For the week of Sunday, July 11, 2021
Dear Friends:
I spent the Fourth of July devouring a book published by the Minnesota Historical Society (of which I am a member) titled, A Good Time For The Truth. It explained immediately to me why there was this recent minor tempest in the Minnesota Legislature to attempt the transfer of the oversight of the MHS from an independent board to the state government. This book had the audacity to suggest that there isn't exactly one story to be told about the history of our state. It's an anthology of essays that describes the various experiences of Minnesotans from a variety of races, cultures, religions, and backgrounds, most of them other than mine. It is not an advocacy piece or a political screed. It is a collection of personal accounts of life here from people who matter every bit as much as I do. The premise of the book, as the Introduction states, is that "a society that systematically suppresses the stories and wisdom of certain groups cannot make the best decisions for a shared future. We need a future in this state that leaves no one out. We are interconnected, we are interdependent. In the long run, on our earth, we will thrive or fail together." If the MHS were a religious organization it may just as well have said, "We are catholic." We have lots of stories to tell!
It has long been important to me to recall that the most important story ever told to Christians is the life story (gospel) of Jesus Christ and that there is not one story in the Bible about that, but rather there are four of them: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. We hear each weekend at the liturgy from a holy gospel "according to..." one author or another. There are quite a number of overlapping stories in those gospels about Jesus, but all of those authors are different in terms of what they choose to notice or remember or comment about, in part because they were all originally writing to different audiences. The Spirit-inspired editors of our scriptures were content to just let all four of those accounts sit there on the pages alongside one another, without any one of them having to be the singular definitive story. We have to reckon with all of them, and that is a good thing.
Bible scholars have for centuries cautioned against an interpretive mistake known as invoking "a canon within the canon." The "canon" here simply refers to the whole of the biblical books, taken together. That caution is meant to remind us that there is no one book of scripture, and certainly no one gospel, which is the measure by which all the others are to be judged for accuracy or adequacy. If I have a preference for St. John's point of view (for example, portraying Jesus as a kind of know-it-all heavenly guy who always knew what was going to happen next and why), that doesn't get to trump St. Mark's point of view (where Jesus seemed bound by human understanding and on the cross cried out, "My God, why have you forsaken me?!"). We need both stories in order to truly understand.
In the same way, the European story of Minnesota history must stand alongside the Native American Indian story, and the African and Latino and Hmong and Somali stories, and they must all be allowed to be heard. No one of them gets to cancel out all the others. To attempt to do otherwise will only impoverish us all. This is both the agony and the ecstasy of being Catholic.
Fr. Mike
CLICK ON IMAGE BELOW FOR A VIDEO MESSAGE FROM FR. MIKE