Campus Ministries: Catholic Ministries

Hope: Openness for Surprise
Brother David Steindl-Rast

Happily I have lived long enough to see that many things that once seemed to be set in stone--conventional wisdoms and hardened attitudes, imbedded habits and political divides--can and do give way to new ways of living.

When I was growing up, for example, it was generally thought harmful for athletes to work out with weights: it made them "muscle bound." Surprise! This myth was dispelled, new ways of training developed, athletes became bigger and stronger, and what were thought to be unsurpassable records fell away.

For most of the last century, drinking and driving went hand in hand. No one ever thought that this practice could be changed. After all, police officers and judges drank and drove too. Then came MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and a growing revulsion at the senseless deaths and injuries caused by drunk drivers. To our surprise, attitudes did gradually change, laws were strengthened and enforced, and a new social phenomenon, "designated drivers," came into being.

Making clever use of the returning veterans from the First World War, the tobacco industry had made smoking in public common and acceptable. People had a "right" to smoke wherever and whenever they wanted. Or so we thought. Slowly the mounting evidence of the dangers of secondhand smoke came into the public consciousness. And with it came an increasing awareness that non-smokers have rights too, the right to breath smoke-free air. Surprise! Now we have a new way of living, what once seemed an impossible scenario: addicted smokers huddles together, rain or shine, summer or winter, at the entrance of buildings, exercising their "right" to smoke.

After hundreds of years of slavery and another hundred years of Jim Crow, racism in America was entrenched and unchallenged. Then came the surprise: Montgomery, Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Civil Rights Movement. The struggle continues today, but the KKK is dead and new ways of thinking and behaving are taking hold.

For tens of thousands of years women have been oppressed and brutalized all around the globe. Gender roles were frozen. Less than a hundred years ago in the United States women could not vote, could not own property. They were themselves treated as men's property. This tragedy continues today in much of the world. But we are witnessing something new. Old attitudes are thawing. The Spirit is kindling a new appreciation of the full humanity and equality of women. Ever so slowly, but irreversibly, women are bing empowered, new ways of living and interacting are emerging.

On the international political level, right through the 1980's the Iron Curtain seemed to be just that, impregnable, the Cold War a costly, perilous, and permanent part of the 20^th century. Everyone, including the "experts," were amazed then when along came Lech Walesa and Solidarity in Poland, and the walls came tumbling down. A new world order replaces the old.

For over four hundred years the Roman Catholic Church had seen itself as a bulwark against Protestantism and the Enlightenment. Protestants were "heretics," and Modernism condemned. Surely at least in the Church things would remain the same. Wrong! God surprised us with good Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. The Church's doors and windows were opened to fresh ideas: altars were turned around, modern languages introduced at Mass, Protestants became "separated brethren." New ways of living and relating.

The attitudes and conventions of society are the sum of the choices and life styles of its individual members. Societies change when people change. And even the most intransigent among us can surprise us. As our personal fears and frailties, assumptions and compulsions, give way to new ways of living, society changes.

Isaiah 43:19

Good Friday and Easter Sunday are of singular significance for Christians. Christ's death and rising are reason for hope. On Good Friday His disciples had fled, His enemies were gloating, His life was ebbing away, yet Jesus continued to hope: "Father," He said, "into your hands I commend my spirit" (Lk 23:46). Easter Sunday surprised everyone. God rolled back the stone that sealed Jesus' tomb and opened for Him and His followers a whole new way of living.

Easter means that nothing is set in stone. The grave cannot hold us, sin cannot master us. We need never despair about the possibility, the probability, that God will surprise us. God is always raising us up to new ways of living.

Ronald Stanley, O.P.

For additional articles related to this topic see:
FATAL FLAWS
THEN CAME THE STORM
PERSEVERENCE
TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE
FORGIVE! ...AND FORGET?
YOU GOT AN ATTITUDE?
BE RECONCILED!
CONFESSION: THE BITTERSWEET SACRAMENT