by James Alison O NE OF THE privileges of studying theology within the clerical formation programs of the Catholic Church is that you get to study philosophy first. For at least three years. This can seem interesting and exciting when you're immersed in itit certainly hones the intellect for debate. At other times it can seem soul-crushing and destroy- ingwhat has this nitpicking linguis- tic analysis got to do with preparing me to preach the gospel? In retrospect, the true extent of the privilege becomes clearer: when it comes time to study theology, the pupil has been primed to interpret, to be able to remove words and concepts from the meaning foisted on them by the gut, to separate them from their inherited baggage and to begin to de- tect where contemporary religious ideology and real thought might begin to diverge, and how to follow the lat- ter. For practical and financial reasons, these additional three years have only really been possible where theological education was conceived as a forma- tion process for male celibate clerics who start young and for whom a seven-year training course is not en- tirely inappropriate. These years also serve to create a shared culture of dis- course within which a huge amount of discus- sion, disagreement and range of opinions are held more or less pacifically. This culture is part of what allows for the sheer variety and difference of theological viewpoints which circulate freely in the Catholic Church on all but the few hot-button issues at which the ecclesiastical traffic cops attempt to blow their whisdes. As an aside, I would note that, para- doxically, as this male-only culture winds downand the discipline of theology is undertaken (as it should be) by people of both sexesthe loss of prior philosophical training is likely to mean that theological discussion will become narrower, less capable of tolerating variety and less aware of the Fora discussion of "Taking the plunge/' visit www.fheolog.org Ash Wednesday Now forty winters have besieged this brow that bears the mark of ashes once again, its shallow furrows yielding to time s plow as, on command, I turn and turn again. With every year the mark goes deeper still and stays there longer than the year before, reminding me, despite my flesh's will, there comes a spring when I'll be marked no more. Yet still I bow and part my graying hair to make way for the dust that makes us all, the mortal touch, the cross traced in the air, the voice that tells me to regard the fall that each of us must know before we rise and raise unwrinkled brows to greet God's eyes. Angela O'Donnell ease with which theology can fall cap- tive to religious ideology. The task of creating a new structure of shared dis- course prior to the delicate business of talking about God or reading scrip- ture, a structure not dependent on male-only clerical formation, is one of the great catechetical and community- building challenges for the church. In my own case, despite having been led to the portals of theology by some extraordinary Dominican teach- ersHerbert McCabe, Fergus Kerr, Roger Ruston and Timothy Radcliffe, to name a fewnothing could quite have prepared me for the shock of my first semester of the formal study of the- ology at the Jesuit faculty in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. As the semester wore on, I found myself feeling as though I was being drownedand in two senses. In the first place, I had the sense that I was probably going to have to hold on to my faith (emphasis on "my") despite the best efforts of these slippery, overintellectualized, rela- tivistic-seeming teachers. As the weeks went by, it did seem as though "my" faith and all that I held sacred and dear was under assault from these people. And I was drowning. B ut even more significant than that my self-importance was threat- ened by the excellence of the teachers was the cumulative effect of the sheer volume of reading. Day after day, week after week, author after author, opinion after opinion, a sea of words were being poured on me from every angle. They were opening up new horizons and challenging bits of surety in the pit of my stomachuntil the lit- tle Inquisitor General on his throne in the upper part of my skull could take it no longer. He had been accustomed to sitting there, serenely sifting through such little ideas as my reading and lis- tening had brought before him, rou- tinely and elegantly trashing them from a position of enormous imagined superiority: after all, someone who is right can easily detect what is wrong, James Alison recently wrote Undergoing God (Continuum). CHRISTIAN CENTURY February20,2007 8 and is never aware of how defensively he is proceeding. It's not as though all these opinions and words were out to get my poor inner Inquisitor. But he was complete- ly at sea amid the sheer volume and breadth of what was washing over him. He didn't have the staff or the time to be able to put all these dreadful books right, or the fingers to plug up all the holes in the dike. And so he drowned. This is what I call "falling through." And it was for me the vital experience in beginning to learn theology. It was an experience of being pulled out of my own narrow sacred world and dis- covering a