without doing it effects a kind of transubstantiation. If we resist with merely finite energy, this energy is exhausted after a certain time, and when it is exhausted, we give in. If we remain motionless and attentive, it is the temptation which is exhausted — and we acquire the energy raised to a higher degree.

For a little boy, temptation is a simple thing; for a little boy who can move about under his own volition, it’s a simple thing that’s simply everywhere. Closets hold treasures. Desks sit over snaking cables and wires.

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Cabinets hold bags of flour, sugar, and other mysteries. Desk cabinets conceal pencils, markers, and other goodies. 

The Boy doesn’t resist temptation, reaching his pudgy fingers toward dangers and toys alike.

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But he’s at that lucky point in life when temptation is all about learning, and vice versa.

#13 — Humility and Humiliation

Wednesday 27 February 2013

humiliate ourselves before false gods

It’s sometimes easy for me to grow depressed about the world we have brought our children into. There are so many different calls for attention, so many things that people place in the center of their lives, things that at their heart are not only meaningless but actually harmful yet somehow seen as the ultimate good. It all falls under the banner of materialism and instant gratification, and the technology of today only heightens it. Indeed, the technology is often part and parcel of the whole game: smart phones to take pictures of unhealthy food to share with friends who have just posted pictures of the new car they bought that they really can’t afford; tablet computers that allow people to feed their obsession with sex, shopping, or whatever their fetish anywhere and everywhere; televisions large enough to cover most of a wall so we can see in painful clarity the details of our visual obsessions. Add to it the realization that children growing up today face new peer pressure to fit in by owning all these gadgets, using all these gadgets obsessively, virtually praying to these gadgets — and anyone who doesn’t fit in will faces a barrage of bullying, taunting, and rejection.

It’s not a world I would personally like to have to grow up in.

Weil speaks of these obsessions in terms of false gods:

We do not have to acquire humility. There is humility is us. Only we humiliate ourselves before false gods.

The fact that humiliate and humility have the same root is ironic today, considering how so many people humiliate themselves, all the while thinking they’re elevating themselves.

#12 — Natural Movements and Grace

Tuesday 26 February 2013

Michelangelo's painting of the sin of Adam and Eve from the Sistine Chapel ceiling
Michelangelo’s painting of the sin of Adam and Eve from the Sistine Chapel ceiling

Some Christians explain it with the doctrine of Original Sin. Muslims reject the notion of an inherently sinful nature in humanity but believe that pride (an unwillingness to submit) is humanity’s chief sin (ReligionFacts.com). Judaism seems to have no established doctrine on the matter, but the Jewish experience of the twentieth century — indeed, in most centuries — probably led many to believe in the tendency of humanity toward evil. Through countless rebirths, Buddhism  teaches, humans are to overcome a seemingly natural tendency toward attachment. Hinduism teaches that there is a reality beyond the everyday — the Brahman — that humans can achieve by changing not only their view but also their behavior, suggesting that the original state is an inferior state. Secularists use the term “human nature” to explain the simple fact that all religions recognize: the natural movement of the will tends to be downward.

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analagous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception (Gravity and Grace, 45).

Yet life is generally about improvement. We want to become better people We want the “I” of today to be somehow more elevated than the “I” of yesterday and not quite so much as the “I” of tomorrow will be. Yet all this movement is relative to a standard. If we’re saying “better” and “worse,” it’s in relation to something. And even though we could say, “Well, yes: that ‘something’ is our former self,” that’s still not quite satisfying. We seem to have the desire to move toward an ultimate goal. It’s always about rising above the natural state we find ourselves in, and more often than not, it’s about detachment. The things that drag us down are things that we can leave behind, religions teach us, and the first step to rising is to make ourselves lighter. Gravity can pulls down harder on more mass; grace works to remove those weights and pull us upward.

While it sounds somewhat more Eastern — more Buddhist or Hindu than Christian — than Fr. Robert Barron, in Catholicism, points out that there is an element of detachment in Jesus’s most famous teachings, the Beatitudes, specifically the four, seemingly negatively framed Beatitudes. Barron begins by reminding us that Thomas Aquinas said there were four substitutes for God: “wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us” (43). The negative Beatitudes, then, are formulas for this emptying, and they form a perfect parallel with Aquinas’s four substitutes.

