Cover
story Theologian keeps death close when she talks to freshmen
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff
Death runs deep in Theresa
Sanders books and teaching. Dead bodies. Recently or long expired. She
also likes relics, saintly bits of death.
The Georgetown University theologian makes the corpse a wonder to
behold. She uses the dead body as a tool to pry into life and into theology.
Its an approach that keeps her students coming back for more.
In the introduction to her first theology book she examines a
photograph from the war in Bosnia. Corpses hopelessly entangled among
each other, have been unloaded by a driver who glances back from
the cabs open door to make sure his entire cargo has been
dumped.
Sanders writes in the introduction that mixed among the corpses
is other debris: a wheelbarrow, a stretcher, sticks and dirt. One
mans arm, stiffened and bent like a claw, reaches up from beneath another
mans body in a parody of embrace. She quotes Larry in the Somerset
Maughams novel The Razors Edge, The dead look so
terribly dead when theyre dead.
Sanders, 37, keeps death close when she talks to freshman students
in The Problem of God, the introductory theology course. I guess I have a
morbid fascination because death is the central question of life, she
told NCR. I figured if I tackled death first as a scholar,
everything else in life would be easy.
Sanders tells her students that there are two things I am
absolutely sure about, would go to the mat for.
The first one is God is love. The second that love is
stronger than death.
What Sanders loves is teaching that introductory course.
Ive never yet had the feeling that I hadnt
seduced them into thinking theology is the most fascinating thing in the
world.
She doesnt take them to a cemetery to convince them, though.
She takes them to the movies. She has them view movies about death, movies like
Romero, the biographical account of the life of Bishop Oscar
Romero, assassinated after standing up for the poor of El Salvador.
In film, she said, you see theology written in
experience. I think film does have the power to change peoples lives --
in a way Karl Rahner might if they read Rahner.
Sanders, who holds a doctorate in religion from Syracuse
University, specialized in Rahner, the 20th-century Jesuit theologian.
Theyre never going to read Rahner. But if I can show
them a film where Rahners theology comes out -- Romero.
I tell my students that Christians should hate the cross in
the way they should hate all murders, Sanders said. I tell them
that Jesus death isnt good in itself. Its only good because
its part of his fundamental commitment to people and to their needs and
concerns.
And I try to show the same thing in Romero.
The movie shows that Romero dies, but hes resurrected
in the end. There are those closing quotes that say a bishop will die, but the
people of God, which is the church, will never die, and that Romero
realized his blood would be a seed.
She referred to Romeros words heard in a voiceover at the
end of the 1989 film. If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran
people. Let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be a
reality. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will
never perish.
Sanders acknowledges that she doesnt reach every student.
But she tries.
Her first assumption when she walks into the classroom to teach is
that somewhere along the line, all of my students have been hurt by
religion.
Experience confirms this, she said.
I teach to the kid in the back who has to be there,
doesnt want to be there, and who loathes anything associated with
religion, she said. I seduce them by getting them to ask all the
questions theyre afraid to ask or thought they couldnt ask: Is
there a God? If theres a God, how come theres so much evil in the
world? What do I do with my roommate whos a Buddhist? My church says
shes going to hell. Isnt that the stupidest thing you ever
heard?
However, when she sits down to write -- a commitment thats
resulted in two books so far -- she makes the point that this is what
lifes about, that as hurtful as religions and their attendant
theologies can be, they are inescapable.
Her books so far: Body and Belief: Why the Body of Jesus Cannot
Heal, (The Davies Group, 2000) and Celluloid Saints (Mercer
University Press, 2001). She got the idea for Celluloid Saints when she
was in Blockbusters picking up a movie and realized she teaches a course on
saints and another on film but knew of no book that combined the topics.
Search for meaning
We are creatures who seek meaning, and, in the words of
theologian Paul Tillich, we can never be without a sense of ultimate
concern. I try to offer students a language to express the thoughts,
doubts and questions they have about religion, she said.
