• 

1 

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TOWARDS RECONCILIATION 

By 

Walter J, Burghardt, SJ, 

1974 
Publications Office 

UNITED STATES CATHOLIC CONFERENCE 
1312 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. 

Washington, D.C. 2 0 0 0 5 



DeacWIfîsd 



Foreword 

With the proclamation of a Holy Year of grace, Pope Paul ex-
pressed the hope that the year would "contribute to the tireless 
and loving effort of the Church to meet the moral needs of our 
time." To this end he has set for a theme that of Renewal and 
Reconciliation. 

This theme speaks directly to the deepest needs of men and 
women today. Each of us stands in need of interior renewal. We 
stand in need of reconciliation with our God and with our fellow-
pilgrims as we journey toward the Lord. Reconciliation has many 
other facets. It reaches to racial and ethnic groups, social and 
economic classes, areas of ecumenism and international relations. 

In these pages Father Walter Burghardt illuminates the mean-
ing of reconciliation in its many aspects. He does so with sensi-
tivity and thought-provoking insight. To read his reflections is to 
take a first saving step toward the goals of the Holy Year. May 
God bless his efforts and give attentive listeners to his word. 

TIMOTHY CARDINAL MANNING 
Archbishop of Los Angeles 
Chairman, Ad Hoc Committee on the 
Holy Year, National Conference of 
Catholic Bishops 



About the Author 

Father Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., is one of the country's best 
known theologians. He taught at Woodstock College from 1946 to 
1974 and, effective September 1, 1974, is a member of the 
faculty of the School of Religious Studies, Catholic University of 
America. He is Editor of the journal Theological Studies, has 
written five books, and has lectured widely. 



Contents 

K Who Needs'Reconciliation? 1 

II. Reconciliation Between God and Man 7 

III. Reconciliation Within Man Himself 13 

IV. Reconciliation Between Man and Man 19 

V. Reconciliation Between Man and Nature 25 

VI. Reconciliation: Deeds Not Words 3 1 



... . . , 

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Preface 

In its original form, the material in this booklet was presented 
on the NBC radio program Guideline—six addresses in January 
and February, 1974. Few changes have been made, and those 
are mostly stylistic. More importantly, the radio context affected 
the content. Inasmuch as the talks were directed to a broad 
audience, not simply to the Catholic constituency, I did not ex-
plicitly discuss certain facets of reconciliation which are part and 
parcel of the Catholic vision. Catholic readers, therefore, should 
broaden and deepen my presentation, move beyond my perspec-
tives. Let them, for example, plumb the depths of the Eucharist 
as the sacrament par excellence of reconciliation, as well as the 
communal and more privately oriented celebrations of penance. 
No single booklet can do it all. I shall be content if I provide a 
provocative prologue and a useful framework. 

WALTER J . BURGHARDT, S.J. 





Who Needs Reconciliation? 
In the autumn of 57, Saint Paul penned these enraptured lines 

to the Christians of Corinth: "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new 
creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come! 
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself 
and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, God was in 
Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their tres-
passes against them, and entrusting to us the message of recon-
ciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His 
appeal through us. We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be 
reconciled to God" (2 Cor 5:17-20). 

On May ninth of 1973, Pope Paul proclaimed a Holy Year for 
1975. For its inspiration, the Holy Year of Catholicism reaches 
back to the Jubilee Year of the Jews: the land rested, property was 
restored, slaves were freed. The distinctive theme for 1975, as 
Paul VI saw it, was frightfully urgent. He summed it up in Saint 
Paul's trumpet call: reconciliation. 

To reconcile is to reunite, to bring back to harmony. Reconcilia-
tion impli es, therefore, that division has taken place, separation, 
rupture. Two realities, two persons, two peoples are at odds, do 
not relate as they should. North Vietnamese and South Viet-
namese, Christian and Jew, black and white, wife and husband— 
the examples are legion. There is discord, disunity, disharmony; 
oneness has been ruptured. 

Four major ruptures call for reconciliation. These ruptures I 
shall analyze at fair length; but first I shall set the stage for the 
four acts to come, sketch the problem as one fairly fallible 
theologian sees it. I begin where we are, leap back to the begin-
ning, move forward to the mid-point of history, return to today. 

1. 
If there is any one word that sums up the 70s, I suggest it is 

disunity. If there is any one characteristic that marks our present, 

1 



it is cleavage, conflict, division, disharmony. This absence of unity, 
of oneness—ultimately, of love—confronts us on four levels: 
between man and nature; within man himself; between man and 
man; between man and God. 

In the first place, there is disunity, rupture, between man and 
nature. By "nature" I mean all that is not man or God. The 
problem is complex (as I shall detail later), but it has come to a 
focus, has come to haunt us, in ecology. The land we have 
ploughed and plundered, the chemicals that feed our life and heal 
us, the air we breathe and the ground we walk, the very wealth of 
our world threatens to strangle us. In consequence, it is more and 
more difficult to discover God in His creation, hard to touch God 
through the things of God. It is as though the things we see and 
hear and touch and taste and smell were divorced from the God 
who fashioned them—and, more frightening still, hostile to the 
men and women who use them. To survive this earth, we must 
subdue this earth. 

Second, this disunity between man and nature is a symbol, 
and to some extent an effect, of the disunity that exists within 
man himself. I am one person, yet I am so often at war with 
myself. That deep-rooted conflict was described with rare insight 
by Saint Paul in his letter to the Christians of Rome: "My own 
actions bewilder me. What I do is not what I want to do; I do the 
very thing I hate. . . . It is not the good my will prefers, but the 
evil my will disapproves, that I find myself doing. In my inmost 
self I delight in God's law; but I see in my lower self another law 
at war with the law of my conscience, enslaving me to the law of 
sin which my lower self contains" (Rom 7:15-23). Even apart 
from sin, apart from the gentle Dr. Jekyll and the brutal Mr. Hyde, 
I am so often two persons, confused and confounded, tormented 
and distracted, unglued and unhinged. 

Third, this disunity within man himself is a symbol, and to 
some extent a cause, of the disunity that prevails between man 
and man. Half the human race is at war with the other half. It 
is not simply a war between nations—Southeast Asia and the 
Middle East. A cold war rages between those who have and those 
who have not, between the powerful and the powerless, between 
employer and employee, between white and black, between atheist 
and believer, between Protestant and Catholic, even at times 
between a man and the woman who is one flesh with him. A 

2 



terrifying feature of our times, from the human ashes in Dachau 
through the living corpses in Calcutta to the whispered words of 
hate in suburban New York, is "man's inhumanity to man." Like 
the pagans of Saint Paul's day, men and women whose law of life 
should be love have turned "ruthless, faithless, pitiless" (Rom 
1:31). 

Fourth, all these disunities—man and nature, man himself, 
man and man—are but a symptom, and in great measure an 
effect, of the most tragic disunity of all: the rupture between man 
and God. At this instant there are literally millions of men and 
women who say in their hearts "There is no God." There are 
millions more who say in their hearts "There is a God," yet exile 
Him effectively .from their everyday living. And there are the 
uncounted millions whose experience of God is an experience of 
absence: God does not seem to be there. They simply do not 
find Him in crib or creation, on a cross or in His human images, 
in the proclaimed Word or "where two or three are gathered" 
in His name. He does not seem to be there. 

2. 

There you have the first significant fact: the fact of disunity. 
The second significant fact: disunity was not God's original design 
for us. However you interpret the first three chapters of Genesis— 
a real-life situation where human living originates, or inspired 
fiction with a religious message, or a wedding of both—the story 
of Adam and Eve reveals God's plan for human unity. Note the 
four levels on which the story moves. 

In the first place, a remarkable oneness prevailed, an intimate 
harmony, between man and God. When God made the first man, 
He gave him not simply a garden of delights, the beasts of the 
field, the birds of the air, a woman from his flesh. More precious 
than all, God gave man God. The first instant Adam came from 
the hand of God, the first moment Eve was fashioned from the 
flesh of Adam, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit lived within them. 
Human creation was one with its Creator. 

Second, there was a striking unity, a fascinating harmony, 
within man himself: within Adam, within Eve. That grim, unceasing 
struggle which we experience within ourselves, which Paul de-
scribed—flesh warring against spirit, lust against love, passion 

3 



against purpose, all the schizophrenia that cleaves me into two— 
such conflict was foreign to Eden. Adam, like Eve, could not be 
seduced by surprise, could not say, as Paul would, "The very 
thing I hate, that is what I do." An inner poise, a sanity and 
serenity, a profound oneness, such was God's design; such was 
man to be. 

