[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]saying, What profiteth? and it all makes sense. ). A
worker s secular life gains coherence through his persist-
ing connection to the sacred. His imaginative life even
draws on the stained glass windows of the church he
attends, the illustrations of the books his children read
in Sunday school: I can put myself over there [in an-
cient Palestine] in my head I ll be listening to Jesus
give one of His talks, along with all the other folks. No,
I hadn t thought how I d look be dressed [I had
asked]. I guess I m invisible to all of them; that s how it
goes [in his thinking], or else they d all notice me. In a
humble, stoic, persevering life a mind crosses time and
space to find the sacred, bring it home to a particular
secularity.
Not that such a person is, to use Emerson s phrase,
representative man. He is the first to distinguish him-
self (not in a self-serving manner) from many of his
37
CHAPTER I
coworkers and neighbors: Different people have differ-
ent things they think of in their spare time, when
they ve got time to think. Here, unpretentiously, he
knows to skirt the temptation to generalize; rather, he
aims to uphold a concreteness worthy of Husserl s re-
peated phenomenological assertion of human particu-
larity. Still, he makes it amply clear that in the late
twentieth century he belongs, to a significant degree, in
the company of those who died in the first century.
Sometimes, when he confesses to his failures, to fall-
ing short of his spiritual ideals, to a quiet perplexity at
what he sees around him (on television, in movies, in
newspaper and magazine advertisements), I dare link
him in my thoughts to Pietro da Morrone, the Bene-
dictine hermit monk who was summoned to Rome in
1294, turned into a pope Celestino V. In no time (a
mere five months) he had abdicated, his luminous in-
wardness and piety, his lifelong sanctity, no help at all
in dealing with the demands of papal politics. When a
General Electric factory worker struggles to keep his
faith, to live as Jesus did, at least some of the time,
while the rest of the time accommodating to his situa-
tion in a neighborhood, a nation, he is, with respect to
such efforts, not unlike that only pope who ever quit his
job: Celestino V left the Vatican to return to his her-
mit s life as a monk (and, soon thereafter, die). I win, I
lose, that factory worker acknowledges with a shrug,
and with no claim to originality in the use of those four
words, even as one suspects that the weary pope of the
thirteenth century had a similar line of reasoning cross
his mind as he departed the big city for the sanctuary
(the sanctity) of the countryside.
38
IN THE BIBLICAL TRADITION
It is no accident that the central character in Silone s
Bread and Wine, Pietro Spina, is named after the Pietro
da Morrone who became briefly the pope. In the novel
Pietro Spina is a revolutionary on the run, hiding in the
garb of a priest. The novel, in fact, renders brilliantly
and affectingly the mix of idealism and pragmatism that
even a principled warrior in the fight for social change
must summon in his daily life. Irony abounds in the
story: the hero s soulful decency, no matter that he is a
hunted man, declared a criminal by the state; indeed,
his sanctity, no matter his full commitment to the secu-
lar he is an ardent socialist who wants a better world
for humble workers, near penniless farmers. Pietro is
hiding when he dresses as a priest, but the reader readily
realizes that all too many real priests lack the impres-
sive spiritual qualities Silone has given his protagonist.
An utterly secular materialist bears himself nobly, earns
his right to a Roman collar so often betrayed in history,
as Pope Celestino knew, and as Silone first came to
know as a fifteen-year-old lad, when a severe earthquake
did terrible damage to Italy s Abruzzo region where he
lived, the son of a peasant. In a mere eight seconds fifty
thousand people were killed, and thousands more, al-
ready poor, were reduced to even further vulnerability.
Under such circumstances the local bishop and his en-
tourage promptly fled to safer territory, a secular jour-
ney, and the young boy, Tranquilli Secondo (Ignazio
Silone is a pseudonym), watched that departure with
surprise, consternation, disgust. Here, he knew, was a
kind of lived secularism; here, as Dorothy Day once put
it, was Christ betrayed as He has been again and
again by clergymen, never mind those who attack and
39
CHAPTER I
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plkajaszek.htw.pl
