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| Pere Marquette's chalice in Manresa Chapel |
I’m always somewhat hesitant to write on spiritual topics since, for each of us, our relationship to our Maker is a deeply personal, unique and intimate thing, something best confined to home and church. Or to the mountains and forests if that be your particular inclination. I know I personally feel particularly uncomfortable when people (and particularly political people) use a public forum to speak on religious matters and most particularly when asked to pray in a public forum, prayers that may not necessarily suit my individual sensibilities.
So I’m aware that this might seem sensitive but, after all, I figure I’m among friends here and I do only do this once a year after each Jesuit retreat. I do hope I don’t come across as being preachy. I really think of it more as sharing a personal journey, more often even a personal struggle with the truths of creation and creators. But since I assume most people struggle with these matters, I don’t feel that I’m stepping on toes when I share my own struggles, and sometimes my own epiphanies. Once a year in January I go to the Jesuits and use their retreat to meditate on my struggles. And more often than not, I have some sort of epiphany. Maybe my epiphanies will be of some use to others. So I write.
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Each retreat speaks to me in a very different way. Sometimes I get my stroke of inspiration in the first half hour. Sometimes it doesn’t happen until Sunday morning. Last year I went through the entire weekend without feeling anything. It was the first time I felt the retreat had been a waste of 40 hours. As I wrote last year, I did have a number of interesting conferences discussing the fine line that exists between art and pornography and an even finer line between pornography and piety, none of which resulted in any conclusions which was why I felt empty for the weekend. Then, in the final hour on Sunday as I’m leaving the papal Mass, I turn the corner and am astounded by the discovery of this gorgeous collotype hanging in the hallway. This was in the last five minutes of the retreat. Some follow up emails with the retreat director lead me to the world of the great Argentine artist Francisco Masseria and my love affair with Masseria and his beautiful portraits of children has lasted the whole year and is still going strong. So I have been touched every year. Last year it may not have happened until the last five minutes but it still happened. In fact, it may have been that much more powerful coming late in the event as the good vibes lasted an entire year this time. And it may have happened quite arbitrarily but finding the goodness in humanity through art proved to be the theme last year.
Thus I was more than pleasantly surprised to see the same theme extended into this year as Fr. Fennessy, Manresa’s resident art expert, directed our retreat this year with seven highly entertaining lectures on the prolific sacred art produced by Rembrandt. Detroit was one of only three cities in the world chosen for a special exhibit in 2013 on Rembrandt’s sacred art, particularly his "Head of Jesus." I went to the DIA to see the Head of Jesus exhibit last summer but unfortunately it was sold out. The manager of the DIA bookstore found a way for me to order a gorgeous print of the painting (which I have still yet to have framed on my still unadorned walls here on Kenrick Street.)
This year for the first time our conferences were held not in the chapel but in the lounge since that was the only way to accommodate Fr. Fennessy’s extensive slide presentations on Rembrandt’s art. The seven conferences on the master and how his work related to scripture and spirituality were so fantastic that it made me want to go back to college and pursue a degree in art history. The mysteries that he revealed in painting after painting were mind-boggling and I certainly wish I could have videotaped all seven sessions.
Last year I found my inspiration in the last ten minutes. This year I found it in the first ten minutes when Father made the rather casual passing remark, "The philosophers say that there is no problem in the world that cannot be solved except for man’s inability to sit alone in a room in silence." This was to emphasize the Jesuit tradition of the silent retreat as they always tell us in orientation, "God always speaks to us, but most of the time it’s in a whisper. So until we can eliminate all the noise from our lives, we will not be able to hear it."
But his quotation concerning solving all the world’s problems through silent meditation was, I later told Father on Saturday, a particularly bold statement. Since the mother of all world problems is peace, the philosopher is telling us that we can even have world peace if only we can all learn to sit alone in a room in silence so we can hear the message on how to achieve it. That is an incredible statement.
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Of course, everyone knows I’ve been an avid student of world peace ever since high school. I am one of those strange individuals who thinks of world peace far beyond the realm of an abstraction. I not only believe that it’s possible to achieve it, I believe we can do so within our lifetime. I wrote a number of papers about this in high school and college. In fact my senior thesis at Boston University film school was about using film and television not only as entertainment media but also as cultural tools to promote an answer to world peace. The paper was so well received by my professors that I graduated in the top of my class.
