Shining light on sexual abuse

Films generally rely on drama to attract the attention of viewers. And with viewers’ attention spans becoming shorter and shorter, a drama like Spotlight is a rarity.

The film tells the story of the investigation by a team at the Boston Globe newspaper, beginning in 2001, of cases of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the Boston diocese.

 

 

That investigation took many months of sustained, difficult work. And the film is faithful in showing the careful, persistent work that journalism requires, especially in uncovering a story of such magnitude.

Marty Baron, an outsider—“an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball”—arrives from Miami as the new editor of the Globe and assigns a team of journalists to investigate allegations against John Geoghan, an unfrocked priest accused of molesting more than 80 boys.

The paper’s “spotlight” team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative unit in the United States, is led by editor Walter “Robby” Robinson and includes reporters Michael Rezendes, Matt Carroll and Sacha Pfeiffer. They interview victims and try to unseal sensitive documents.

They run into many roadblocks. The cases brought against various priests were settled in mediation, and the information about those cases is sealed and unavailable.

The culture of Boston is infused with the sense that the Catholic Church is an important and necessary player in the city’s life. Robinson keeps hearing warnings to back off. The church does many good things; you don’t want to spoil that.

As part of their investigation, they interview some victims who are now adults. These are the most moving scenes in the film. While the abuse happened when they were young boys and they are now grown men, it’s clear their souls are broken. We get a glimpse of track marks on one man’s arm. Another man explains that he’s now sober but struggled for years with addiction.

A greater damage to these victims, however, is that the abuse helped destroy their faith in God. Even Rezendes, the reporter, who, like most of the others, grew up Catholic, says that while he hasn’t gone to church in years, he always thought he would return. Now, it’s clear, he won’t.

Pfeiffer, while going door to door, encounters the retired priest who had molested one of the men she had talked to earlier. He admits what he did, then adds, “but I never felt gratified myself,” as if that made it OK.

The film is especially good in its attention to detail. It gets so much right about journalism—how diligent reporters must be to obtain multiple sources, how they have to write everything down, how every piece of information is important.

In one scene, Rezendes is talking with a lawyer named Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) about addenda to court documents. Garabedian says, “You don’t know the half of it.” Like a good reporter, Rezendes says, “Tell me the half of it.” And that leads to a key piece of evidence in breaking the story.

When they’ve turned in their initial story (they end up publishing over 600), Baron, the editor-in-chief, is copyediting the piece and says, “Too many adjectives.”

The film also shows that Robinson had a chance to break this story five years earlier but buried it and didn’t pursue the information he received.

Spotlight is an outstanding film that shows the power of the press in exposing the injustices of powers, like the Catholic Church, that try to hide their sins “for the greater good.”

A possible spiritual classic

Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and until recently the editor of Poetry magazine, has written what may become a spiritual classic, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, $24, 182 pages).

 

He opens his book with a four-line stanza from one of his uncompleted poems:

My God my bright abyss

into which all my longing will not go

once more I come to the edge of all I know

and believing nothing believe in this:

He closes the book with the same four lines, with one exception: the colon after “this” becomes a period.

Thus, as a good poet does, he captures the paradoxical journey of faith he is on, at “the edge of all I know,” looking forward. Then, at the end, “believing nothing believe in this,” a sure but tentative faith.

In a preface, Wiman says he “wanted to write a book that might help someone who is at once as confused and certain about the source of life and consciousness as I am.”

The book is filled with aphorisms that address this paradox of faith and doubt. These ring true but often demand rereading and reflection. Early on he writes, “Inspiration is to thought what grace is to faith: intrusive, transcendent, transformative, but also evanescent and, all too often, anomalous.”

The writing throughout is, understandably, poetic, as in this description of his origins: “I grew up in a flat little sandblasted town in West Texas: pumpjacks and pickup trucks, cotton like grounded clouds, a dying strip, a lively dump, and above it all a huge blue and boundless void I never really noticed until I left, when it began to expand alarmingly inside of me.”

Wiman’s language about faith is refreshing because it does not employ the usual insider phrases. He often contrasts faith and belief, noting that “faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change.”

Belief, on the other hand, is more intellectual and superficial. “How astonishing it is,” he writes, “the fierceness with which we cling to beliefs that have made us miserable, or beliefs that prove to be so obviously inadequate when extreme suffering—or great joy—comes.”

Another theme under the rubric of paradox is the co-mingling of God’s presence and absence. Wiman writes: “If grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.”

In 2005, Wiman learned that he had an incurable cancer of the blood, which he calls “as rare as it is unpredictable, ‘smoldering’ in some people for decades, turning others to quick tender.” Despite frequent hospitalizations and a bone marrow transplant, he wrote a book of essays, an excellent poetry collection (Every Riven Thing) and a translation of poetry by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, all while editing Poetry.

He also wrote this book in sections over a period of years. Some parts are written during the early stages of cancer treatment, when he faced a more immediate chance of dying. He describes this with incisive feeling: “It is qualitatively different when death leans over to sniff you, when massive unmetaphorical pain goes crawling through your bones, when fear … ices your spine.”

Wiman weaves in excerpts from poems from a variety of sources, including some of his own. And one of his recurring themes is the affinity of poetry and faith. He points to the importance of imagination in experiencing God: “Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us.”

He describes a real poem as having “singular music and lightning insight,” while a living god “is not outside of reality but in it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive.”

This is why, he writes later, “poetry is so powerful, and so integral to any unified spiritual life: it preserves both aspects of spiritual experience, because to name is to praise and lose in one instant. So many ways of saying God.” There’s that paradox again, something you’ll find in poetry and in the Christian mystics.

