by Joseph Stoutzenberger
A professor of mine at Temple University, David Harrington Watt, insisted that it is important in scholarship to let readers know who we are and what has influenced the positions that we are expressing. In my writing, I have always stayed away from talking about myself. If I wrote about, for instance, Catholic morality, I wanted what I wrote to be about Catholic morality and not about me and my understanding of it. I was never interested in blogs, either in writing one or reading those of other people. I tended to stay away from books in which people talked about themselves too much.
Then I was asked by iPub Global Connection publishers to write a series of blogs in conjunction with a book of mine they were publishing. The editor said that a blog should be personal and related to themes in the book. I decided to give it a try. It provided me an opportunity to look back on my life and appreciate how certain experiences shaped my point of view. For instance, my mother raised her six children Catholic. My father, on the other hand, never attended church in his life except for a couple of his children’s weddings. I heard in school that only baptized Catholics went to heaven. I knew my father to be a good man; except for not going to church, I couldn’t imagine any sin he might have committed. The thought of my dad going to hell was totally preposterous to me. When I heard that heaven was reserved for Catholics, it registered as some kind of abstraction that had nothing to do with real life. When Vatican Council II later affirmed that “all people of good will” were members of the people of God, my dad included, I thought, “Of course. Welcome to the real world.”
A few years ago, Bishop John Dolan co-edited a book about Catholicism and suicide. In it, he writes about his own brother’s death by suicide. This personal experience surely influenced his sensitivity to this painful topic. Church teaching declares suicide to be wrong, but Dolan and the other contributors to the book make it clear that it is essential to pay attention to the persons involved. A reality such as a person taking his or her life does not fit neatly into a simple moral pronouncement. Suicide is not an abstract concept but a desperate act by a hurting flesh and blood person.
A woman friend of mine took seriously Catholic teaching on artificial birth control. She followed the natural family planning deemed acceptable by the church to avoid pregnancy. Due to her irregular menstrual cycle, she discovered that only during a few days a month would sexual intercourse be “safe” from possible pregnancy, and even that was not failsafe. Following the NFP method had two results for her and her husband. For one, she became pregnant anyway with a fourth child whom she and her husband welcomed and loved dearly; but it strained the family’s finances and caused her to go to work in the evenings soon after giving birth to supplement the family income. The other children had little time with either parent, and spent a good deal of time on their own, often getting into trouble. A second result of following the method was that there developed tension between husband and wife. She was the one who took her temperature daily, kept tabs of the calendar, and resisted any expression of physical intimacy for fear that it would lead to another pregnancy.
The son of a Catholic friend of mine went away to college. Three months later, the son told his father that he discovered that he is gay and that he has become close friends with another male student. Initially his father disowned his son and told him not to come home for Thanksgiving. By Christmas, the father relented and invited his son home and even said he could bring his friend with him. He stepped back from all the notions of homosexuality that he had harbored and came to see the reality of who his son is, which transformed his perspective on sexual identity.

In all of these situations, people’s perspectives were influenced by their experiences and circumstances. David Watt is right; it’s important to realize that our experiences color our perspective. Whether we admit it or not, truth claims are filtered through the prism of real-life experiences, our own and those of others. Abstractions have their place, but they are not meant to be straightjackets. Real life is complicated. We called another Temple professor a “bread and baloney man.” The joke was, give him a sandwich, and he was happy spending his days and nights pouring over ancient texts. He was brilliant, but we wondered if he might not also learn something by going out in the light of day and mingling with real people. An essential step in the search for truth is probing who we are and what has shaped our point of view and hearing from others about theirs. Hold abstract principles up to the light of reality; balance the objective with the subjective. Real life is meeting. The medieval Sufi poet Rumi offers an invitation to celebrate the richness that comes from openness to diversity and the uniqueness that is always part of real-life experiences: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”