Third, in God's plan a unique oneness would link man with 
man. In God's providence, the harmony within the flesh of Adam 
was symbolic of, was intended to flower in, an unbelievable 
harmony among his children till time was swallowed up in eternity. 
Never war, only peace; not hate, but love; no "mine and thine," 
only "I and thou." 

A final unity God forged between man and nature. No sooner 
had He fashioned Adam and Eve to His own image, no sooner had 
He gifted them with the power to know and the freedom to love, 
than He blessed them, commanded them to create living reproduc-
tions of their life, commissioned them to touch the earth with their 
magic, link it to their love. In God's graciousness, mute creation 
would be eloquent; each "thing" would speak to man of the God 
who molded it. No starlight but would captivate his mind as it 
captivated Ignatius of Loyola; no rose but would ravish his soul 
as it ravished Teresa of Avila. At that moment each blade of grass, 
each feathered wing, each vein of gold, each breath of air was not 
a rival, not an enemy, not a reluctant captive, but a willing servant. 
And man looked on "things" with awe and delight, aware that 
God's Spirit moved over the face of the earth. 

3. 

There you have the second significant fact: God's design for 
human unity. The third significant fact: God's design was defaced, 
this primitive unity did not endure. Once again, the Book of 
Genesis raises more problems than it solves. But for our purposes 
one inescapable reality bursts into history. The disruptive element, 
the chaotic factor, is sin. And, as Genesis presents it, sin divided 
man; when Adam disobeyed God, he destroyed unity on four levels. 

In the first place, Adam ruptured the bond that linked man and 
God. When love fled from Adam's soul, the God of love fled with 
it. The sentence in Genesis is expressive: "[God] drove out the 
man; and at the east of the garden of Eden He placed the cherubim, 

4 



and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to 
the tree of life" (Gn 3:24). Man had been exiled from God. 

Second, sin destroyed man's harmony within himself, the 
symmetry God had designed for every personality. Till the end 
of time, men and women would be dehumanized by the devil 
within them; man's worst enemy would be himself. For sin is 
schizophrenia, inward division: the one person at once image of 
God and image of Satan. Again, the words of Genesis after the 
first sin are pregnant: "The eyes of [the man and woman] were 
opened. . . . The Lord God called to the man . . . and [the man] 
said: 'I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, 
because I was naked; and I hid myself " (Gn 3:7-10). Man was a 
stranger to himself. 

Third, sin severed the link God had forged between man and 
man, the link of love. In the wake of that primal sin, the first two 
brothers in the story of man went forth to a field, and (Scripture 
tells us) "Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him" 
(Gn 4:8). Man had been sundered from man. 

Finally, sin shattered the oneness between man and nature. 
Material creation would conspire against him: the win and the 
waves would refuse to obey him, beauty would sedu< . nim and 
loveliness betray him, animals would turn into enemies or slaves-
by-compulsion. The promise God hurled at Adam is fraught with 
meaning: "Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall 
eat of it all the days of your life" (Gn 3:17). And man, in his 
lust, would rape the earth to its destruction and possibly his. 

4. 
There you have the third significant fact: the fact of sin. But 

there is a fourth significant fact: the fact of grace. To restore the 
unity that had been sundered by sin, the Son of God became man. 
To recapture in some measure the divine dream of human harmony, 
to put man at peace with God, with himself, with his fellow man, 
and with all creation. God came to reconcile. 

With His birth and His death Christ our Lord has destroyed 
the foundations of disunity; in Bethlehem and on Calvary God 
Himself began the task of reconciliation. To begin with, He linked 
man with God. "All those who welcomed Him He empowered to be-
come children of God, all those who believe in His name" (Jn 1:12). 

5 



Second, He made it possible for man to live at peace with himself. 
Remember the problem of Paul? "Pitiable man that I am, who will 
set me free from a nature thus doomed to death?" Remember his 
answer? ". . . Jesus Christ our Lord" (Rom 7:24-25). Third, He 
made it possible for man to live at peace with his fellow man. 
"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another 
as I have loved you" (Jn 13:34). To realize this love, He gathered 
us into one body, His own body, with Himself as Head: "You are 
all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3:28). Finally, He won for us the 
grace to live in some sort of harmony with material creation—not 
only with the animal but even with the atom. True, we cannot 
achieve that total, unlabored oneness which God originally intended 
between man and earth; but we can, with good will and God's 
grace, touch the earth and all its creatures with renewed reverence, 
conscious that the earth and its fulness are the Lord's, aware that 
we are not earth's despots but its stewards. 

Such, I submit, are the broad outlines of a theology of reconcilia-
tion. Four critical ruptures: between God and man, within man 
himself, between man and man, between man and nature. Four 
ruptures that have their ultimate origin in man's sin, their ultimate 
reconciliation in God's grace. Four ruptures that call for careful, 
painful, prayerful analysis. I shall open the process by plumbing 
the basic rupture: man severed from God. As preparation, I would 
ask you to meditate the profound message of Saint Paul to 
the Colossians: "It pleased God that in [Jesus Christ] a\\ the 
fulness of divinity should dwell, and through [Jesus] to reconcile 
to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace 
by the blood of His cross. And you, who once were estranged and 
hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, He has now reconciled in His 
body of flesh by His death, in order to present you holy and 
blameless and irreproachable before Him" (Col 1:19-22). 

6 



II 
Reconciliation Between 

God and Man 
I open the process, the analysis, by plumbing the basic rupture: 

man severed from God. Here, as in so much that follows, I am 
talking about an uncomfortable monosyllable: I am talking about 
. . . sin. I do so without apology. And I do so with little em-
barrassment, if only because that remarkable psychiatrist Karl 
Menninger has just produced a heady volume entitled Whatever 
Became of Sin? (New York: Hawthorn, 1973). He is not afraid to 
speak of sin. He does not hesitate to quote the First Epistle of 
John (1:8): "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and 
the truth is not in us." If a distinguished psychiatrist can confess 
the fact of sin, an undistinguished theologian dare do no less! 
I shall say something about the rupture that is sin—specifically 
how it ruptures man from God; and I shall suggest how man and 
God are reconciled. 

1. 

First, then, the rupture that is sin. What is this thing called 
sin? Let me begin with a strong statement from the Protestant 
theologia n Paul Tillich: "Have the men of our time lost a feeling of 
the meaning of sin? Do they realize that sin does not mean an 
immoral act, that 'sin' should never be used in the plural, and that 
not our sins, but rather our sin is the great, ali-pervading problem 
of our life? To be in the state of sin is to be in the state of 
separation. Separation may be from one's fellowmen, from one's 
own true self and/or from his God" (quoted by Menninger, op. cit., 
pp. 189-90). 

I do not agree with Tillich that "sin does not mean an immoral 
act"; at times it does and should. But it remains true that more 
important than any individual act of sinning is the state of sin, 

7 



and that this state of sin is a state of separation. Let me spell out 
these ideas—act, state, separation—from certain insights in the 
Old Testament, in the New Testament, and in contemporary 
theology. 

In the Old Testament, to sin is not merely to miss the mark, 
to be deceived, to fall short of a goal; it is not only to be quite 
human, to fall short of what God and human persons have a right 
to expect of us. That is all very true; it is what we are all l ike— 
we all fall short; but this is altogether negative. Once Israel came 
to know God, sin was seen as rebellion. From the first man's sin 
to the whole nation's sin, to sin was to revolt, to rebel, to disobey. 
And the rebellion, though it could mean trampling on the rights of 
fellow humans, was at bottom and basically, ultimately and 
primarily rebellion against God: it meant deliberately, consciously, 
knowingly to resist the will of God, to flout His law. The first man 
sinned in that Adam ate of the tree "of which I commanded you, 
'You shall not eat of it' " (Gn 3:17). David, adulterous murderer, 
finally recognized that he had not only violated the rights of Uriah: 
"I have sinned against the Lord" (2 Sam 12:13). And sin for the 
nation, for Israel, meant to play the harlot, to be unfaithful to God; 
it meant to break a covenant, to offend against a personal God. 

In the Hebrew tradition all men were sinners. That tradition 
was pithily expressed by the preacher we know as Ecclesiastes in 
the third century before Christ: "there is no man on earth so just 
as to do good and never sin" (Eccl 7:20). 

The New Testament builds on the Old. Here Luke, Paul, and 
John are especially insightful. St. Luke's parable of the prodigal 
son suggests vividly what it really means to sin. To sin, as the 
prodigal sinned, is not primarily to squander a father's wealth; 
to fornicate, as the prodigal fornicated, is no more than a symptom 
of something more profound. To sin is to break a bond, to destroy 
a relationship, to withdraw myself from God my Father and from 
His love. The words of the prodigal are pregnant: "Father, I have 
sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be 
called your son" (Lk 15:18). This is what the elder brother failed 
to understand. Angrily he assailed his father: "Look, these many 
years I have never once disobeyed a command of yours" (Lk 
16:29). Important yes, but not all-important. 