  1. Wealth: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Barron suggests a slight reformulation: “how blessed are you if you are not attached to material things, if you have not placed the goods that wealth can buy at the center of your concern.”
  2. Pleasure: Another negatively framed Beatitude becomes surprisingly apt for our culture when we reformulate it as Barron does: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” becomes “how blessed […] you are if you are not addicted to good feelings.” It’s easy, Barron says, to see this addition to good feeling in today’s society with its “prevalence of psychotropic drugs, gluttonous habits of consumption, and pronography” (44).
  3. Power: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.” Barron reforms this into, “How lucky you are if you are not attached to the finite good of worldly power” (44). We might be tempted to think this applies only to those with political power, but we all — even children —  have some degree of power and control over someone in the world.
  4. Honor: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The polar opposite of honor is persecution, and while honor is good, “when love of honor becomes the center of one’s concern, it, like any other finite good, becomes a source of suffering” (45).

This is what Lent is all about: giving up some of the distractions and attachments that tend to pull us downward (often material objects) while paying special attention to the things that lift us up (often some form of giving). It’s a sacrifice of the things for which we often sacrifice everything, our little mini-idols that occupy unhealthy proportions of our thoughts — forty days of detachment.

#11 — Advanced Opinion

Monday 25 February 2013

opinion has an effect

Humility is the great sin of the modern age. Whether it’s “I’m okay; you’re okay” or “I’m the king of the world,” humility is on the other end of that spectrum. Many in the secular world find the notions of Christianity — Catholicism in particular — about the true, fallen nature of humanity to be distasteful because it offends the relatively modern sense of the inherent goodness in humanity. I think it probably has more to do with the humiliation of humility than it does with supposed dignity and inherent moral goodness. This is, of course, not to say that all individuals in today’s culture lack humility — just the prominent ones, the ones we as a society generally look up to.

Humility has as its object to eliminate that which is imaginary in spiritual progress. There is no harm in thinking ourselves far less advanced than we are: the effect of the light is in no way decreased thereby, for its source is not in opinion. There is great harm in thinking ourselves more advanced, because then opinion has an effect.

Having too positive an opinion of ourselves distracts us from the goal almost all religions set before us: the purification of our will. It not only distracts us; it deceives us.

#10 — Existence and Value

Saturday 23 February 2013

Illusions about the things of this world do not concern their existence, but their value.

Keeping a proper perspective about the value of the things around us — the everyday things in our lives, the this and that which are so much more than merely this and that — is probably made both easier and more difficult by the simple fact of having a family. Children and a spouse create routine, and routine risks monotony.

Therein lies the danger.

Saturday morning — breakfast, Skyping with Dziadek and Babcia, taking L to ballet, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, planning for the next week of school, correcting this or that assignment. This mix of truly the meaningful with the truly mundane risks making it all seem mundane.

Therein lines the illusion.

Weil is speaking the illusion that makes actions of inherent evil seem good in some circumstances, but the reverse is equally likely, and probably equally dangerous.

#9 — Sin and Favor

Friday 22 February 2013

I should look upon every sin I have committed as a favor of God.

It happens more often than I would really like to admit: the stumble, the trip, the knee to the ground. It’s never been something I would have thought to be thankful for. More often than not, stumbling into sin lands in humiliation of one sort or another, and humiliation is not something we usually look forward to or like to dwell on. Still, there’s a certain ageless wisdom in what Weil writes:

I should look upon every sin I have committed as a favor of God. It is a favor that the essential imperfection which is hidden in my depths should have been to some extent made clear to me on a certain day, at a certain time, in certain circumstances. I wish and implore that my imperfection my be wholly revealed to me in so far as human thought is capable of grasping it. Not in order that it may be cured but, even if it should not be cured, in order that I may know the truth.

Mistakes, sins, errors all mark progress.

#7 — Authority and Legitimacy

Wednesday 20 February 2013

Obedience to a man whose authority is not illuminated by legitimacy — that is a nightmare.

As a teacher, I think often about authority and legitimacy, and the simple fact that if I lack one, I lack the other. The problem with legitimacy, though, is that many of my students come with different definitions of what legitimacy looks like. I might just have two strikes against me from the beginning — two, or more. When our differing definitions collide, someone often ends up losing. Win-win is a lovely idea, but sometimes, it’s just not practical. Sometimes, the option seems taken before the situation even reaches a full head.

