Yet, I feel at home here in many ways. I am drawing on my Catholic roots, the spirituality learned mostly from the Jesuit Sodality of Mary when I was in high school, and then further formed by the brief stay with the Carmelites of Cleveland. All of that marked me in ways that are mostly unconscious and little articulated. However, here I am doing what in some ways is most natural for me, teaching. It helps that I kept drawing on this tradition intellectually by my work on the Catholic poet and priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and my continual fascination with the mystics, and on "saints" not recognized officially by the church, such as Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. Still, there is a sense that it is highly presumptuous of me to be teaching these young men to be priests! I hope and can already see that in little ways they are also teaching me.
I am living with the Vincentians, an order also known as the Congregation of the Mission, because they were founded in the 17th century by St. Vincent de Paul, a priest who first wanted only to make money by serving in the big urban parishes of Paris, and then underwent a "conversion" to see his mission as serving the poor of Paris and in the little villages, where people knew both spiritual and material poverty. I am gaining a great deal of respect for this order in my long conversations over dinner with various priests here.
Besides learning about the order, there is another reality that is emerging as I begin to peel back a couple more of the layers of this many-layered society. Everything here has to be said in plural (and in the Indonesian language, plural is indicated by using the noun twice!). A remark that one of the Vincentians made last night is interesting. He expressed the sentiment that there is a deep spirituality and love for silence in the Javanese people, thanks to the immersion in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions that came to this island many centuries before either Christianity and Islam. In the book I am reading here, In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos, the author talks about "panditos," Javanese sages, who went to caves to practice meditation and influence the harmony of the earthly realm.
Even politics is seen to be under the supernatural, with the ruler possessing or losing wahyu, literally "light," but a supernatural kind of power and charisma. In my second tour of this island, I see even more how prevalent "kejawen" the indigenous Javanese practices and beliefs, are to this people. On the other hand, the hegemony of Java, where most people live, and where the government resides, leaves behind those from the outer islands, further from these centers of political and even spiritual power. I learned last night that in Borneo, in the western part of Kalimantan, where this order of Vincentians has missions, Christianity only came in the 1970s and has not yet taken root in people's deep attitudes. More and more, I see people here identifying with their tribe, which I don't put in quotation marks, because there is still a reality of tribalism that operates brutally at times, as in the late 1990s, when Dayaks, the people of Borneo, turned on their Madurese immigrants in absolutely horrendous fashion. Javanese not only distinguish themselves from those of the Outer Islands, such as Sumatra, Kalimantan, Papua, and others, but from the Chinese who have lived and prospered here for a very long time, and who make up a significant part of the population of the Catholic Church here. That story is one I will have to leave for now.
That brings me to the beautiful ceremony of the ordination of the new Bishop of Malang yesterday. I got to know him briefly while sharing a meal with him in Bali, thanks to my good Carmelite friend, Fr. Joseph. He too is a Carmelite, a more contemplative order than the Vincentians. The Carmelites and Vincentians were among the earliest Catholic orders to establish a base here in the city of Malang. I know from his first responses when told that the Pope wanted him to be bishop, that he had many reasons why he could not do it, and he had wanted to spend the rest of his life teaching and writing books. I know from watching him give a careful presentation on Genesis 1 and 2 as a "talk show" for the community in the capital city of Bali, Denpesar, that he is at heart a teacher, and I saw him patiently answer many questions about marriage from the lay people who attended. I also saw him acknowledge his grief over the loss of his brother, a fellow Carmelite just a year before. I shared with him my own family's story of my father as a Holocaust survivor and my mother a former Benedictine nun! So we made a good personal connection, and that was evident when he invited me to accompany him to the opening Mass on the first day of school here. Knowing his heart made this whole ceremony-- watching him prostrate himself while a litany of prayers was said over him, then the laying on of hands by each of his fellow bishops, the reading of the letter from Pope Francis by the papal nuncio, his receiving the symbols of the episcopate (ring, mitre, and big hat)--much more moving for me.
So I continue to be awed by all that I am learning and experiencing here, both the beautiful and the terrible. I am so very far from understanding it, but just keep opening myself to these offerings from some great spiritual Source.