St. Paul tells us of a "sin" that is almost a personal force. It 
indeed entered the'world through one man's rebellion, Adam's 

8 



act of disobedience. But it is more than a single act: it is an evil 
force, a malevolent power, that tyrannizes every man born into 
this world. It is a power hostile to God, a power that alienates 
men from God. Its works are sinful deeds. Because of it, Paul says, 
"I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want" (Rom 
7:19). It is Sin with a capital S. 

For St. John, sin is separation from God. For sin implies that 
the sinner is enslaved to the devil, that he dwells in darkness, that 
he is spiritually dead. Sin is the hostility of a man or woman 
against a God who would save them. Sin, for John, has a frightful 
facet: I hate God. 

Rebellion against God, hostility to God, alienation from God, 
destruction of covenant between man and God—these biblical 
insights into sin theologians are constantly trying to recapture, 
to organize, to deepen. Four aspects of this theology of sin can 
be uncommonly fruitful. First, a sin is not merely an individual 
act about a particular object: I robbed a friend of fifty dollars, 
I had lustful desires about a woman, I told a needless lie, I 
shredded a rival's reputation, I killed an enemy in cold blood. 
These are indeed "sins": I have introduced moral disorder into 
the world. More importantly, in sinning I am realizing myself as 
a person; these acts express, give the shape of, who I am. Not 
always; not any isolated act. It is one thing to tell a lie, another 
thing to be a liar; one thing to kill, another thing to be a killer. 
And still it remains true that a sinful act is less important for the 
disorder it creates than for what it says about me as a person: 
Who am I? Whom do I love? What is my attitude towards God? 

Second, there are situations in life where I am not so much 
master of my freedom, not so fully aware of myself as a person, 
that my actions, my sins, engage me as a whole person. In a 
sense, I say no to God, but not so totally that I cease to love Him. 
It is not a fully personal no. I do not close myself to God. Call it 
venial sin, slight sin, even serious sin—whatever you will,: it is 
not the inner core of me that rebels. I do not break the bond that 
links me to God. The love relationship abides. 

Third, there are other sin situations where I commit myself 
completely as a person. I am aware of God inviting me to com-
munion with Him; I sense that what I say or do here is crucially 
important; I am remarkably, thrillingly free—and I say no. It is 

9 



Adam deciding that he will be as God is; it is David taking 
Bathsheba and murdering Uriah; it is the prodigal son cutting 
himself off from his father; it is Judas sacrificing his Saviour for 
silver; it is Pilate washing his hands of the Christ in whom he 
finds no crime; it is perhaps Peter swearing by God that he does 
not know the Man. This is sin at its most profound, because it 
is my total self that rebels. Mortal, because it is sin unto death. 
Not perhaps the ultimate rebellion (take Peter or the prodigal), 
but perilously so (take Judas). Perilously so because in such sin 
/ sin, this total person, free and unfettered. Perilously so, because 
this sort of sin is what makes me genuinely a sinner. Perilously 
so, because a covenant has been crushed and I am a stranger to 
God. How often I say no with such freedom and finality, not even 
a Jesuit can say. I would think, rarely, because "a life which can 
in short hops go from life to death, then back again to life, and 
then to death is not life at all" (John W. Glaser, S.J., "Transition 
between Grace and Sin: Fresh Perspectives," Theological Studies 
29 [1968] 262). 

Fourth, such sin stems from what the Gospel of John calls "the 
sin of the world" (Jn 1:29), the virus of evil that entered the world 
(Paul says) "through one man" (Rom 5:12), that "dynamically 
unfolds itself and tightens its grip on humanity and on the world 
in an escalating fashion down the ages of history. It is the hidden 
power which multiplies transgressions in the history of mankind. 
They are merely its symptoms; it is greater and deeper than all of 
them" (Kevin F. O'Shea, C.SS.R., "The Reality of Sin: A Theological 
and Pastoral Critique," Theological Studies 29 [1968] 244). 

2. 

Sin, then, is profoundly a matter of man and God; and at its 
worst, sin ruptures man from God. I admit, it is the rare sin that 
assaults God directly; few humans curse God with utmost serious-
ness. Most sins are leveled at the image of God: another human 
person. And still, each sin touches the divine: the covenant, the 
link, that relates earth to heaven. 

Rupture between man and God calls for reconciliation between 
man and God. And because the rupture that is mortal sin, sin unto 
death, is rebellion, hostility, alienation, destruction of a covenant, 
it will not do to simply say " 0 my God, I am heartily sorry for 
having offended thee." Reconciliation calls for conversion. For 

10 



only conversion reverses the radical rupture that sin creates. Like 
sin, conversion means that my whole person changes: I have a 
new stance towards God, a new way of looking and living; I change 
the whole thrust of my life. No single cry of sorrow, no one act 
of love, will do this. I must change. I must give to God a total yes 
that is expressive of me. 

The problem is, I cannot change myself. There is a paradox 
here: I can turn from God all by myself; I cannot turn to Him all 
by myself. St. Paul said it pointedly to the Christians of Corinth: 
"All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself 
. . . ; that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. 
. . . For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that 
in Him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor 
5:18-21). 

"In Him. . . ." Reconciliation, conversion, comes through Christ. 
It began in Bethlehem, where a new oneness, a root unity, between 
God and man was born. For the flesh that God took is our flesh: 
in some genuine sense, it is my flesh, your flesh, the flesh of every 
human person born into this world. The Son of God became what 
we are, that we might become what He is. In Bethlehem forgive-
ness was born, a new covenant. Reconciliation climaxed on 
Calvary, where "the sin of the world," the tyrannizing power that 
has torn man from God since the beginning, was leveled in the 
blood of Christ. And reconciliation touches each of you now in the 
risen Christ, who offers you time and again a new covenant with 
God and makes it possible for you to respond with a total yes. 

Conversion . . . to Christ . . . through Christ. I am not sug-
gesting that at this moment you are turned totally from God and 
His Christ, alienated from God, in rebellion against Him, that you 
have not experienced conversion, that you are in a state of sin. 
Quite the contrary. My experience of Christians is very much my 
experience of myself: turned radically to Christ in mind and will, 
but dreadfully weak in living the logic of that conversion. You 
cannot call me sinner, because my face is set towards Christ. 
But you can call me sinful, because so many of the actions that 
should express who I am, a committed lover of Christ, give the 
lie to that person. So much of my life is superficial. I mean, so 
many of my human acts are not fully human, do not commit me as 
a total person. They are neither sin in the radical sense nor con-

11 



version. They do not enslave me to Satan, they do not commit 
me to Christ. The danger in such semi-Christian living was 
strongly stated in the last book of the Bible: "I know your works: 
you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! 
So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will 
vomit you out of my mouth" (Ap 3:15-16). 

I have asked you to take a fresh look at the rupture that is sin, 
a fresh look at the reconciliation that is conversion. I have insisted 
that both rupture and reconciliation involve a relationship of man 
with God. I have suggested that, to grasp this relationship, you 
look less at your individual sins, more at the sort of person these 
sins express; look less at your endless acts of contrition, more at 
the kind of person such remorse images. I have argued that 
mortal sin, sin unto death, total alienation from God, is rare among 
earth's men and women; but I have hinted at the peril that over-
hangs those whose face indeed is Godward but whose hands and 
hearts are earth-bound. 

I conclude these reflections with St. Paul's message to the 
Colossians: "And you, who once were estranged and hostile in 
mind, doing evil deeds, He has now reconciled in His body of flesh 
by His death, in order to present you holy and blameless and 
irreproachable before Him, provided that you continue in the faith, 
stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel which 
you heard . . ." (Col 1:21-23). 

12 



Ill 
Reconciliation Within 

Man Himself 
In St. Paul's letter to the Christians of Rome there is a remark-

able chapter in which the Apostle reveals his inner conflict, the 
rupture that rends him within, the schizophrenia that makes two 
persons of him: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do 
not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . It is no longer 
I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing 
good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, 
but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil 
I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no 
longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to 
be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 
For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my 
members another law at war with the law of my mind and making 
me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched 
man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" 
(Rom 7:15-24). 