However, Wiman does not see poetry as a replacement for faith. He notes that “modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone,” but for him, “Christ … is a shard of glass in your gut.”

He says he is a Christian because of Jesus’ cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Christ’s suffering, he writes, “shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering,” and “Christ’s compassion makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death, even—possible.” And he is a Christian, he writes, “because I can feel God only through physical existence, can feel his love only in the love of other people.”

Wiman does more than record thoughts unconnected to his life. He writes of his experiences of this love through his wife and his twin daughters, who have helped carry him through seven years of cancer.

In the end, he concludes that at the heart of faith is “acceptance of all the gifts that God, even in the midst of death, grants us.”

My Bright Abyss is a book of depth and insight that demands careful reading and reflecting. I will certainly be rereading it more than once in the years ahead.

A scientist's experience of heaven

While many see compatibilities between science and religion, many others see conflict. An Oct. 15 article in Newsweek, “My Proof of Heaven” by Eben Alexander, tries to bridge that conflict in a dramatic way.

Alexander is a neurosurgeon who has taught at Harvard Medical School and other universities. He tells of an experience he had four years ago when he awoke with an intense headache. “Within hours,” he writes, “my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down.” Doctors at the local hospital determined that he had contracted a rare bacterial meningitis that had penetrated his cerebrospinal fluid, and the bacteria were eating his brain.

For seven days he lay in a deep coma, and his higher-order brain functions were totally offline. Then, as his doctors weighed whether or not to discontinue treatment, his eyes popped open.

Alexander writes about his experience as a scientist because he knows how stories like his sound to skeptics. He notes that while he considered himself a Christian before this happened, it was “more in name than in actual belief.”

But his experience changed that. He writes: “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well.” He describes “a larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, precoma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.”

Alexander is not the first to describe such an experience, but he is one of the few who does so as a scientist, and a neurosurgeon at that. And, as far as he knows, no one before him ever traveled to this dimension “(a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation.”

This is important because the chief arguments against near-death experiences “suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient or partial malfunctioning of the cortex.”

His cortex wasn’t malfunctioning; it wasn’t even functioning. “According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind,” Alexander writes, “there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.”

He goes on to describe his experience, with frequent disclaimers about language not being able to adequately capture what happened.

The message that “went through [him] like a wind” had three parts. He summarizes them thus:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Regardless of Alexander’s science credentials, most nonbelievers, I imagine, will simply deny the truthfulness of his experience, believing (yes, having faith) that some nondivine explanation will eventually emerge.

Many Christians, I imagine, will also deny his message because it’s too inclusive. It lets people off the hook. It doesn’t punish evildoers.

Alexander writes that the universe he experienced in his coma is “the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.”

I’ve read (and heard) other accounts like Alexander’s, and each time I feel encouraged. But I also know it comes down belief. While science feeds our knowledge, what we decide about the universe and our place in it comes down to faith.

The juvenilization of American Christianity

The June issue of Christianity Today devotes several articles to “The Juvenilization of the American Church.” Thomas E. Bergler’s long cover story, “When Are We Going to Grow Up?” presents a history of American Evangelicals reaching out to youth through organizations such as Youth for Christ and Young Life. He notes the success of this outreach but cautions about unintended consequences: “Juvenilization tends to create a self-centered, emotionally driven and intellectually empty faith.”

Throughout its history, the Christian church has adapted the gospel message to its culture, with varying degrees of success. At the same time, such efforts have been criticized as either watering down the message or presenting a false one that doesn’t adequately challenge people to follow Jesus.

White evangelicals, in particular, writes Bergler, found success in adapting the gospel message to the culture, especially to young people: “It fared equally well in the buttoned-down 1950s and the psychedelic 1960s.”

Meanwhile, in the wider culture, the meaning of American adulthood underwent change. Instead of encouraging responsibility, self-denial and service to others, a new “psychological adulthood” encourages the individual’s needs and wants above obligations and attachments to relationships.

He quotes sociologist James Côté, who says the seven deadly sins have been redefined: “pride has become self-esteem … lust has become sexuality … envy is now channeled into initiative and incentive … sloth has become leisure.”

Bergler refers to the National Study of Youth and Religion by Christian Smith and other researchers, which found that the majority of American teenagers are inarticulate about religious matters. Smith labels their pattern of religious beliefs as Moralistic Therapeutive Deism.

This kind of adolescent narcissism, Bergler writes, has come to typify many Americans today: “God, faith and the church all exist to help me with my problems. Religious institutions are bad; only my personal relationship with Jesus matters.”

In that same issue, several other writers respond to Bergler’s article. John Ortberg, a megachurch pastor, mostly agrees with Bergler but calls the issue a missiological one of contextualization. He asks, How do we contextualize the gospel to a youth-worshiping culture?

He also notes that we need help defining just what spiritual maturity is.

David Kinnaman, a researcher and president of Barna Group, says we under- and overestimate the power and shape of the next generation. He notes that “typical parents are just as ‘addicted’ to media and technology as are their teenagers, just in different ways.” He says they’ve interviewed teenagers who complain that their parents’ use of technology inhibited quality family time.

David Zahl, a cultural critic, agrees with Bergler’s diagnosis but says “it misses the freedom at the heart of the gospel.”

He makes the point that we don’t grow out of spiritual adolescence by trying to grow up. “The Christian religion,” he writes, “is not ultimately about the Christian, either adolescent or mature—it is about the Christ.”

The question Bergler raises is an important one: Are we too immature? One of the better resources I’ve found in discussing spiritual maturity is Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. He posits that we create an ego structure in the first half, then “fall upward” in the second half as we search for meaning.