Then I went to USC to get the MBA and wrote extensively about using the free market system to propel us towards world peace. Boston University had been a very left-wing socialist school so I got a solid education in fixed market systems there, certainly enough to appreciate that though they may not be the panacea that some of its proponents claim they are, they are also most certainly not the evil that many of its opponents believe they are.
Then at USC I got educated on the other side of coin getting a solid indoctrination on the pros and cons of the free market system. I am probably the only candidate ever admitted to the MBA at what was then called "the arch-citadel of bourgeois capitalism – the University of Southern California," to have been admitted on the basis of an essay critical of capitalism and singing the praises of socialism. But I’m sure I was admitted based on the following sentence in my essay: "Though capitalism may not be such the perfect system that so many profiteers believe it is, socialism is also not the evil system its detractors claim it is. The truth is far more simple – both systems rise and fall on the strengths and demerits of the individuals working them."
And as I studied for the next two years, I came to understand that capitalism does not have to be the "greed is good" culture that the movie "Wall Street" so popularized in all in its cynicism about free market excesses. What always struck me as so curious is how everyone gets so bent out of shape over the impact of the morals of the film and television industries, but these same detractors don’t seem to get that when a company intentionally puts out a faulty product that they know will kill people, that this is such a much greater evil than any movie or TV program could possibly be.
So I was admitted to one of the top MBA programs in the country on the basis I presume of a very strong undergraduate transcript coupled with great recommendations and an admission essay that conveyed someone with a completely open mind about the pros and cons of the two competing economic systems. And I continued from there to study and write about how a bold new economic model that embodied the best of both the fixed and free market systems might be used to promote world peace.
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The basis for all this was the main lesson I learned from my two years of study there. It’s a lesson I’m not sure many people consider. The lesson is this: the free market system, commonly referred to as capitalism, is completely amoral. It is concerned only with the welfare of the individual without regard to the impact on others. Much to my surprise, I found this to be its great strength rather than a weakness. I said amoral, not immoral. Amoral does not mean lacking in morals as the word immoral does, but rather simply not taking morality into consideration. This means that an amoral system will work regardless of the morality of the participants. The fixed market systems, commonly known as socialism, are moral systems. Their concerns in an ideal world are the welfare of the entire community, without regard to the individual, or the polar opposite of capitalism.
That is their weakness. A fixed market system assumes that the participants will voluntarily make moral choices. This is fine in theory but it certainly does not work in practice. Since it assumes moral choices will be made, if moral choices are not made, it falls apart. In order to ensure moral choices are made, socialist societies form committees to make their laws rather than depending on the democratic process which is considered corrupt. This is all fine and good except if the committees become corrupt, it all falls apart. And according the Socrates, the committees will always become corrupt since it is human nature to be self-serving. As Socrates said - power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That is the strength of the democratic tradition. As flawed as it is, it does prevent absolute power and consequently absolute corruption.
If the flaw in socialism is that is a system that can only work when moral decisions are made by immoral people, then the strength of the free market is that it works regardless of whether the participants are moral or immoral. Certainly, freedom is a double-edged sword which allows people to engage in destructive acts as readily as constructive acts. But the strength of an amoral system is that, just as it grants the participants freedom to choose an immoral course, the same system also allows participants to pursue a moral course. There is nothing inherent in an amoral system that prevents or even discourages participants from doing the right thing. So it is far more likely in an amoral system that the moral thing will be done than with a system that by its very nature, according to Socrates, may intend to be moral but must eventually become corrupted.
The free market is populated by companies which are governed by shareholders who use the democratic process to vote management in and out. The shareholders in turn are regulated by the profit motive, which is driven 100% by consumers choosing to buy or not to buy a product on which they place a value. So the free market can only prevail when companies produce products that the consumer values. Contrary to the popular belief then that the free market is not only vulnerable to but rife with corruption, its amoral nature actually results in the greater chance of moral decisions being made.
This does not happen all the time and we have a free press which certainly does an outstanding job of informing us every time it does not happen. But as I said in my USC admissions essay, no system is any better than its participants. What I have learned as an MBA is that the free market system does nothing to discourage moral decisions even if sometimes some of the participants choose otherwise. That is its strength. It allows us the flexibility to choose to be moral. The rest is up to each one of us as individuals. It is not an easy aspiration. But it shouldn’t be that hard either. After all, most of the time the only thing on the line is money. Contrast this with dictatorships where prison, torture, and even death are often gambled. With my many years in industry, it has always impressed me how those of us living in free societies can be so inclined to make immoral decisions just for money. Most of the time it’s not even a matter of much money; often it’s really just a matter of not losing what we already have. So many of us will look the other way when we see corruption rather than chancing losing a raise or a promotion, or even just a basic livelihood. How petty of us when contrasted with others who risk their lives to do what’s right.
