“[R]ecalling the ‘dangerous memory of Mary’ challenges depictions of Mary’s life that attempt to neutralize its radical implications for pushing against injustice and its call to stand in compassionate solidarity with all who suffer….It is this dangerous memory of La Virgen of Guadalupe that empowers nos/otrx to push against all that keeps us from recognizing the presence of God in ourselves, and each other.”
A refreshing lecture from Dr. Pearl Maria Barros and Catholic Women Preach!
First, I compare this to what I was told in my small, rural Diocese about how women should communicate in a male-lead organization: “Use silence.” and “Be brief.”
Second, I envy the ease with which Dr. Barros talks about Mary as a presence in the life of her family, growing up. I didn’t learn to speak about elements of my theological imagination as actual people, and I see that this is taken by some Catholics as a sign of ‘real faith’. I didn’t grow up speaking Christian as my mother tongue, though, and so I have a hard time talking about saints, Mary, Jesus, Joseph as actual persons in the way that I am an actual person. This manner of speaking would have developed in childhood, and then cradle Catholics carry it forward into adulthood, and it becomes ‘insider lingo’ or code through which the natives identify themselves. When I hear Dr. Barros talk about Mary as she does here, it is so jarring and feels like deliberate deception on her part.
SPEAKING CATHOLIC AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
I was told, “We’ve never had anyone like you” and indeed, my Diocese didn’t know (and wouldn’t listen) to how important it is for a new Christian to be able to speak about ‘Christ’. I tried to explain several times — for the benefit of myself but also other future converts — but monolingual people couldn’t understand. Like many people who’ve inhabited only one language from birth, they laughed at someone trying to speak a new language, never having gone through that difficult, humbling experience themselves.
Is it mandatory though for adult converts to have to pick up this way of speaking about the Mother of God or Christ the Redeemer or Source, as an actual friend in this world? I actually had so much frustration with cradle Catholics who talked to me like this, as though the doorway to Christ consciousness and intuiting the meaning of ‘Mary’ could only be conveyed in this way.
MYERS-BRIGGS
This insistence on concretizing one’s experience in a particular way is what Myer’s Briggs ‘sensors’ do. They need to hear, feel, see, taste and touch something for it to be real. They distrust anything that can’t be measured or clearly categorized. They are bottom up people.
I am an intuitive person and I need time to get the Big Picture and then use points 25, 37, 45 and 61 to make leaps of insight into what points 22, 39, 41 and 59 might look like, and then what the Big Picture might be. I am top down; a global thinker. For me, connecting the dots brings pleasure and joy and satisfaction. Rather than receive knowledge from my senses, I construct my own theological imagination. To do this, I need to read and then discuss things with others. This is why I value good homilies and like to read. The Eucharist and Reconciliation — those Sacramental rituals — appeal to sensors, but aren’t necessary for intuitive people. Upwards of seventy-five percent of people are sensors. Does 75% of humanity feel these tangible, touchable connections to God are useful, or even necessary? When it comes to the Eucharist, what matters to me is the visualization in my head as I approach, and having put myself ‘in the presence of God’ during the preceding prayers. I also have enjoyed learning the history and significance of each part of the Mass. A lot of the older church buildings were designed to be sacred spaces, after all. The Mass is performed everyday all over the world. That’s communion.
WHO REALLY BELONGS?
Abortion, and how people are having sex, and with who, is just not something I give a lot mental space to. I will post soon about my humble and semi-formed understanding of the metaphysics of life and why Canadian society should have a conversation about how easy abortion is, and the impact that has on society. Some Catholics have a political vocation and that’s part of the diversity of Creation; but it’s not me. My politics is my politics but my Catholicism is interior, spiritual, metaphysical. As for morality, after five years of observing, I think the Church should teach better and judge less. Am I a real Catholic? Who decides?
Back to Sacramentals, and what that means for intuitive Catholics. I don’t claim to “believe”; I enjoy trying to understand. The process of deepening my intuitive sense of how Scripture and Tradition and the saints and the CCC and what the visible Church is doing in the culture ‘feeds’ me. Am I Catholic? What I learn influences my activities in the public sphere, as well. Do Catholics have freedom of conscience? Who decides what I do with the fruits of my Catholic-Christian theological imagination? Is spirituality the same as the moral life? I appreciate Catechism of the Catholic Church for its exposition of the / a Moral Life, although it’s grating when those charged with guarding the deposit of Christian faith lapse into partisanship. That one-sidedness from ordained institutional men is what might cause ‘secular people’ to say, “I’m spiritual, and a good person but not certainly not religious.”
TYPE KNOWLEDGE AS A SET OF GLASSES TO ACCURATELY VIEW OTHERS
About ‘type’, I’ve noticed in my time as a tutor of IELTS that I am a much more useful teacher for learners who share my intuitive way of understanding. I know which dot they are missing in their understanding; we don’t have to be like sensors and start from “the beginning”. With students who are sensors, I’ve learned to be more systematic and explicit. Similarly, in Church environments, I’ve noticed that those with a sensing style feel that I’m “not Catholic”, or “don’t believe what the Church teaches”. They need to see me doing certain things or hearing me speaking in a particular way in order to “judge” me. I’ll have to leave the Myers-Briggs ‘judging vs perceiving’ for another post. There is nothing so toxic to a Catholic intuitive-perceiver as a sensing judger; and bureaucracies are where sensing-judgers do well. Lord have mercy on us intuitive-perceiving types, especially if we are female.
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
I hope that as the Canadian Church reconsiders what RCIA looks like, they take into consideration individual differences in temperament, moral matrix, and more. I think the movement to write the Canadian RCIA should be lay-driven, by a mix of cradle Catholics and converts and include representatives of all the types of people they hope to teach. I hope they allow converts some time to learn to ‘speak Christian’ because we have a lot to add to the collective theological imagination.
Back to that first point about women and communication in the Catholic Church, I never seriously considered myself a feminist until I became Catholic in a rural, conservative Diocese. I took my freedom and human dignity for granted until my baptism, and I am still in recovery. The Church teaches that ‘all is grace’, and I guess when some autocratic Father wants to take away your everything, on a whim, based on his personal imaginary Jesus, that is what he (He?) will do. As I said, I am still in recovery.
DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
I will write more about what a feminist therapist put in front of me when I decided take up the churlishly-delivered suggestion by a Luddite priest that I “get some counselling”, in 2019. Check out Ken Wilbur’s meta-theory of all the major theories of emotional, spiritual and human development. It is important to understand how pervasive medieval consciousness still is in the Church, and everywhere. With Big Tech and God-like technology hacking our still-Reptilian brains and souls, institutions clinging to medieval consciousness leave humans open to be downgraded.
The Spirit laid out decades ago a clear (collective) path to conscious-raising in the Mystical Body of Christ, that is — as Dr. Pearl Maria Barros says above, ‘learning to recognize Christ in each other, and in ourselves’.