To this point I have argued that sin is rupture, that the radical 
rupture rends man from God; for sin is rebellion against God, 
hostility to God, alienation from God, destruction of covenant 
between man and God. Reconciliation, therefore, is an empty 
six-syllable word unless unity, harmony, oneness is restored 
between man and God; but peace between man and God is not 
the work of man, it is the love of Christ. Now I shall argue that 
the schizophrenia of sin not only severs me from God; it ruptures 
me within, makes two persons of me, two persons at war. And I 
shall insist that reconciliation, the destruction of sin's inner 
rupture, is a chimera, sheer whistling in the dark, apart from St. 
Paul's response: "Who will deliver me? God, through Jesus Christ 
our Lord" (Rom 7:24-25). 

13 



1. 

First, then, sin is schizophrenia. I am not using schizophrenia 
as a psychiatrist would. I am not suggesting that the sinner is 
psychotic, that he has lost contact with his environment, that his 
personality has disintegrated, that he needs a psychiatrist. I mean, 
to be a sinner is to be schizoid in its root sense: in sin I am in-
wardly divided, I am not the one person God shaped me to be. 

Frightfully abstract? I suspect so. To concretize it, I suggest 
we go back to the early centuries of the Christian era, to those 
theologians we call "Fathers of the Church" because they 
fashioned the spiritual personality of the ages to come. The 
Fathers rang the changes on a favorite theme, a sentence from the 
first page of Scripture: "God created man in His own image, in 
the image of God He created him; male and female He created 
them" (Gn 1:27). What does it mean to image God? With basic 
help from Scripture, and some misunderstanding of the biblical 
witness, the Fathers constructed a number of image theories, not 
always in harmony one with another. But on one fundamental facet 
they were all at one: the model for our imaging of God is the Man 
who is Image with a capital I: God's Son in flesh. He is God's 
perfect likeness—at once God's blinding revelation of Himself 
and God's clarifying revelation of what we should be. In fact, as 
far back as the second century, the first Christian theologian, 
Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, claimed that the first man to be made, 
Adam, was made not simply "in the image of God," but in the 
image of Christ to come. Even then, at the dawn of human creation, 
Christ was all-important in God's plan for man. Not as an after-
thought, an appendage, an epilogue, a remedy for sin. No. Even 
apart from sin, as Irenaeus seems to have sensed it, God would 
have come to us in human flesh, because even apart from sin He 
was the model for our humanness. 

That is why, Irenaeus proclaims, the first man was fashioned 
as he was: not only human flesh and human spirit, but flesh and 
spirit made genuinely human because pervaded and transformed 
by the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit. This was the first man 
because this was to be the Second Man; this was Adam because 
this was to be Christ. 

Here you have man at his most human, his most Christlike: man 
strikingly one, not only with God but within himself, because ruled 

14 



by the principle of oneness, the Holy Spirit. Flesh in harmony with 
spirit, spirit in harmony with Holy Spirit. Sin ruptures that one-
ness—the very first sin and every sin where my whole free self 
rebels. Sin ruptures my oneness because the Holy Spirit is no 
longer there and I am at war with myself. In St. Paul's terms, 
"I do not do what I want, I do the very thing I hate. . . . I can will 
what is right, I cannot do it." 

The Fathers of the Church saw this problem of sin-as-rupture 
in terms of man-as-image. Many of them were puzzled: Does sin 
destroy God's image in man, or disfigure it? Obliterate it utterly, 
or merely mar it? The problem is not artificial. On the one hand, 
the Holy Spirit is no longer within me; I am not now Spirit-led, 
I am Spiritless; and so I am no longer Christlike, no longer the 
image of God a Christian ought to be. On the other hand, sin, for all 
its destructive power, cannot so loose the bonds which link man to 
God that sinful man is simply Godless. The third-century theologian 
Origen saw this acutely and expressed it vividly: "It is the Son of 
God who painted [the image of the heavenly] on man. And 
because the painter is so remarkable, His image can be obscured 
. . . , it cannot be destroyed . . . ; for it remains always the image 
of God, even though you may put over it the image of the earthy" 
(Homily 13 on Genesis 4). The point is: even severed from God, 
the sinner belongs to God; despite his no to God, God still calls to 
him; earth-bound in fact, he is Godward in destiny. 

Precisely here lies sin's schizophrenia: I am inwardly split, 
torn, rent. In day-to-day living, I am no longer linked to God by 
love; I have shouted a rebellious, definitive, covenant-rupturing 
no to Him. And at the same time my whole person cries out for 
Him. Silently yes, mutely indeed; but none the less really. More 
tragic because unrecognized; a more profound frustration because 
only my rebellion is audible, and the core cry of my heart for my 
God is muted within the depths of who I am. 

This is when sin cuts most sharply, splits the Christian person 
in two: when my response to the covenant call of a loving God is 
an absolute no that stems from my total self in complete freedom. 
But this sort of rejection is hardly our everyday experience. My 
own schizophrenia, I suspect, parallels the experience of most 
Christians. I do not hurl at God a definitive no; I do not really 
reject Him; at bottom, when all is said and done, I love Him; and 

15 



so, in harmony with the promise of Christ, God loves me and lives 
within me: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are tabernacled in me. 
But I do not live out the logic of that dynamic divine presence; 
I play games with God. I neither embrace Him totally nor repulse 
Him completely—and that is a dangerous line to walk, a perilous 
tightrope. 

It was the ceaseless sin of the Israelites as denounced by the 
Lord through Jeremiah: "You have played the harlot with many 
lovers; and would you return to me?" (Jer 3:1). It is the recurring 
sin of Christians whenever we try to serve two masters. I com-
promise. I crawl to the edge of sin-unto-death . . . but not quite 
over. And so you have that endless catalog of "venial" s ins— 
I disobeyed, I lied, I gossiped, I cursed, I got angry, I drank too 
much, I stole—repeated so often that I question my own sincerity. 
You have that smaller list of "serious" sins—from lust for 
another's flesh to lust for another's life—which are not "unto 
death" for me only because I did not quite know what I was doing. 
And most importantly, you have that set of sins impossible to 
catalog—sins of "omission"—impossible to catalog because in 
each instance I did . . . nothing. A child was starving, and I 
closed my eyes; napalm fired human flesh, and I said nothing; 
public officials betrayed their sacred trust, and I thought "Every-
body does it"; a stranger asked a smile, and I never gave it. 

Christian schizophrenia as I see it, sin's inner rupture as I 
experience it, is rarely a clear no to a God who will not let me go. 
Rather, I am rent within, inwardly divided, because I compromise, 
come to terms with two masters, do not live the Life that burns 
and yearns within me. 

2. 

But if such is sin's inner rupturing, whence comes reconcilia-
tion? How can I be made whole again? The basic answer is St. 
Paul's glad cry: "Who will deliver me? God, through Jesus Christ 
our Lord" (Rom 7:24-25). The problem is, Jesus Christ is not a 
magic formula: you speak His name and there He is; you wave 
your hand and you are healed by Him. 

And yet the Christian paradox lies precisely in this: Jesus Christ 
is there! Take the most radical form of sin's schizophrenia—where 
I have shouted a definitive no to God, where my living actions, at 

16 



once cold-blooded and passionate, have declared that / am 
supremely important, not God. Indeed I am no longer linked to 
God by love; Father, Son, and Spirit no longer live in me. None-
theless, I cannot sever the last strand that binds me to divinity: 
like it or not, want it or not, I am God's; and so God and His Christ 
constantly call to me, will never cease calling till I murmur a no 
in death which is beyond recall. Put another way: I may stop loving 
Christ; He never stops loving me. The proof4ias to be Calvary. As 
St. Paul summed it up: "If while we were enemies we were 
reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, now that 
we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life" (Rom 5:10). No 
matter how deep that divisive rupture, the Son of God is there to 
heal it. 

But again, I am not so much interested in this radical rupture 
which ends love, this radical reconciliation which demands a fresh 
beginning—almost like Calvary all over again. What I called our 
everyday experience, the day-to-day rupturing—the casual "small" 
sins and the thoughtless 'big" sins and the mass of omissions— 
this is where reconciliation must touch your daily existence. Here 
is where you grow into one person or split insensibly into two. The 
Spirit of Love lives in you, the source of reconciliation, of inner 
oneness, of harmony between flesh and spirit, between the spirit 
of man and the Spirit of God—what must you do to free Him for 
reconciling action within you? 

Aye, there's the rub! To free Him. . . . My obstacle, after half a 
century, is not God, not the world's men and women; my obstacle 
is myself. It is a strange and disturbing fact: the more I focus on 
myself, the more divided I am inside. The more selfish I am, the 
less of a single self I am. Not strange at all, if I reflect a bit. 
St. Augustine's oft-quoted confession has been quoted so often 
it has lost its savor: "Thou hast made us for thyself, 0 Lord, and 
our heart is restless till it rests in thee." And modern philosophers 
join contemporary youth in insisting that I am authentically a 
person, a self, to the extent that I am "for others." For God, for 
others: only by moving outside myself can I become genuinely 
myself, a person, a wholeness. 

