If your guardian angel waves at you, wave back - Spirituality

Catholic elite's head trip misses heart of the matter

True story: Recently, an elderly man lay dying in a hospital bed. At the same time, his sister died unexpectedly in another city. The man's adult daughter and friends decided not to tell him of his sister's death, fearing the news would upset him and affect his condition. The hospital staff agreed; the doctors and nurses said they would keep the news to themselves.

The next time his daughter visited, however, the dying man said he knew his sister was dead. Astonished, his daughter asked, "How did you know?"

"A woman told me last night."

"What woman?"

"I don't know," he said peacefully. "A woman in white."

The man's daughter concluded a nurse or doctor must have let slip the news, and even though her father didn't seem upset at all, she was irritated. She complained, but the staff insisted that none of them bad told her father. Who was the mysterious "woman in white"?

Did an angel tell the man his sister had died? Many who belong to what Andrew Greeley calls the "Catholic elite" - college-educated, often with graduate degrees, theologically articulate, often church professionals - would be skeptical. Other Catholics, many of those who constitute the more than 55 million "ordinary Catholics" in this country, would be less likely to scoff. Why?

Because those whose spirituality is intuitive, centered mainly in the heart, not the head, have a feel for this sort of thing. Call them unsophisticated and anti-intellectual and they may suggest that your faith depends more on theories than experience.

Joan Wester Anderson is a Catholic writer who hit on the idea to write a book about ordinary people's encounters with angels. She rented a post office box and wrote a letter to the editor asking people to send their angel stories. Her letter appeared in three Catholic and two mainline Protestant publications. The first time she checked her post office box it was crammed with letters from people eager to tell their stories.

After a mere eight months, Anderson's book Where Angels Walk (Barton & Brett) is in its sixth printing, having sold nearly 38,000 copies. She has a full speaking schedule, all but a few of her invitations from Catholic parishes.

Many members of the Catholic elite receive information like that with raised eyebrows; perhaps they quietly hum the theme from "The Twilight Zone."

What's the matter with these people, we may think, why are they so gullible? Angels. Saints. Our Lady of Here and There. All that "simple Catholic piety" stuff. They need creation spirituality! They need to read Joseph Campbell! They obviously know nothing about Carl Rogers and C.G. Jung. Their faith is simpleminded.

Parish staff people tell Anderson that parishioners ask for speakers on spirituality, but when they bring in an expert on spirituality, few people show up. On the other hand, when they invite Anderson to talk about angels, they get overflow crowds. "Don't be disappointed" one parish staff person told Anderson, "if we only get 10 or 15 people"; 250 angel enthusiasts showed up.

When a friend who is principal of a Catholic elementary school became a grandmother for the first time, she searched and searched until she found just the right picture of, you guessed it, a guardian angel. "It's to hang in the baby's bedroom," she said. "This is Catholic culture. Maybe it's old-fashioned, but something in me says it's important for a grandmother to do this kind of thing. It carries a good message."

I suspect that many of us, members of the Catholic elite, over the years let our spirituality become predominantly a bead trip. We allow our brain to drive, giving our heart and imagination mere scraps.

It's a large faux pas to admit to praying the rosary, having a favorite saint to pray to or believing in angels, especially guardian angels. I hate to say it, but I think we're talking about spiritual prejudice here. We're not talking genuine intellectualism but being a theological dilettante. After all, Karl Rahner - probably the greatest and most balanced Catholic intellectual of this century - took angels, saints and Mary seriously enough to write about them more than once in his multivolume Theological Studies.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the Catholic elite. As near as I can tell, books by Henri Nouwen - an author with much appeal among the Catholic elite - far outsell those by any other author who writes about spirituality. Wouldn't we have to say that his books have heart? Michael Leach, publisher at Crossroad Publishing Co., says a new Nouwen book will sell more than 25,000 copies during it's first year in print, and the number goes way up as time goes by.

Nouwen doesn't write highly academic stuff, it's true. He also eschews jargon and theological fads and trends, certainly a point in his favor. At the same time, Nouwen's books do not encourage a particularly warm spirituality. His stuff is still largely cerebral. In the Name of Jesus, for example, a 1991 book that has sold some 60,000 copies, is basically scriptural piety applied to the theme of leadership.