Hopeful still: voices on the church in a time of scandal & fear.

Last year, in my summer of discontent with the church, Commonweal asked me to supply an essay on the notion of Catholic hope. I begged to be let off the hook--in 2004, was this not, like military intelligence, a particularly bitter oxymoron? Catholic hope?

How do I qualify for this task? When I describe myself as a good Catholic, I don't mean I'm good, notably, or obedient, particularly; nor do I possess special confidence in my faith or wisdom. I mean I am good at being a Catholic: by turns devout and dubious, by turns proud and ashamed of our church history and practice, by turns stingy and generous in my tithing. In these contradictions I haven't felt much conflict. As I haven't expected perfection in myself, neither have I imagined that a human institution like the church, even when full of grace, could or should be perfect, blameless, or unchanging.

Nonetheless, it would be disingenuous to share my thoughts on hope without signaling at the start some of my reasons for despair. Hailing, as I do, from the catholic wing of the Catholic Church, it's a struggle to limit myself to one paragraph.

Last year, I listened as the Massachusetts bishops announced their hope to unseat elected state officials who disagreed with the Catholic position on same-sex marriage. (I was married to my boyfriend a few weeks later.) Access to the Eucharist was being used as a weapon against those who publicly questioned church teaching. Closer to home, my family's beloved parish was being closed, its buildings sold. Our appeal to save it had been denied with a swiftness so blinding as to beggar description. The most nettlesome insult, and I blinked in disbelief at the spectacle, was Cardinal Bernard Law being installed in a sinecure in Rome the very week that some who were his flock in Boston recoiled at the closing of their local parishes, a direct result of his pastoral failures.

One Boston-area parishioner remarked to a National Public Radio reporter that she had continued faithfully to go to Mass and support the church during the sexual-abuse scandal, to the shock and scorn of her friends; she felt that to have her parish closed too was no reward for her loyalty. Trying to be charitable, one might say "Oh, the Vatican had a tin ear on that one," but this worry dogs me: Is it only a tin ear, or has it become a tin heart?

[section]

SOME TWENTY YEARS AGO, when I was making a pilgrimage to monasteries around the world, I secured a visa to enter Agion Oros, the sacred mountain, the third finger of Chalkidiki in northern Greece, where, it is said, no females are allowed, including nuns and female mosquitoes. (Where the breakfast eggs come from remains a holy mystery.)

With a couple of guys I met on the boat from Ouranopolis--"city of heaven," the departure port from mainland Greece--I hiked for five days, and visited eight or nine Greek and Russian Orthodox monasteries. The communities welcomed guests but extended the rubric of obedience, requiring pilgrims to work, to fast, to rise in the middle of the night for the services, to accept direction however inscrutable.

At the monastery of Philotheou, I was asked by an elderly monk to shift a six-foot pile of firewood from one corner of a storage shed to another, and then to sweep the corner I'd cleared. The task took about ninety minutes. When I was done, and my work was surveyed, I was asked to shift the pile again to a third corner, and to sweep the corner I had just filled with wood. I moved that wood pile four times--more slowly each time.

I was content to follow orders, anticipating some soft-focus, Zen-Hallmark epiphany, a shimmering new apprehension of my own goodness, or smallness, or something. If there was a grain of wisdom to be derived from the exercise, though, it escaped me. Perplexed, I merely washed up and went to sleep. I recall the exercise without regret.

I took on that make-work task in the name of hope: that I would be granted a spiritual benison. Twenty years later, who is to say that I remain empty-handed? What I retain is this question: Why didn't I speak? Why didn't I just ask: "Why do it this labor-intensive way? Why not just move the pile of wood out the door once--sweep--and then move it back?" Maybe the monk would have told me why. Maybe he would have laughed, shrugged, and said, "Do as you think best." Maybe he would have said: "In questioning is the beginning of wisdom."

Maybe the wisdom I was looking for then arrives only now, twenty years later.