To be at peace within, therefore, to reconcile the conflicting 
forces inside of me, I must deaden this damnable, distressing 
stress on myself—on my needs and my wants, on my self-fulfil-
ment and what is meaningful to me. I must let the Spirit lead me 

17 



where He will. A perilous resolve, replete with risk—once I remove 
that resolve from the safe order of the abstract. For I do not know 
where the Spirit might lead me if I let Him; and at times I am not 
at all sure it is the Holy Spirit who has taken the reins. But the 
blessing of it is that the Spirit will lead me outside myself, lead 
me to "the others," those who are less human because I am less 
Christian: to the child of six who has never heard a word of love, 
and the lonely old lady whom everyone shuns; to those who hate 
me because I seem to have so much, and those who pity me 
because I seem to live so little; to all those in search of something 
to live for, those in sorrow over life that has died. These "others" 
are legion; but only through them will I escape that small self in 
whose womb so much sinfulness comes to birth. And in leading 
me to "the others," the Spirit will be leading me to "the Other"; 
for, as the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber emphasized, every 
individual thou is a reflection of the eternal Thou. Only in Him 
will all our inner ruptures ultimately be reconciled, and we shall 
stand forth images of Christ alone, images of nothing else created. 

18 



II 

Reconciliation Between 
Man and Man 

In the First Epistle of John there is a terrifyingly strong para-
graph: "This is the message which you have heard from the begin-
ning, that we should love one another, and not be like Cain, who 
was of the Evil One and murdered his brother. And why did he 
murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's 
righteous. . . . We know that we have passed out of death into 
life, because we love our brothers and sisters. He who does not 
love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, 
and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. 
By this we know love, that [Jesus] laid down His life for us; and 
we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. But 
if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet 
closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? 
Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and 
in truth" (1 Jn 3:11-18). 

Thus far I have argued that reconciliation implies rupture: one-
ness has been destroyed. I have argued that ultimately rupture 
has its origin in sin, finds its reconciliation in God's grace. I have 
insisted, first, that the radical rupture rends man from God. 
I have insisted, second, that the schizophrenia of sin ruptures me 
within. Now I shall discuss a third rupture that is the work of sin. 
I shall argue that sin severs man from man, human person from 
human person. And I shall insist that reconciliation, the destruc-
tion of sin, the restoration of oneness among God's children, is 
impossible unless love lays hold of us, unless we lay hold of God 
in love, lay hold of man in love. The "two great commandments 
of the law" are really one: I cannot love God if I hate my neighbor, 
and I will not love my neighbor as I should unless I love God with 
all my mind and heart, with all my soul and strength. 

19 



1. 

First, then, sin severs man from man. You see, few sins are 
aimed directly at God. Rarely does a human being set up what he 
knows are false gods; rarely does he curse God in cold blood. 
More often I sin by offending against the image of God: I sin 
against man. Most sins reflect the sin of Cain, who turned on his 
brother Abel and slew him. Most sins exemplify man's inhumanity 
to man. 

Some of this inhumanity has taken place on a scale so vast, 
on a canvas so broad, that you cannot grasp it if you live or die 
outside it. I am thinking of the gigantic inhumanities man has 
inflicted on man just in my lifetime. Take war and politics. Two 
world wars: the first took 10 million lives, the second took 15 
million in military personnel alone. Two atomic bombs fashioned 
a new hell in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nazi gas chambers ex-
terminated six million Jews. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's explosive 
book tells of 12 million Russians in any given year imprisoned, 
tortured, or killed in the network of prison islands he calls the 
Gulag Archipelago. The Spanish Civil War cost a million lives. 
Napalm converted Vietnam into family incinerators. Nine and a 
half million refugees clogged the roads of East Pakistan. Terrorist 
bombs maimed women and children in Northern Ireland, and a 
blockade threatened millions with starvation in Biafra. All this and 
much more in my short span of living. 

Take poverty. Each night two out of every five human persons 
on this earth go to bed hungry—two out of five. One third to one 
half of the human race suffers from nutritional deprivation. The 
United States, with 6 percent of the earth's population, controls 
40 percent of the earth's wealth. The North Atlantic nations, with 
16 percent of the earth's peoples, control 80 percent of the earth's 
wealth. And if those figures seem abstract to you, here is how 
many years you could expect to live if you grew up in certain other 
countries: Cambodia, 44; Kenya, 43; Burma, 42; Sudan, 40; 
Ghana, 39; Madagascar, 38; Libya, 37; Cameroon, 36; South 
Vietnam, 35; Togo, 34; Chad, 32; Syria, 30 to 40; Nepal, 25 to 40. 
And beneath these naked figures smolders a volcano of envy and 
resentment, of frustration and hate. For if war is sinful because 
man does something—something evil, poverty is sinful because 
man does nothing. 

20 



Take race: black and white in South Africa, black and white in 
the United States. In our own "land of the free" I have seen the 
subtle, bloodless violence of white power—power that enslaved 
a whole race, condemned it to ghettos and the back of a bus, 
forced it to study in shacks and work in toilets, forbade it our 
sidewalks and our pews, barred it from hotels and restaurants, 
from movie houses and rest rooms. Not because these people were 
ignorant or dirty or penniless; only because they were black. And 
they won their freedom not because the master race loved them; 
they forced freedom from us by their blood and our law. A court 
of law proved more powerful than the Sermon on the Mount. In 
consequence, you have the black reaction: in large measure they 
despise us, hate us. So much so that a prominent black theologian 
has confronted white Christianity with these harsh words: "[We 
have] no use for a God who loves whites the same as blacks. We 
have had too much of white love, the love that tells blacks to turn 
the other cheek and go the second mile. What we need is the divine 
love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black 
people to destroy their oppressors, here and now, by any means at 
their disposal" (James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation 
[Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970] p. 132). 

War, poverty, race—here is the legacy of Cain on national, 
global, cosmic levels. But the rupture between man and man is 
not something that begins "out there" somewhere. If, as Isaiah 
proclaimed, "peace is the fruit of righteousness" (Is 32:17), if, 
as the Second Vatican Council taught, "peace is likewise the fruit 
of love" (Gaudium ef spes, no. 78), then war is the fruit of un-
righteousness, of hate. But I dare not lay that unrighteousness, 
that hate, solely at the feet of the enemy, only in the heart of the 
politician, blame it all on the dictators of our day. If I am as honest 
as I want my neighbor to be, I must look within, to see if the seeds 
of war are planted in my heart. I dare not be less Christian than 
Christ demanded when He said: "You have heard that it was said 
to the men of old, 'You shall not kill, and whoever kills shall be 
liable to judgment.' But I say to you that whoever is angry with 
his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother 
shall be liable to the council; and whoever says 'You fool!' shall be 
liable to the hell of fire" (Mt 5:21-22). 

Granted that poverty and malnutrition, infant mortality and 
early old age, are complex issues, far beyond the power of any 

21 



one individual or group to resolve. It still remains true that people 
are dying as they are because we are living as we are. Whole 
cities could live on the garbage from our dumps, on the clothes 
we wear once, on the luxuries we have made necessities. We dare 
not lay the blame on "the nation"; the nation is "we the people." 
As with war, so with poverty, I must look into my heart and ask: 
Is someone in agony, across the street or across the world, because 
I do not care enough? 

So too with race. Never have I spoken harshly to a black man; 
but never have I spoken harshly to an American Indian either! 
Before I absolve myself of all responsibility for the hatred that 
severs white and black, I must ask myself several questions: Does 
the comfort I enjoy—house, food, job, money—stem in any way 
from America's long history of exploitation, of injustice to a whole 
race? How often have I taken the first step towards a black person, 
to ease his hunger not so much for food and drink as for under-
standing and love—to lift a little of his loneliness, his feeling that 
he was not wanted? Do I share the conviction of many Christians 
that "the whole thing has gone too far," that "they" are getting 
far more than they merit? Can I say honestly that I love them as 
human persons fashioned by God in His image and refashioned 
in the blood of Christ? 

2. 

This brings me to my second point: How in the concrete can 
the rupture be healed, how can man be reconciled to man, how 
can I become a force for reconciliation? From one perspective, 
the task seems hopeless. Will anything anybody does heal the 
hatred that inflames Northern Ireland and West Africa, Southeast 
Asia and the Middle East? Is it realistic to think we can feed and 
house and clothe a world population that is now doubling every 
thirty-five years? Can we expect more than an armed neutrality 
between black and white in the United States? 

The total task may be hopeless, and still we are not helpless. 
I shall not pre-empt the order of politics; my purposes are pastoral. 
Let me suggest several Christian responses to the sins that sever 
man from man. 

