I MMERSED IN THEOLOGY

Taking the plunge

by James Alison
O
NE OF THE privileges of
studying theology within the
clerical formation programs
of the Catholic Church is
that you get to study philosophy first.
For at least three years. This can seem
interesting and exciting when you're
immersed in itit certainly hones the
intellect for debate. At other times it
can seem soul-crushing and destroy-
ingwhat has this nitpicking linguis-
tic analysis got to do with preparing
me to preach the gospel?
In retrospect, the true extent of the
privilege becomes clearer: when it
comes time to study theology, the
pupil has been primed to interpret, to
be able to remove words and concepts
from the meaning foisted on them by
the gut, to separate them from their
inherited baggage and to begin to de-
tect where contemporary religious
ideology and real thought might begin
to diverge, and how to follow the lat-
ter.
For practical and financial reasons,
these additional three years have only
really been possible where theological
education was conceived as a forma-
tion process for male celibate clerics
who start young and for whom a
seven-year training course is not en-
tirely inappropriate. These years also
serve to create a shared culture of dis-
course within which a
huge amount of discus-
sion, disagreement and
range of opinions are held
more or less pacifically.
This culture is part of
what allows for the sheer
variety and difference of
theological viewpoints which circulate
freely in the Catholic Church on all
but the few hot-button issues at which
the ecclesiastical traffic cops attempt
to blow their whisdes.
As an aside, I would note that, para-
doxically, as this male-only culture
winds downand the discipline of
theology is undertaken (as it should
be) by people of both sexesthe loss
of prior philosophical training is likely
to mean that theological discussion
will become narrower, less capable of
tolerating variety and less aware of the
Fora
discussion
of "Taking the
plunge/' visit
www.fheolog.org
Ash Wednesday
Now forty winters have besieged this brow
that bears the mark of ashes once again,
its shallow furrows yielding to time s plow
as, on command, I turn and turn again.
With every year the mark goes deeper still
and stays there longer than the year before,
reminding me, despite my flesh's will,
there comes a spring when I'll be marked no more.
Yet still I bow and part my graying hair
to make way for the dust that makes us all,
the mortal touch, the cross traced in the air,
the voice that tells me to regard the fall
that each of us must know before we rise
and raise unwrinkled brows to greet God's eyes.
Angela O'Donnell
ease with which theology can fall cap-
tive to religious ideology. The task of
creating a new structure of shared dis-
course prior to the delicate business of
talking about God or reading scrip-
ture, a structure not dependent on
male-only clerical formation, is one of
the great catechetical and community-
building challenges for the church.
In my own case, despite having
been led to the portals of theology by
some extraordinary Dominican teach-
ersHerbert McCabe, Fergus Kerr,
Roger Ruston and Timothy Radcliffe,
to name a fewnothing could quite
have prepared me for the
shock of my first semester
of the formal study of the-
ology at the Jesuit faculty
in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
As the semester wore on, I
found myself feeling as
though I was being
drownedand in two senses.
In the first place, I had the sense
that I was probably going to have to
hold on to my faith (emphasis on
"my") despite the best efforts of these
slippery, overintellectualized, rela-
tivistic-seeming teachers. As the
weeks went by, it did seem as though
"my" faith and all that I held sacred
and dear was under assault from these
people. And I was drowning.
B
ut even more significant than that
my self-importance was threat-
ened by the excellence of the teachers
was the cumulative effect of the sheer
volume of reading. Day after day,
week after week, author after author,
opinion after opinion, a sea of words
were being poured on me from every
angle. They were opening up new
horizons and challenging bits of surety
in the pit of my stomachuntil the lit-
tle Inquisitor General on his throne in
the upper part of my skull could take it
no longer. He had been accustomed to
sitting there, serenely sifting through
such little ideas as my reading and lis-
tening had brought before him, rou-
tinely and elegantly trashing them
from a position of enormous imagined
superiority: after all, someone who is
right can easily detect what is wrong,
James Alison recently wrote Undergoing
God (Continuum).
CHRISTIAN CENTURY February20,2007 8
and is never aware of how defensively
he is proceeding.
It's not as though all these opinions
and words were out to get my poor
inner Inquisitor. But he was complete-
ly at sea amid the sheer volume and
breadth of what was washing over him.
He didn't have the staff or the time to
be able to put all these dreadful books
right, or the fingers to plug up all the
holes in the dike. And so he drowned.
This is what I call "falling through."