huge, peaceful discipline that preceded me and that had extraor- dinary depths, contours, melodies and spaciousness. I was being pulled into swimming around in it. This meant beginning to see how those teachers who it had been so easy for the clever beginner to despise were doing a magnificent job of holding open a great canopy of learning within which I could indeed find things that I didn't control, things that nourished me, things that would help me build something, but also things that I didn't find so helpful and could avoid, ways of talking and thinking which tired the soul rather than giving it zest. "Falling through" was how I moved from being someone who had an inter- est in theology to someone who loved theology and had found himself caught in a bigger, more open world than he could imagine. One where theology was no longer simply a discipline about which one should know for other pur- poses (and there may be people for whom that is exactly what it should be!) but a gift and a promise of being, and of finding myself on the inside of an act of communication from elsewhere. SUDANESE REFUGEES IN LI MBO Lost boys by Ashley Makar A HANDFUL OF the "lost boys of Sudan"the 26,000 chil- dren who fled civil war on footare on the big screen endearing themselves to American au- diences. Four thousand were deliv- ered from a United Nations refugee camp to various communities in the U.S. in 2001. A few of them are the subjects of a just-released National Geographic documentary, God Grew Tired of Us. One of the boysnow a mantells the story of his exodus through Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya to the U.S. and work in a factory, and finally to school at Syracuse University. But this com- plicated and rough redemption will not happen for most of the refugees. The airlift was a one-time opportuni- ty, an operation that cannot be repeated in the current state of the international refugee regime. Now that the southern Sudanese war is declared over, the UN has shifted its focus for Sudanese asy- lum seekers from resettlement to repa- triation; in addition, the U.S. is accept- ing fewer refugees since 9/11. This con- vergence of policies leaves millions of Sudanese at an impassethey are trapped between beloved home villages and inhospitable African cities, while their hope dwindles. Outside All Saints Cathedral in Cairo, Gabriel Kuol shows me his vital documents in a transparent folder. There is a yellow paper rectangle the size of an index card. In the left corner is a stamp noting that he has permis- sion for temporary residence in Egypt; in the right corner is a passport-sized head shot stapled and stamped by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In the photo, the word "REFUGEES" ap- pears over his right shoulder like a ban- ner. He looks like a cross between a convict and a schoolboymouth rigid, face full to the camera, eyes wide open as if he won't ever stop looking at you. Another photo is safety-pinned to his application. Underneath, typed words create an autobiography"Gabriel Kuol, born in the Dinka tribe; mother drowned in river Nile; plane bombard- ed camp; we ran; they started shooting; father killed; they found me under the tree; took me to Emarat; worked in the house daily, Blue Nile fields on Fridays, sleeping outside on the floor, eating food remainders, beaten with water hoses, slap, irritation, no honor. 1983; left home country due to security cir- cumstances, repeated air invasions; dis- tributed to the leaders of the army; compulsory residence, Khartoum; work with no salary, savagery, hard treatment, force, violence; no human." The words make a caseshowing a well-founded fear of torture, enslavement and forced military recruitmentto support his application for asylum. Then Gabriel's closing words: "Now I am in your hands." There is one more photo. In it, Gabriel is wearing sunglasses and pos- ing next to a monument that has "Out of Egypt I have called my Son" etched in bold print on plaster. Gabriel is squatting, posing as a hip-hop star, showing off the thick silver chain of his cross necklace. His thin arm is raised to the small monument, his left fnger pointing to the word "out." T he Out of Egypt sculpture stands in a courtyard between All Saints Cathedral and Refuge Egypt, an Episcopal ministry for displaced East Africans. For Sudanese asylum seekers, the church serves as a place to go. Over a million have come to Egypt, having heard by word of mouth, as Gabriel did: God willing, the UN will help you. Since the end of the southern Sudanese war, the Sudanese are not recognized as refugees by the UNHCR office in Cairo, yet thousands of refugees are making their way up the Nile. They receive yellow cards authorizing their residence in Egypt, renewable every six months, if the government Ashley Makar teaches at Hofstra University in New York. She spent last winter doing research in Cairo. 9 CHRISTIAN CENTURY February20,2007 ^ s Copyright and Use: As an ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the copyright holder(s)' express written permission. Any use, decompiling, reproduction, or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be a violation of copyright law. 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