A first step to reconciliation is to . . . remember. That remark-
able Jewish storyteller Elie Wiesel, who feels guilty because he 

22 



survived the Holocaust, tells us that, for Jews, to forget is "a crime 
against memory as well as against justice: whoever forgets be-
comes the executioner's accomplice" (The Oath [New York: 
Random House, 1971]). It is too convenient for Christians to 
forget that the Holocaust took place in a Christian country, too 
easy for us to say "I wasn't there," too simple to shrug our 
shoulders and wash our hands of it. Time erases bad memories— 
except for the Jews; for all too many of them, God died in 
Auschwitz. And time erases what I have done to my fellow man, or 
failed to do for him. I am not asking you to brood, to become 
neurotic, to fasten sickeningly on your failures. I am asking you 
simply to remember. Don't become "the executioner's ac-
complice." 

But remembrance is not enough. Sin calls for sorrow—even 
where it is not I who have sinned, but the Christian community 
of days long gone. One example. Thoughtful Jews who welcomed 
Vatican ll's Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, who welcomed 
the Church's rejection of the "Christ-killer" canard, were be-
wildered by the absence "of any note of contrition or repentance 
for the incredible sufferings and persecutions Jews have under-
gone in the Christian West. The Church's various declarations 
asked forgiveness from the Protestants, the Eastern Orthodox, 
from the Moslems, but not from the Jews. Many Jews, especially 
those who lived through the Nazi holocaust, asked with great 
passion, 'How many more millions of our brothers and sisters 
will need to be slaughtered before any word of contrition or 
repentance is heard in the seats of ancient Christian glory?' " 
(Marc H. Tanenbaum, "A Jewish Viewpoint," in John H. Miller, 
ed., Vatican II: An Interfaith Appraisal [Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre 
Dame Press, 1966] p. 363). I may not be personally responsible 
for death on the hot sands of Sinai, for bloated bellies in Appa-
lachia, for Southern laws that condemned blacks to illiteracy; but 
do I ever weep for them? 

Remembrance and repentance call for conversion: I must change 
in mind and in heart. Here reconciliation becomes sticky. It is 
easy enough to deplore an individual sin, to say I shall try never 
to do it again. It is much harder to become the new person who 
does not act that way. It is relatively easy for me not to fire a gun, 
not to waste while a continent hungers, not to let bias destroy 
normal courtesy. It is ever so hard for me to become a man of 

23 



peace, a man poor in spirit, a man who loves. But unless I do, 
I shall not become a force for reconciliation; I shall be one only 
with the few I like, the few who like me. 

The radical break-through will come when I love God enough 
to love His every image on earth, when I see in every broken body, 
in all starved flesh, the crucified corpse of Christ. Only then will I 
do what Thomas Merton saw must be done: "our job is to love 
others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy." 
Not with words only or primarily; all too many of us deny with our 
lives what we profess with our lips. We have reached that point in 
history where we either treat our neighbors as brothers and sisters 
or invite destruction. 

In this connection, a Hasidic tale dear to the Jewish philosopher 
Martin Buber is splendidly pertinent: "A young student after much 
anguish knocked on the door of his rabbi. He cried out: 'Rabbi, 
I have eyes to see, ears to hear, and a mind to understand, yet I 
do not know for what purpose I was created or what meaning there 
is in my life.' The rabbi answered: 'Foolish one, neither do I know 
the purpose of existence, but come let us break bread together' " 
(cf. Arthur Gilbert, "The Contemporary Jew in America," Thought 
43 [1968] 226). 

24 



II 

Reconciliation Between 
Man and Nature 

Recently the social philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm 
was interviewed by a New York newspaper. He had come to this 
country in the early 1930s, an exile from Hitler's Germany, hopes 
high for life and work in a vibrant America. Forty years later, he 
fears for his adopted country. "The United States is not yet 
entirely in hell. There is a very small chance of avoiding it, but I 
am not an optimist." 

Why this gloom? One reason is what Fromm calls our "un-
restrained industrialism." After World War II, America's industrial 
machine spewed an endless flow of motor cars and pleasure boats, 
refrigerators and air conditioners, barbecue pits and heated swim-
ming pools. Such incredible excess of material things, Fromm 
claims, the machine process, has minified man, made his own 
life seem unimportant to him. "We have grown soft from it at a 
sacrifice of, what shall I call it, the soul." And, on the whole, we 
"have accepted the logic of machinery, which is to demonstrate 
how machinery works. The ultimate purpose of making a gun 
is to fire it." 

In consequence, "America has become the world's most destruc-
tive society." Not only have we bombed Vietnam back to the 
Bronze Age. "Our society is also internally destructive. In the 
last decade or so, a million people have been killed in highway 
accidents. We produce cars with built-in obsolescence. Knowing 
the possible dangers, we continue to pollute the environment. And 
we subsidize violence on the screen—movies in which human life 
is depicted as brutish and cheap" (cf. New York Times, Dec. 15, 
1973, p. 33). 

I have analyzed three ruptures that call for reconciliation: 

25 



rupture between man and God, within man himself, between man 
and man. Now I take up a fourth facet of human disunity, a rupture 
Dr. Fromm has in mind, the rupture between man and nature, 
between man and things. I shall probe two problems: (1) what this 
rupture does to us, and (2) what this rupture asks of us. 

1. 
First, then, what is this rupture between man and nature? By 

"nature" I mean all that is not man or God. Till recently, you 
and I have pretty much taken nature, things, for granted. There 
they were—air and ocean, coal and natural gas, aluminum and oil, 
steer and salmon, wheat and milk and eggs, cars and boats and 
planes, drugs and electric lights—there they all were, in their 
natural state or the fruit of American know-how, at our disposal 
now and forever. Oh yes, much of it was hostile, had to be 
subdued; some of it belonged to others, had to be carried enslaved 
across continents; but when the chips were down, nothing could 
resist American ingenuity. What we wanted we could have. One 
tradition even boasted that such consistent success, such material 
prosperity, was a sign of God's election: we were a chosen people. 
All enemies would fall before our blessed might: not only ensouled 
peoples but the soulless soil, the bowels of the earth and the 
limits of outer space. 

Suddenly all that changed. No longer could we take nature 
for granted. Each day a new headline horrified us, terrified us: 
"Last Pocket of Clear Air in United States Disappears"; "World 
Oxygen Level Threatened by Pesticides"; "Air Pollution Will Re-
quire Breathing Helmets by 1985"; "World Losing Water Pollution 
Battle despite Stepped-up Control Efforts"; "Chemical Fertilizers 
Called Threat to Water Resources"; "Millions Face Threat of 
Starvation"; "World Food Supplies Seen Running out by Year 
2000"; "Experts Say Human Race May Have Only 35 Years Left" 
(Cf. Karl Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin? p. 121). 

In fear, we looked at nature with new eyes, fresh awareness. 
I looked at human excrement pouring into the Hudson River, and 
I smelled not waste but death. I breathed deeply, coughed, and no 
longer found humor in the joke: "When does the snow get dirty 
in New York City? At ten thousand feet." I read that autos occupy 
more space in America than do people, and I felt strangled. I saw 
a tree felled in a few short moments, and I remembered that the 

26 



tree had been centuries a-growing. I watched the Arab-Israeli 
crisis unfold, and realized that this winter our children and our 
aged might be cold, might freeze. I saw a lady look wistfully at 
chuck beef in a market, and the ceaseless surge in living costs 
became more than a statistic. I heard that, to power western 
cities, Navajo land would be strip-mined, and I thought of the 
horror that is Appalachia. 

Appalachia. . . . Is it possible that Appalachia is, in miniature, 
America in the year 2000? "Every year Americans junk 7 million 
cars, 48 billion cans, 20 million tons of paper. Our industries pour 
out 165 million tons of waste and belch 172 million tons of fumes 
and smoke into the sky. We provide 5 0 % of the world's industrial 
pollution. An average of 3000 acres of oxygen-producing earth a 
day (1,000,000 a year) fall beneath concrete and blacktop. The 
average American puts 1500 pounds of pollutants into the atmos-
phere each year. Furthermore, there is no end in sight" (Richard 
A. McCormick, S.J., "Notes on Moral Theology: April-September, 
1970," Theological Studies 32 [1971] 97). 