And it was for me the vital experience
in beginning to learn theology. It was
an experience of being pulled out of
my own narrow sacred world and dis-
covering a huge, peaceful discipline
that preceded me and that had extraor-
dinary depths, contours, melodies and
spaciousness. I was being pulled into
swimming around in it.
This meant beginning to see how
those teachers who it had been so easy
for the clever beginner to despise were
doing a magnificent job of holding
open a great canopy of learning within
which I could indeed find things that I
didn't control, things that nourished
me, things that would help me build
something, but also things that I didn't
find so helpful and could avoid, ways of
talking and thinking which tired the
soul rather than giving it zest.
"Falling through" was how I moved
from being someone who had an inter-
est in theology to someone who loved
theology and had found himself caught
in a bigger, more open world than he
could imagine. One where theology
was no longer simply a discipline about
which one should know for other pur-
poses (and there may be people for
whom that is exactly what it should be!)
but a gift and a promise of being, and of
finding myself on the inside of an act of
communication from elsewhere.
SUDANESE REFUGEES IN LI MBO
Lost boys
by Ashley Makar
A
HANDFUL OF the "lost boys
of Sudan"the 26,000 chil-
dren who fled civil war on
footare on the big screen
endearing themselves to American au-
diences. Four thousand were deliv-
ered from a United Nations refugee
camp to various communities in the
U.S. in 2001. A few of them are the
subjects of a just-released National
Geographic documentary, God Grew
Tired of Us.
One of the boysnow a mantells
the story of his exodus through Sudan,
Ethiopia and Kenya to the U.S. and
work in a factory, and finally to school
at Syracuse University. But this com-
plicated and rough redemption will
not happen for most of the refugees.
The airlift was a one-time opportuni-
ty, an operation that cannot be repeated
in the current state of the international
refugee regime. Now that the southern
Sudanese war is declared over, the UN
has shifted its focus for Sudanese asy-
lum seekers from resettlement to repa-
triation; in addition, the U.S. is accept-
ing fewer refugees since 9/11. This con-
vergence of policies leaves millions of
Sudanese at an impassethey are
trapped between beloved home villages
and inhospitable African cities, while
their hope dwindles.
Outside All Saints Cathedral in
Cairo, Gabriel Kuol shows me his vital
documents in a transparent folder.
There is a yellow paper rectangle the
size of an index card. In the left corner
is a stamp noting that he has permis-
sion for temporary residence in Egypt;
in the right corner is a passport-sized
head shot stapled and stamped by the
Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees. In the
photo, the word "REFUGEES" ap-
pears over his right shoulder like a ban-
ner. He looks like a cross between a
convict and a schoolboymouth rigid,
face full to the camera, eyes wide open
as if he won't ever stop looking at you.
Another photo is safety-pinned to his
application. Underneath, typed words
create an autobiography"Gabriel
Kuol, born in the Dinka tribe; mother
drowned in river Nile; plane bombard-
ed camp; we ran; they started shooting;
father killed; they found me under the
tree; took me to Emarat; worked in the
house daily, Blue Nile fields on Fridays,
sleeping outside on the floor, eating
food remainders, beaten with water
hoses, slap, irritation, no honor. 1983;
left home country due to security cir-
cumstances, repeated air invasions; dis-
tributed to the leaders of the army;
compulsory residence, Khartoum; work
with no salary, savagery, hard treatment,
force, violence; no human." The words
make a caseshowing a well-founded
fear of torture, enslavement and forced
military recruitmentto support his
application for asylum. Then Gabriel's
closing words: "Now I am in your
hands."
There is one more photo. In it,
Gabriel is wearing sunglasses and pos-
ing next to a monument that has "Out
of Egypt I have called my Son" etched
in bold print on plaster. Gabriel is
squatting, posing as a hip-hop star,
showing off the thick silver chain of his
cross necklace. His thin arm is raised
to the small monument, his left fnger
pointing to the word "out."
T
he Out of Egypt sculpture stands
in a courtyard between All Saints
Cathedral and Refuge Egypt, an
Episcopal ministry for displaced
East Africans. For Sudanese asylum
seekers, the church serves as a place
to go. Over a million have come to
Egypt, having heard by word of
mouth, as Gabriel did: God willing,
the UN will help you. Since the end
of the southern Sudanese war, the
Sudanese are not recognized as
refugees by the UNHCR office in
Cairo, yet thousands of refugees are
making their way up the Nile. They
receive yellow cards authorizing
their residence in Egypt, renewable
every six months, if the government
Ashley Makar teaches at Hofstra University
in New York. She spent last winter doing
research in Cairo.
9 CHRISTIAN CENTURY February20,2007
^ s
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