Dr. Seuss condemned: grinches go after de Mello

The final blow came on August 23 with a CDF "notification" that the writings of Father Anthony de Mello have been examined and in part found wanting - "incompatible with the Catholic faith" and a cause of "grave harm." As one Jesuit wag put it, going after de Mello, the very popular Indian Jesuit retreat master who died suddenly of a heart attack at age fifty-six in 1987, is a little like condemning Dr. Seuss!

In my judgment, Father de Mello's Sadhana: A Way to God (Doubleday) remains the best Catholic "how to" book for someone looking for instruction in methods of prayer. Some of de Mello's early texts, the CDF acknowledges, "can be helpful in achieving self-mastery, in breaking the bonds and feelings that keep us from being free, and in approaching with serenity the various vicissitudes of life." But overall de Mello's writings are said to exhibit a "progressive distancing from the essential contents of the Christian faith." Particularly objectionable, it is alleged, are his concept of the unknowability and cosmic impersonality of God, his sense of Jesus "as a master alongside others," a preference for "enlightenment," criticism of the church, and an excessive focus on this life rather than life after death. Bishops were ordered to ensure that the offending texts are withdrawn from sale and not reprinted.

The Vatican is bewildered by de Mello's emphasis on "awareness" and "interior enlightenment" over against Scripture, doctrine, and belief - and puts the worst possible construction on de Mello's awkward formulations. His stress on awareness, I would say, tries to get at the difference between theory and experience, external conformity and interiorized faith, or the letter of the law versus the spirit.

De Mello's insight into the liberating effects of awareness derives from his training in Buddhist vipissana ("insight") meditation. When I was in Bombay in the summer of 1975, I made an appointment with a Mr. Guenka, who was de Mello's insight meditation teacher, to see if I could arrange a retreat with him. No luck; our schedules did not allow it. (Guenka was a successful entrepreneur, of crockery and dairy products, who gave insight retreats on the side; he was, I felt, the only interesting and believable guru I met on my six-week tour of India.) It would be another decade before I was able to make a ten-day Buddhist insight retreat (in Barre, Massachusetts), which consisted of eight hours of silent meditation a day. It was one of the most enriching experiences I have ever had - it cleared the mental and emotional passages, opened up the whole psychophysical system. I came away with a deepened recognition of how, in G.M. Hopkins's words, the Holy Spirit "over the bent world broods."

The key to understanding de Mello's writings (largely story collections) is to have made one of his retreats. Otherwise, since he borrowed freely from other religious traditions, especially the Sufi tales of Idries Shah, he will be misconstrued. The Vatican complains of "ambiguity" and "perplexity" in interpretation. But of course. De Mello was not writing theology; he was a collector of parables, and loved to shake people up, get them thinking or reimagining. Above all, he was an artist in helping people to reimagine God - as much greater and more giving than they had dreamed. For years I resisted attending one of his retreats - because in adapting to American culture I thought he talked too much! And in that period of my life I wanted a silent retreat.

But in the early 1980s I finally gave in. And what did I find? The man was a mesmerizing storyteller, of course, and could have made it as a standup comic in the Catskills. (He also should have been sued for violating copyright laws, for the stories he "borrowed," without credit, from others.) But what I most remember is his image of God - beyond words yes, but boundless in generosity, love, and forgiveness. What I found, in other words, was the gospel, and the very orthodox spirituality of the fourteenth-century classic, The Cloud of Unknowing - a God who is incomprehensible to intellect but knowable to love and to love alone. De Mello used an odd principle to get at the unfathomable goodness of God - the idea that God couldn't be worse than you and I, but had to be at least as good as we are at our best. What came out of that pedestrian principle was a radical doctrine of divine abundance and grace.

"At various points in his books," says the CDF's explanatory note, "institutions of the church are criticized indiscriminately." A story from de Mello's The Prayer of the Frog (Gujarat Sahitya Prakash) is cited as evidence: "A public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God: 'They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.' 'What are you complaining about?' said God. 'They won't let me in either!'" Has Rome lost its sense of humor? What would the Vatican have done, do you suppose, if it had had to deal with that Galilean upstart who went about calling the religious authorities of his time "whitened sepulchers" and "hypocrites"? De Mello lets the church off easy in comparison. Rome sometimes gives the impression it has forgotten that our roots lie in the Hebrew prophets, the force of whose criticism is directed against the home team.

"Every good Christian," says the preface to Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, "ought to be more ready to give a good sense to the doubtful proposition of another than to condemn it." Would that this text were inscribed over the door of Cardinal Ratzinger's office.

David Toolan, S.J., is an associate editor of America magazine.

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