In all these facts and figures, what I find frightening is that we 
are enlarging the enmity that exists between man and his earth. 
It is as if we began with the curse of God in Genesis, "Cursed is 
the ground because of you" (Gn 3:17), experienced how reluctant 
nature often is to serve us, vowed that with our know-how and our 
power we rational creatures would enslave the irrational, and then 
carried our vow relentlessly to its logical conclusion. We have 
conquered the earth; it is subject, or soon will be, to our every 
will and whim. Only . . . the slave has turned on his master; cold 
reason is no longer in control; out of the nonhuman we have 
fashioned a monster, and the monster threatens to strangle us. 
The rupture that sin spawned, hostility between man and his 
environment, is reaching the point of no return. I can only hope 
that you are as frightened as I am. 

2. 

My second main point: what does this rupture ask of us? 
Obviously, reconciliation. But how do we achieve reconciliation? 
The answer is not easy, because the problem is complex; and the 
problem is particularly complex because it is not clear how we 
have come to this unpretty pass. 

27 



For some experts, we are where we are because of an American 
mentality, an American attitude, an American value system. We 
see the material world as a giant cookie jar. The world is a 
commodity and we are consumers. Since this life is either all 
there is or a vale of tears while we wait for a better life, it makes 
sense to raid the cookie jar. And so we profit, we pleasure, we 
pollute (Cf. J . Barrie Shepherd, "Theology for Ecology," Catholic 
World 211 [1970] 172-75). 

Other experts point to a dilemma that has confused American 
society since the nineteenth century: we worship nature, yet we 
exploit it. On the one hand, there is the religion of nature. Many 
work in the city while dreaming of the country; they work on 
supersonic transports and live in ranch houses to escape the city's 
noise. In communion with nature, they seek deity, virtue, vitality; 
finding God in the woods, they let the city stew in its sin. On the 
other hand, there is the religion of civilization. It was symbolized 
by the steam locomotive: we sang about it, its ability to leap rivers, 
grind rocks into powder, trample down hills. Here nature is 
"defined by its openness to manipulation and exploitation" (Cf. 
H. Paul Santmire, "Ecology and Schizophrenia: Historical Dimen-
sion of the American Crisis," Dialog 9 [1970] 175-92). 

Others take us back a giant step. They blame our ecological 
crisis on the Christian understanding of the Old Testament. As 
they see it, the scientific stance of the Western world goes back 
to the first page of Scripture: "God created man in His own image, 
in the image of God He created him; male and female He created 
them. And God blessed them, and God said to them: 'Be fruitful 
and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion 
over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every 
living thing that moves upon the earth' " (Gn 1:27-28). Subdue . . . 
dominion. Christianity (so the charge runs) sees in man the one 
center of the universe. All else—soil and sea and sky, blue marlin 
or bird of paradise, oil or coal or natural gas—all that is not man 
has for purpose, for destiny, to serve man, to serve his purpose, 
to serve his pleasure. Man is not part of nature; somewhat like 
God, he transcends nature. Man not only differs from the sub-
human; the subhuman is his slave. 

And Western man has lived his theology, has played his role 
of master, with a vengeance. In laboratory and forest, in factory 
and refectory, we pillage and we rape, we devour and we waste. 

28 



Why not? It is I who am God's image, master of all I survey—king 
of the earth (said some early Christian writers) as God is King of 
the universe. Man will be utterly one with nature only when 
"things" no longer resist man's will, no longer struggle against 
him. 

Finally, a perceptive Protestant ethician, Joseph Sittler, insists 
that our basic ecological error is that we Christians have separated 
creation and redemption. The reason why we can worship nature 
in Vermont and at the same time manipulate nature in New York is 
because, in our view, the redemption wrought by Christ leaves 
untouched the creation wrought by God. And once we wrench 
redemption from creation, once we put nature out there and grace 
in here, as long as we omit from our theology of grace man's 
transaction with nature, it is irrelevant to Christians whether we 
reverence the earth or ravish it (Cf. Joseph Sittler, "Ecological 
Commitment as Theological Responsibility," /doc, Sept. 12, 1970, 
pp. 75-85; also his remarks in John H. Miller, C.S.C., ed., Vatican 
II: An Interfaith Appraisal [Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 
1966] pp. 426-27). 

Now each of these analyses says something important about 
man's rupture from nature, how that rupture came to be; and so 
each suggests in its own way how the rupture may be repaired, 
how man can be reconciled with his earth. But from all these 
analyses one word emerges as a critical corrective: responsibility. 
I am responsible for my earth. But if responsibility is to be real, 
is to lead to reconciliation, I must frame a fresh attitude to the 
earth, to all that is not human. How? 

First, I dare not interpret the Genesis command "subdue the 
earth" to mean that God has given man unrestricted power to do 
with the earth whatever he will. God gives man not despotism 
but stewardship. And a steward is one who manages what is 
someone else's. A steward cares, is concerned, agonizes; he may 
not plunder or waste; he is responsible, can be called to account 
for his stewardship. "The earth is the Lord's" (Ps 24:1). 

Second, we shall not be responsible stewards unless we shake 
off the consumer mentality: more things equals better persons. 
How difficult this is, the energy crisis reveals. We Americans, 
6 percent of the world's population, have been consuming 30 
percent of its energy. Our government's initial solution to the 

29 



sudden shortage? For a short time, sacrifice, less consumption. 
In the long run, how can we continue to consume 30 percent? 
Not should we, only how do it? Our spontaneous solution: 
Project Independence, the world as competition. Only later did 
we hear Project Interdependence, the world as community. 

Third, we shall not be responsible stewards unless we sense 
the intimate unity, the inescapable solidarity, that links man to 
nature. We must take seriously the mystery-laden affirmation 
of St. Paul: when man in Christ is finally restored to his true nature 
and destiny, "the creation itself will be set free from its bondage 
to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God" 
(Rom 8:21). Man and his world are intended by God to grow 
together, to be redeemed together; they share a common destiny. 

This means, fourth, an awareness that the subhuman is sacred. 
Everything that exists, from ocean floor to outer space, is precious 
because it reflects the God whose whole being is summed up in a 
monosyllable: He is. And everything that lives, from the simple 
amoeba through a field of wheat to the sulphur-bottom whale, is 
more precious still, because it images the God who is Life. Nature 
is sacred in its own right, even apart from man. 

Responsible stewardship means, fifth, a realization that the 
earth belongs to all men. I do not deny your right to private 
property; but private property is not an absolute. It is subordinate 
to core personal rights: the right to life, to human dignity, to bodily 
integrity. America is not entitled to keep or consume everything 
it can produce or purchase. It is through the things of earth, 
from water to atomic energy, that man becomes human or inhuman; 
it is largely by his use of God's creation that man is saved or 
damned. And so it is frightening that two out of every five human 
beings fall asleep hungry each night; it is frightening that, despite 
the dollars pouring into Latin America, the rich get richer and the 
poor get poorer. Each man, each woman, each child have a strict 
right to as much of this earth's resources as they need to live a 
human existence in union with God. The earth is man's. 

I have spent much space on attitudes, because only a new 
attitude can change America from rapist to steward. Only a fresh 
vision can change enemies into partners, reconcile man and his 
earth. But if love will not change us—love of God, of God's image, 
of God's creation—perhaps fear will. Raping the earth may 
destroy us, here and hereafter. 

30 



II 

Reconciliation: 
Deeds Not Words 

In this approach to reconciliation, my argument has been 
basically simple. I have argued that reconciliation implies rupture, 
a rupture on four levels: between man and God, within man himself, 
between man and man, between man and nature. I have argued 
that reconciliation, the destruction of rupture, ultimately comes 
through grace, through Christ, through love. And I have argued 
for fresh attitudes—to God, to myself, to my fellow man, to nature 
—new ways of looking at these realities, new ways of addressing 
them. 

But attitudes and words are not enough. The Epistle of James 
is strong here: "Be doers of the word, and not hearers only" 
(Jas 1:22). And the First Epistle of John: "Little children, let us 
not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth" (1 Jn 3:18). 
The problem, of course, is: how? 

A remarkable ecumenist, Lukas Vischer, made three reflections 
recently which he thought relevant for the Holy Year. He took from 
the Book of Leviticus, chapter 25, the three prescriptions of the 
ancient Jewish Year of Jubilee; each prescription suggested to 
him what all Christians might do so as to make 1975 more than 
a limited Catholic celebration (cf. National Catholic Reporter, Nov. 
23, 1973, p. 11). The three prescriptions touch (1) ecology, (2) 
justice, (3) freedom. I should like to develop, to expand, his brief 
suggestions. 

1. 

One prescription fairly leaps out of Leviticus. The Lord says: 
"The land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me" 
(Lv 25:23). The point is, the Jews were expected to "recognize 

31 



this divine claim in each year of the sabbath and even more in 
each jubilee year. The land should rest in this year. The Jews 
should resist the temptation to regard the land as property to be 
manipulated by them. God's creation has its own right which has 
to be respected by us" (Vischer, loc. cit.). 

