Got to Kick at the Darkness “'til It Bleeds Daylight”

Got to Kick at the Darkness “’til It Bleeds Daylight”

Christopher Duncanson-Hales
cduncansonhales@trentu.ca

I have to say as a lay Catholic theologian living in Northern Ontario, I am very conflicted by the selection of our new pope, Francis. In many respects, Pope Francis epitomizes the contradictions and conflicts I see in the pews today. Often I remain silent when others echo the socially conservative ethos of the Church hierarchy. One of my professors at Saint Paul University in Ottawa commented that as he looked back on his life as a priest, missionary, and academic, he thought what today’s church needed more than anything else is an ecumenical movement between ‘Left/Progressive’ and the ‘Right/Conservative’ Catholics.

I see this contradiction in Francis’ humility and commitment to the poor in tension with his vitriolic and over-the-top attacks on same-sex marriage in Argentina. This pope’s emphasis on his role as ‘Bishop of Rome,’ with no reference to ‘supreme pontiff’ or other imperial language or trappings of the papacy, has the potential to relativize the power of the papacy balanced by the needs and wisdom of the local church. That said, as a lay, underemployed theologian, I feel pretty marginalized and isolated in my local church. But I continue to hope.

In an interview given to Turin’s La Stampa and reported in the New Yorker, then Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope Francis expressed this contradiction as

a tension between the center and the periphery . . . . We must get out of ourselves and go toward the periphery. We must avoid the spiritual disease of the Church that can become self-referential: when this happens, the Church itself becomes sick. It’s true that accidents can happen when you go out into the street, as can happen to any man or woman. But if the Church remains closed onto itself, self-referential, it grows old. Between a Church that goes into the street and gets into an accident and a Church that is sick with self-referentiality, I have no doubts in preferring the first.

A Church that goes out into the street, is going to be full of the same contradictions we find in the pews, saints and sinners, progressives and conservatives, Catholic Worker and Opus Dei. But hopefully, as Francis notes, accidents do happen, and it is in these unexpected accidents that the Holy Spirit moves.

A Church that goes out into the street, warts and all, lives in the light. A Church that “remains closed onto itself, self-referential” is cloistered in darkness.

A Church that goes out into the street; that lives in the day may sometimes take a road that I am not comfortable with, or I may vehemently disagree with, such as the stand against marriage equality.

But this too is in the street, in the light, for all to see. When the Church enters the debate in the public square, then I, who, with the whole people of God, am also the Church, can challenge and in good conscience, hold the Church to account.

As the apostle Paul reminds us, we are “all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:5-9 NRSV).

Francis gave us an indication of what this movement into the streets might mean for the church during the homily delivered at his inaugural Mass. “Today too, amid so much darkness, we need to see the light of hope and to be men and women who bring hope to others. To protect creation, to protect every man and every woman, to look upon them with tenderness and love, is to open up a horizon of hope; it is to let a shaft of light break through the heavy clouds; it is to bring the warmth of hope!”

Our hope, then, will not be found in Pope Francis, but in the light that is found in the streets, “set against the horizon of God, which has opened up before us in Christ.” Or, as Bruce Cockburn reminds us, “nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight—Got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.”

Christopher Duncanson-Hales is currently living in Sudbury, Ontario as an independent scholar of theology and religion and an itinerant University instructor throughout Ontario.

About the Author: Jason Craige Harris

Jason Craige Harris is a third-year master's candidate in Black Religion in the African Diaspora and a Marquand merit scholar at Yale Divinity School, where he was recently awarded the Mary Cady Tew Prize for exceptional ability in history and ethics. He earned a bachelor’s in religion and African-American studies from Wesleyan University and received the Giffin Prize for excellence in the Study of Religion, Spurrier Award for ethics, and an official citation for academic excellence issued by the 2009 Connecticut General Assembly. As a fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Harris wrote a senior honors thesis analyzing theological anthropologies along political and racial fault lines in U.S. Evangelical history. His research and writing are principally concerned with black life, Christianity, (post)colonialism, violence, feminisms, critical social theory, and ultimately planetary flourishing. Concerns arising from the academic study of Africana religion, philosophy, and ethics particularly inform his inquiries. Through an interdisciplinary framework, he probes the systems of values that undergird dominant epistemological, rhetorical, cultural, and religious forms to determine to what extent, if at all, they conduce to robust conceptions of justice. With an eye toward contemporary social problems, he considers the religious strategies and visions that historically marginalized peoples have created to respond to conditions of living and being delimited by restrictive understandings of race, gender, religion, and nation. He is a general editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Networks, where, among other things, he helps to facilitate conversations on race and postcolonial/liberation theologies. As a Christian minister and budding public intellectual, Harris seeks and invites others into more holistic and attuned, less violent and constrained, ways of narrating the self and the divine. Areas of Interest and Research:   African American Religious Studies  Africana Philosophy African American Moral, Social, and Political Thought African American Intellectual History Liberation and Postcolonial (Christian) Thought  Philosophies of Liberation Contemporary Religious Thought Race, Gender, and American Christianities  Evangelicalisms and Pentecostalisms Histories of Race Discourse in the Americas (Christian) Social Ethics  Critical Social Theory/Social Philosophy Theories of Race, Gender, and Power Method and Theory in the Study of Religion He is deeply committed to a praxis in which dualities of mind/heart, mind/body, and emotions/thought are consistently challenged and replaced with integrated models of selfhood that cherish self-multiplicity - the point at which the postcolonial becomes self-consciously embodied. He also enjoy taking walks in the coolness of the day, singing, laughing, and writing poetically and theoretically on his lived experience, whatever helps to bring more beauty and justice into the world.

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