When I read Weil’s suggestion that authority without legitimacy is a nightmare, I realize that, from time to time, my classroom must be a nightmare for these students. It’s a difficult thought to accept.

#5 — The Source of Action

Monday 18 February 2013

To transfer the source of our actions outside ourselves

Motivation is everything. An evil act can be mitigated, somewhat, when we realize the motivation of the act, though a purely evil act can never lead to a pure good. The opposite, of course, is also certainly true: many a good act has been tainted by a less than pure motive.

Weil’s aphorism seems to be one sure way to make sure our motives are as pure as possible. If the source of our actions is outside ourselves — whether in God or man — it seems less likely that we’ll be doing the right things for the wrong reasons.

First Sunday of Lent 2013

Sunday 17 February 2013

Technically speaking, the Sundays within the Lenten season are not fast days; Sundays, the Church teaches, are always feast days. Which means that theoretically, all the things one gives up for Lent are fair game. “Isn’t that cheating?” I’m tempted to ask.

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After all, I really didn’t sacrifice anything of real value — that’s sort of the purpose of Lent, that realization. What’s in my life that has any value remains: family. Cigars? Alcohol? Coffee? Sweets? These things are all relatively meaningless in the larger picture — again, what Lent helps us focus on.

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It’s not like I’m only just barely refraining from desperately grabbing at this or that. Sure, the things I give up for Lent give me a certain amount of pleasure, but they come with a price. Cigars, no matter how infrequently enjoyed, are in no way healthy. Alcohol is easily enough abused and doesn’t add much to life other than some relaxation and pleasure. Sweets? No problem: it’s not really surrender if you hardly ever do it. Coffee? Well, I thought in giving up coffee for the first time this year I might actually be sacrificing something I would really notice, and believe me, that first day without caffeine, I noticed it.

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But after that first day, it was no problem at all. (A small admission: I did drink coffee today. Couldn’t resist.)

Still, when taking into account all the things I could lose, voluntarily or not, I think most all Lenten sacrifices are fairly insignificant — again, a realization that gets at the heart of the whole point of Lent.

 

#4 — Goodness and Will

Saturday 16 February 2013

Good which is done in this way, almost in spite of ourselves, almost shamefacedly and apologetically, is pure. All absolutely pure goodness completely eludes the will. Goodness is transcendent. God is Goodness.

It started with a few, hard flakes that looked more like ice pellets than anything else. Perhaps it was ice. But I didn’t worry: it was good no matter what it was. I strolled back into the house and calmly told the girls, “You won’t believe what’s happening: it’s snowing.” Within a few minutes, the flakes were fat and heavy, a wet snow that accumulated quickly despite the relatively warm weather. L and I changed our afternoon swimming plans and got dressed as quickly as we could, both excited about the prospect of snow. By the time we made it outside, the flakes were enormous and plentiful, and I found myself watching both the snow and the Girl’s excitement with the snow.

Living in South Carolina, snow is such an unpredictable goodness. It’s so rare it can only be counted as a good: at most, it might disrupt traffic for a little while; it could close the school system down for a day or two; but even the most sour, pessimist in the Upstate must smile a bit to see the occasional snow.

Yet it’s so unpredictable. We can literally go for years without any snow, apparently. Every winter, we wonder: will there be snow this winter> Well, at least I wonder, K wonders, the Girl wonders.

First moments outside
First moments outside

I stood there today, though, marveling at the difference between our Upstate winter reality and that of southern Poland. Here, the question is whether nor not it will snow; there, the questions are when the first snow will come, how long it will last, and if it will melt completely before the next snow falls. There, the first snow fall is just the promise of more, just a whisper of what’s to come. Here, it’s the promise, the whisper, and the whole story.

Muddy snowball
Muddy snowball

Sometimes I wonder what it might be like to live in such a place with my family. Perhaps with that much snow, the Girl would come to take it for granted. Is that even possible? Can a child ever grow tired of making snowballs, of digging snow forts, of sledding?

And what of the good, the transcendent good that eludes the will? Perhaps sometimes that good comes from an unexpected change in the weather, a sprinkling of white in an otherwise gray afternoon.