[section]

IN A MEMOIR, CHILDREN'S BOOK WRITER Madeleine L'Engle remarked that love is not an emotion, but a policy. I think she means that it is both. Is the same true of hope? As pertains to the Catholic Church, the ginger-ale effervescence of hope has fled me these last few hard years. Is it possible to work, live, pray, while entertaining a kind of agnosticism about hope? Without the emotion of hope, is there any juice to the Platonic ideal of it?

When faith is weak, one can still do good works. One can pray. One can avoid evil. One can live as a believer even when one's faith is troubled. Even when one is feeling sour as old damp towels, one can endorse a policy of charity.

But hope seems a more fragile item, seems less susceptible to arousal simply by the longing for it. As a child, I hoped to find my own personal Narnia in a wardrobe. Hoping didn't deliver me a Narnia. Wiser, I can't hope for that sort of thing now.

In First Corinthians, St. Paul proposes that hope is one of the three things that last. Does it? My faith remains in God; my hope is not so much in the church as for the church, though these days I worry such a hope is an unwise investment of my spiritual coin. Does that make it more genuinely hope, or just more stupid?

In the abstract, I hold to these analogies: Faith is the present indicative: hope is future conditional. And love, the greatest of the three, breaks the bounds of grammar metaphors, supersedes language itself.

[section]

HOPE INVOLVES THINKING outside the envelope. The early domes, as I understand it, were equipped with an oculus, a heaven-gazing hole punched at the apex to let out the smoke of incense and burnt offerings, to let in the light and air. These days, the airless dome of beautiful blessed St. Peter's in Rome seems too much like a bell jar, a suffocating specimen case, hermetically sealed against change and growth, stifling life.

St. Paul memorably asserts: "Neither Jew nor Greek, free man nor slave: Christ is all." In the spirit of his confidence, why is it considered such a stretch to continue: "Neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight: Christ is all"? That there are so few exclusionary clauses in the gospel of love is the core of Christian hope for me. And that leads me to hope for women clergy, married clergy, gay clergy; hope for the abandonment of an archaic Byzantine court culture of secrecy.

[section]

SO, FEELING LIKE THIS, where and how will I spend my remaining years? As a Catholic praying in a Protestant pew? As a Catholic heretic endorsing a breakaway American Catholic Church? As a Catholic disenfranchised from his church by the bully bishops of eastern Massachusetts? Or as a gay married Catholic raising a family in the church, taking inspiration from Rosa Parks and refusing to leave the bus no matter how ugly the experience becomes, because it's my bus too, and I won't be intimidated into denying my children their Catholic birthright? (If the child asked his father for bread, would he give his child a stone?) Can I tolerate the epithet hypocrite lobbed my way, for raising my children in the faith while feeling betrayed by the church as I do? Or, out of pique, would I deny my children access to Holy Communion, as those bishops out west denied some? Could I act in such spite, deprive my own beloved children of spiritual oxygen? Clap a different sort of dome upon their lives?

What will I do?

I don't know; and hope, by nature, isn't predictive. But hope does have a proscriptive aspect: the presence of it informs behavior.

[section]

ONE EXAMPLE OF CATHOLIC HOPE TO WHICH I CLING: To the extent that I believe in the hereafter, as a metaphor and a promise, I believe I will be recognized as a Catholic when Jesus welcomes me home.

Are there three things that last? Faith, hope, and love? We're told so, but we must test it for ourselves. Faith can be codified canonically into a creed or a screed. Love can be both a sentiment and a policy. But hope is more private. It takes richest form in the most intimate of relationships: when one is alone, on a bus, reading a book, daydreaming, in prayer. Alone, or with another one, or maybe two. "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I."

There is hope.

Gregory Maguire is a novelist. His adult work includes Wicked, which inspired the Broadway musical of the same name, as well as Lost and Mirror Mirror. For children he has written Missing Sisters and seven volumes in the popular Hamlet Chronicles.