I want to give them the power to think and to speak and
eventually to act, she said. I want my students to understand
Christianity as a beautiful tradition that is constantly struggling: to express
its vision of the world, to live up to that vision and to articulate that
vision intellectually.
She wants them to see that whatever version of Christianity they
grew up with or met along the way, it isnt the only version
possible -- that there are options for thought and action they may not yet have
considered.
Sanders understands.
The big question for me was faith and reason. I remember
distinctly, even as a child, being told, you cant ask that question, just
have faith. I came from a family of smart kids. Four were in academia. And
Im just guessing that at some point, when they were told you should ask
about physics and chemistry and biology, they were also told, but you
shouldnt ask about religion. Im guessing that was enough for some
of them to say, Well fine, Im dont want any part of it.
Sanders, a native of Youngstown, Ohio, graduated from Mercyhurst
College, and got a masters degree at the University of Notre Dame before
finishing her graduate work at Syracuse. She is an associate professor at
Georgetown.
She believes that the best remedy for hurtful theology is better
theology. Some scenes in Romero, she says, are the most
powerful eucharistic theology I know.
Sanders, who arrived at Georgetown in 1991, is the seventh in a
family of eight children. All eight tend toward their very Catholic
fathers brand of verbal humor, she said, while their mother finds her
humor in life. When a local priest asked the mother if she would be a
eucharistic minister, she said not until her daughters could be priests. (The
mother is now a Call to Action conference attendee.)
Sanders, one of the four daughters, didnt want to be a
priest. But she did try being a woman religious and got as far as first vows.
As shes essentially an explorer, she moved on.
In her first book, she explored why the body of Jesus still has
holes in it. Depictions of Jesus, bleeding and scarred, made no sense to her at
all. According to Christian theology, Hes risen. Hes whole. I
mean, we dont picture John the Baptist wandering around in heaven
carrying his head, she said, yet we do picture Jesus still with
these holes.
Fundamental contradiction
Theres a fundamental contradiction there, said
Sanders, who spends the book exploring it. She decides the message of the
depictions of a bloody Jesus is intended, first, to remind viewers that the
church is not a whole body, but a fractured one.
Next, the fact that Jesus body still has holes shows
us that we can never afford to close ourselves off from the life of the world.
Its when we think we have God all sewn up that we get lost.
In her first book, Sanders moves from dead bodies with holes to
dead saints and their relics.
Relics were not something Sanders necessarily had had faith in or
had reasoned about. Yet she wrote, when we hold a tooth or a skull in our
hands nothing feels more solid or certain than the heft of bone. Nothing seems
to have more of an inherent, undeniable bond to a saint than his or her
remains.
Just touch it. Feel its weight. Close your eyes and know the
presence of the saint. But even that presence, a presence so close I can hold
it to my lips or clutch it to my breast in prayer, is fraught with loss and
undecidability.
Relics can be multiplied and divided -- like St. Stephens
finger, broken into a thousand fragments. Yet each fragment is still a relic.
Further, the representation is equivocal, she said, for it relies on the
saints absence. The saint had to be dead.
Now, however, because of movies, a version of the saint can be
brought to life. The celluloid saint lives. Perhaps future reliquaries might
contain both the relic and the movie.
The movie, at least, would still capture the imagination of the
students, even though the relic might blow their minds.
Or not.
Sanders said in recent years she has noticed in her students a
longing for something big to grab hold of and hang on to. They want
something to matter.
They are on the one hand profoundly cynical about all
institutions, religious ones included, she said, and on the other
hand truly receptive to movements and traditions that promise spiritual
depth.
They flock to late-night Masses, she said, and
to prayer vigils and religious retreats. Untouched by the upheavals of the
60s and 70s, they are curious about religions even as they are
reluctant to commit themselves unequivocally to them.
But if Sanders introduction to theology has set them
thinking, a portion of those students might find the life lessons of the dead
saints on celluloid, the tangible bits of saintly dead bones, and the body of
Jesus with holes in it, extremely hard to resist.
National Catholic Reporter, March 30,
2001
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