#3 — Choice

Friday 15 February 2013

When we become conscious that we have to make a choice, the choice is already made for good or ill.

I often speak to my students about choice and habits. So many kids have such ingrained reactions that they’ve brought into the classroom from various environments — home, the street, the community center — which simply do not work in a comparatively-formal setting like a classroom. Perceived slights or insults must be avenged, for lack of a better term, and often very little thought has gone into the decision. These habits, I tell them, are going to get them into some serious trouble at some point in the future. “It won’t just be a referral from some teacher who’s fed up. It will be dismissal from work.”

Hanging on my wall is an almost-cliche but very succinct expression of the principle I’m trying to explain:

Be careful what you think, for your thoughts become your words.
Be careful what you say, for your words become your actions.
Be careful what you do, for your actions become your habits.
Be careful what becomes habitual, for your habits become your destiny.

Yet even when some of them try to break their habit, even when they begin thinking before speaking, there’s something in them that just compels them, despite the newly-formed warnings and whistles, to go ahead and say it. That’s the habit part, because hidden in every habit is a bit of an addiction. And so these kids are aware of the choice, but in many ways, by the time they’re aware of it, they’ve already made the decision.

Certainly, to a greater or lesser extent, the same is true for almost all of us. The awareness of this tendency, though, like the awareness of an addiction, is the first step toward correcting it. Or so we tell ourselves.

#2 — Drawn to Chains

Thursday 14 February 2013

We are drawn toward a thing because we believe it is good. We end by being chained to it because it has become necessary.

Certainly the image of being caught in chains or wire is a common image, but for me, the most vivid comes from Legends of the Fall, definitely the most vivid because of the conscious decisions of the writer and director, who juxtapose two such images in the film. The first comes during the First World War: a brother struggles to free another brother, tangled in barbed wire and blinded by mustard gas, as German troops prepare to fire on the helpless young man. The second appears later in the film, as the surviving brother tries to free a calf from a barbed wire fence on his father’s ranch, thus triggering the painful war memories. In both cases, the greater the struggle, the tighter the barbed wire held. It’s probably why sin — or its modern, secularized equivalent, addiction — is so often pictured as a chain.

But the more telling part of Weil’s thoughts here is the phrase “because we believe it is good.” I don’t know where I read it, but a couple of years ago, one of those deliberately incomplete statements meant to be somewhat initially provocative: no one ever commits evil. The knee-jerk reaction is simple: “But of course they do! Just look around the world!” What’s left out in this initial formulation is simple idea that every act we commit we justify until we think everything we do, in some way or another, is good. Even the sadist, who commits awful atrocities against others, somehow thinks his actions are good — at least good for him. Even when we say to ourselves, “I know this is wrong, but I’m going to do it anyway,” we’re adding elliptically, “But in this case, it’s good, not evil.” And thus we are drawn to all sorts of evils because we believe all our acts to be good. Soon, this so-called good becomes necessary, just like nicotine or caffeine.

That’s what I love about Lent. It forces me to look at those things in my life that I have come to regard as necessary and try to loosen the chains a little by simply abandoning them. Lent encourages me to hit a cosmic reset button on myself — inasmuch as that is possible, or even exists, without supernatural aid.

Retirement

Monday 11 February 2013

It’s not something one expects to read: “Pope to step down.” “Pope resigns.” Since it hasn’t happened in centuries, I guess it’s inevitably big news. “Pope prepares for a monk’s life” reads one headline, only partially satisfying speculation about what a retired pope might do with his time.

This will be the first papal election I’ve witnessed as a Catholic convert, and unlike eight years ago, I have some definite preferences for a new pope. Of course, it’s not up to me in any sense, so further speculation and wish-making seems fruitless. Whoever is Benedict XVI’s successor, he won’t be the last, and if history is any guide, it’s unlikely he’ll do much radically to change anything in the church. It’s odd: I find myself more in step with more traditional Catholics every day despite my agnostic, progressive past, but there’s one “progressive” change I’d like to see in the papacy: a non-European. Peter Kodwo Appiah Cardinal Turkson has been mentioned as a very possible successor, and I find myself thinking that there could be no better selection for a church that calls itself the Universal Church.