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This was my meditation during this year’s 40 hours of Ignatian spirituality. Fr. Fennessy planted the thought that first night and it stayed with me the whole weekend – how about getting back to a model for world peace? How about developing an economic structure that would actually incentivize moral decision making? If that could be accomplished, would peace not follow? The art history lessons revolving around Rembrandt just continued to reinforce this whole theme. Art is so beautiful and it teaches us so much about humanity. If we could all learn to think in terms of creating and sustaining beauty, would peace not follow?
And so it went through the whole weekend. It was my 20th retreat and the first time we were introduced to a special form of prayer called the Examen of Consciousness considered so powerful by Ignatius that he required his disciples to say this prayer twice each day. It is basically a 15 minute exercise that forces the individual, regardless of how much misfortune we think we have, to focus on the blessings and the positive. It is probably the ultimate exercise in sitting quietly in a room so we can hear God’s message to us, an exercise the philosopher promised us could solve any problem, including that of peace. Yes, if we could all just focus on our many blessings, would peace not follow? (Fr. Fennessy ultimately identified the philosopher as the French Enlightenment scholar Blaise Pascal.)
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It was on Sunday, the final morning, that we were given a lesson on one of Rembrandt’s most famous paintings, "Jesus At the Well." Why was that particular piece so important? Why did Rembrandt single it out? Well, contrary to what many fundamentalists believe - and many atheists too - is that Jesus never actually said he was the Messiah, the Son of God. Isn’t it ironic that both atheists and the uber-religious would share this one falsehood in common? Fundamentalists claim that the Bible is full of proof of the existence of God since Jesus, an historical figure, not only said he was God but proved it with his many miracles. Atheists will use the same scriptural passages to support their hatred for God, claiming as the ultimate act of arrogance that Jesus proclaimed himself as God. But Rembrandt wanted to remind us that this was not true. So he painted "Jesus At the Well," which was the ONLY passage in scripture where Jesus actually did say he was the Messiah. Jesus meets the adulteress at the well who, when she tells him that she has no husband, he counters by informing her that he knows she has had five husbands. They are alone so there is no one to witness this except her. But he does reveal himself to her so that she will mend her ways. He tells her that he is the Messiah. And then she goes into town to spread the word. Rembrandt paints an entire story into this work of art, a story that mediates a justification for her lifestyle choices. Of course Jesus forgives everyone, but he especially forgives her because, as Rembrandt portrays it (and many biblical scholars and art historians including Fr. Fennessy agree), she at least had good reasons, something that will appropriately mimic itself much later in Rembrandt’s own personal life. The artist reminds us again that this was the only time Jesus revealed himself. When he paints Pilate judging Jesus, we are again reminded that even at his trial Jesus never claimed to be God. He merely said, "I am the Truth." When Pilate said, "Then you are God," Jesus replied, "It is you who say so." When Jesus is on the cross, it is Pilate who orders the placard saying, "King of the Jews." When the high priests protest and say, "It should read ‘this man claimed to be King of the Jews," Pilate responds, "What I have written, I have written." No, we were reminded at retreat this year of one of the hidden truths in Christianity - Jesus never said he was God except at that one private meeting at the well with the adulteress. This is a truth that both atheists and religious extremists very much need to ponder. Thank you Rembrandt.
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Thu 1-16-14: A week has passed. After seven conferences meditating on Rembrandt’s art and personal and world peace (if you have the former, doesn’t the latter follow anyway?), we had the traditional papal Mass to send us on our way. I always enjoy this Mass since Fr. Marquette’s chalice is used at communion. They did not use it this year. But I still had a chance to stand next to it and admire it and even that little bit filled me with the spirit. Let’s see how long it lasts this year.
As I am leaving, my eyes fall upon this title in the bookstore, "The End of War: How Waging Peace Can Save Humanity, Our Planet, and Our Future" by of all people Captain Paul Chappell, U.S. Army, a veteran of Iraq. I was destined to see this book so I buy it.
Is there a more fitting way to wrap up this weekend?
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