|
Summer
Books Memoir illuminates bond between exiles
PRACTICING EXILE: THE
RELIGIOUS ODYSSEY OF AN AMERICAN JEW By Marc H. Ellis Fortress
Press, 176 pages, $18 |
REVIEWED By MARK CHMIEL
Because of the recent scandals emanating from Boston, many
Catholics feel a sense of betrayal, confusion and outrage at how the
institutional church has covered up these many acts of harm done, repeatedly
over decades, to innocent youth. While journalists, church officials and
scholars attempt to make sense of these dynamics of denial, some Catholics may
experience a gnawing dissonance in going weekly to Mass, listening to homilies
about everything else but the churchs sins, and paying the weekly
collection. Now more than any time in recent memory, more and more American
Catholics may feel an acute sense of exile.
Beyond this current crisis, consider that in recent years those in
the Catholic church who have been officially reprimanded or silenced have so
often been those who are prophetic, visionary and dedicated to living out a
preferential option for the poor and marginalized of church and society, among
them Matthew Fox, Leonardo Boff, Ivone Gebara, Tissa Balasuriya and Jeannine
Gramick. And how many ordinary Catholics have felt the lash of ecclesial
repression such as job firings for seeking to live out a gospel commitment to
inner-city school children, refugees and immigrants with precarious status, or
gay and lesbian folks?
In such a troubling, alienating time, Marc Ellis newest
work, Practicing Exile, may speak movingly to many Christians as to how
to live out their lives with integrity. Ellis writes of his own religious
odyssey that has taken him from studying at Jesuit Marquette University to
working at the New York Catholic Worker, from teaching at the Maryknoll School
of Theology to meeting with Palestinians on the Israeli-occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip, from remembering how Jews tried to be faithful in the darkest hours
of the Holocaust to learning how to speak and not speak of God from radical
Christians living in Costa Rica.
For most of the last two decades, Ellis has been speaking a
prophetic word to anyone who would listen: The central question of
contemporary Jewish life is framed by the displacement and oppression of
Palestinians. In scores of articles and hundreds of talks, Ellis has
admitted that what Jews have done and are still doing to the Palestinians is
wrong. Suffice it to say, this message is not warmly received in synagogues and
among official Jewish organizations. And so Ellis often finds companionship
with those Jews who, like himself, are far from the Jewish establishment, with,
for example, secular Jews like the Israeli journalist Amira Hass and Harvard
researcher Sara Roy, both of whom confront head-on what Israeli policy has
meant for the Palestinian people.
Yes, to practice exile means one becomes intimate with solitude
and loneliness, but, as this brief and moving memoir reveals, one can meet
other exiles from other religious and secular communities. Ellis not only
cultivates a reverence for Shabbat, but he also practices Zen sitting, as many
Christians have been doing in the last couple of decades.
As a Jew, he has learned not only from leaders of Jewish renewal
such as Arthur Waskow and Michael Lerner, but his thought has also been
influenced by such Christian luminaries as Daniel Berrigan, Rosemary Ruether
and Gustavo Gutierrez.
I think of how Thomas Merton was alert to the nascent global
phenomenon of interreligious dialogue at the end of his life in the late 1960s
when he wrote candidly of his bond with Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh:
I have far more in common with Nhat Hanh than I have with many Americans,
and I do not hesitate to say it. It is vitally important that such bonds be
admitted. They are the bonds of a new solidarity
which is beginning to
be evident on all five continents and which cuts across all political,
religious and cultural lines to unite young men and women in every country in
something that is more concrete than an ideal and more alive than a
program.
Like Ellis, Merton was a practitioner of religious exile and also,
like Dorothy Day, he knew that we have all known the long loneliness, and
that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.
Today, that community may be composed increasingly of exiles who recognize each
other in the struggle for justice and the sharing of ordinary life and hope,
including Catholics who meditate with Buddhists, American veterans who travel
to Iraq to help build water purifiers, young people who get arrested with their
elders at Fort Benning in Georgia, Methodists who travel to East Timor to help
with national reconstruction, and Mennonites who stand with Palestinian Muslims
and Christians against Israeli bulldozers.
In Practicing Exile, Ellis declares, In conscience I
cannot acquiesce in the ethical violations of the covenant that now stand at
the heart of what it means to be Jewish. This issue is at the very center of
Jewish life and history. I am ready for judgment. Reading Ellis can help
us to articulate the difficult questions we must be asking about what it means
to be Catholic, how often we acquiesce in ethical violations, and how prepared
we are, consequently, for judgment.
Mark Chmiel is adjunct professor of theological studies at St.
Louis University.
National Catholic Reporter, May 17,
2002
|
|