What does this say to us today? I argued earlier that we 
Americans are raping the earth to our own destruction. We waste, 
we pillage, we pollute so prodigally that the earth we thought our 
slave has turned on its master, threatens to destroy us. I argued 
for a new attitude—against the consumer mentality, for a stance 
where we are not despots but stewards, aware of the intimate unity 
that links man to nature, aware that the subhuman too is sacred, 
aware that the earth belongs to all men. 

With this new attitude, what must we do? First, we cut down on 
waste: we no longer "use, consume, or expend thoughtlessly or 
carelessly," no longer "use to no avail," no longer "squander" 
(American Heritage Dictionary). This means that many of us will 
eat less and drink less, smoke less and drive less, either wear the 
clothes we buy or give them to the poor, stop hoarding for an 
improbable future. 

Second, we pillage less, plunder the earth with reluctance. 
Obviously, the earth cannot remain a sort of eternal Eden, virginal, 
untouched; man must live off the earth, is empowered to remake it. 
But I cannot believe that, with our technological know-how, each 
square foot of concrete must destroy a square foot of soil. I trust 
that the uncounted acres of Vietnam we have defoliated and 
depopulated we will help restore; this is not charity, this is justice. 
Those who hunt wildlife and shoot for sheer pleasure I do not ask 
to cease and desist; but I do ask them to examine their posture 
towards the subhuman: do they see the wild duck and the deer 
simply as man's plaything? The examples are legion, and each 
person has a different set of contacts with nature. But each of us 
should henceforth touch the "things" of God with greater rever-
ence; where we must consume or destroy, let it be only because 
paradoxically it makes us more human. 

Third, let us pollute only where pollution makes some measure 
of sense. Only where we can see pollution as a lesser evil. Only 
with a parallel effort to limit its destructiveness. The energy crisis 
compels us to temper our ideals, to come to terms with reality. 

32 



Please God, it will not mean compromising on principle: God's 
creation is sacred; touch it with reverence, pollute it with fear 
and trembling. 

2. 

A second prescription of the Jewish Year of Jubilee has the 
Lord commanding: "In this year of jubilee each of you shall return 
to his property" (Lv 25:13). The point is, "Those who have gone 
into debt and have had to sell their land shall have their land 
returned to them by the 50th year. As the land and all that it 
may produce is God's property, mankind should share it equally. 
The property should not be united in a few hands but should be 
for the benefit of the community" (Vischer, loc. cit.). 

What does this say to us today? I argued earlier that we 
Americans need a new attitude towards those hundreds of millions 
in the world who do not live humanly. A graphic description of the 
problem caught my eye recently: "If the world were a global village 
of 100 people, 70 of them would be unable to read, and only one 
would have a college education. Over 50 would be suffering from 
malnutrition, and over 80 would live in what we call substandard 
housing. If the world were a global village of 100 residents, 6 of 
them would be Americans. These 6 would have half the village's 
entire income, and the other 94 would exist on the other half" 
(IFCO News 4/6 [Nov.-Dec. 1973] p. 12). 

Such a desperate situation calls not only for an attitude; it 
calls for action. One example on the corporate level. The churches 
in this country are, in many instances, powerful operations. To 
operate efficiently, to help the needy, they invest in stocks and 
other securities. But the corporations in which churches invest 
are not merely tools for producing income; they have social con-
sequences. By their policies, corporations may cause death, 
disease, injury—by decisions on pollution, plant safety, working 
conditions. They exercise influence and power, may even control 
and coerce—by propaganda, advertising, shady practices. Some 
corporations deal in death: napalm, poisonous gas, rockets. Some 
drain the resources of underdeveloped nations, while the rich in 
those nations get richer and the poor get poorer. Some assist 
racial policies by the support they give to racist governments. 

The point is, the. churches may no longer disregard the purposes 
to which their investments are put. They may not go along with 

33 



a certain respected economist: "The question is, do corporate 
executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities 
in their business activities other than to make as much money for 
their stockholders as possible? And my answer is that they do not. 
. . . The executive's job is to do whatever the shareholders would 
like to see done, and most of the time the shareholders only want 
to make money. . . . There is nothing that would in fact destroy 
the private enterprise system more than a real acceptance of the 
social responsibility doctrine" ("Milton Friedman Responds: A 
Business and Society Review Interview," Business and Society 
Review, Spring 1972, pp. 6-8, quoted by David Hollenbach, S.J., in 
Theological Studies 34 [1973] 268). 

This, I submit, is unethical. Nothing is more destructive of 
humanity than rejection of social responsibility. The churches 
have a moral obligation (1) to know how their money is being 
invested, (2) to discover whether human beings are being injured 
or exploited by these investments, (3) to make value judgments 
on corporation policies, (4) to try to control unethical behavior in 
corporations, influence their policy, challenge their actions, and 
(5) in certain instances, to sell the stock they hold. The churches 
can be a unique force for social good. The effort to influence may 
be torturous—but so is death by starvation. 

On the individual level, I must learn, perhaps for the first time, 
if my purchasing power, my purchasing habits, support injustice: 
to migrant workers, to minority groups, to the poor and the power-
less. Problems of the immediate present such as lettuce and 
grapes are too complex to settle in a paragraph. The important 
thing is, you may not shut your eyes to what lies behind a head 
of lettuce or a bunch of grapes, just because it is all too com-
plicated or you simply cannot be bothered. Human lives are at 
stake. And here enter my sins of omission. You know what 
agonizes me as I near life's late afternoon? I have written against 
injustice, preached against it, prayed against it; but I have never 
shouted against it, never linked arms with marchers for peace and 
justice, never laid my life on the line. It's always been behind a 
barricade; it's all been quite safe. And are you among those who 
told nuns to stay in their convents, stay out of Selma and Jackson? 
Are you among those who say that a priest's place is in the pulpit 
and not on a picket line? I'm afraid the theory is no longer 
Christian—if it ever was. Oh yes, some nuns and priests are 

34 



quite stupid in the causes they espouse and the shibboleths they 
shout. But even at their worst they are aware that they are their 
brothers' keepers. 

3. 

A third prescription of the Jewish Jubilee Year: the slave was 
to be freed: "He shall be released in the year of jubilee, he and 
his children with him" (Lv 25:54). Our own jubilee year puts fresh 
pressure on Christians to press for freedom. First, we have sung 
the Star Spangled Banner so long and so thoughtlessly that we 
assume automatically America is "the land of the free." Not so. 

A frightening number of Americans are slaves in the work they 
do. They are cogs in a machine. One half of their waking life is 
dull, monotonous toil which does not engage them as persons, is 
not what they want to do, does not show up in a product of which 
they feel a part, does not touch them to another human being, does 
not make them more human. A spot welder on the assembly line 
in an auto plant put it pungently: "They'll give better care to that 
machine than they will to you. If it breaks down, there's somebody 
out there to fix it right away. If I break down, I'm just pushed 
over to the other side till another man takes my place." The 
writer Studs Terkel summed it up: "Most of us, like the assembly 
line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are 
not big enough for people" ("Here I Am, a Worker," New York 
Times, March 19, 1973). 

Many of you are employers. Are you among those employers 
who put an end to isolation by creating teams, who rotate jobs to 
ease monotony, who involve employees in decision-making, who 
use sensitivity training and encounter sessions so that workers 
get to know one another, who pay workers for continuing their 
education? Our economic system demands x-number of slaves. 
What are you doing to free them? 

More than that: an increasing number of Americans are slaves 
because they have no work to do. They have no skills or their 
skills are not needed. And so they sit quietly or they stage sit-ins; 
they feel empty or they boil inside; they collect compensation for 
nothing and they agonjze about tomorrow. And all the while they 
become less human: no contact with God's creation, no sense of 
being useful, just chained to a system that periodically promises 

35 



less unemployment—or so the statistics say. Do you know even 
one of these slaves? Does he make you uncomfortable? Do you 
even trv to find work for him? One human person? 

And in America about one of every twenty goes to bed aching 
from hunger. When was the last time you did anything about it? 
Something like 35,000 young Americans are exiles from our 
society because they could not in conscience support our Asian 
War. Is it Christian to demand that if they return, they be im-
prisoned? Is this our Holy Year? 

Second, freedom is a demand not only on the world's most 
powerful country but on the world's most powerful Church The 
Cathol ic Church in this Holy Year must free women to contribute 
their rich gifts to the ceaseless task of redeeming a world; they 
ought no longer be second-class citizens, with nothing to say in 
church or chancery, encouraged only to wash the linens of today's 
Church and the diapers of tomorrow's Church. And the Church 
must double its efforts to exercise authority as service and not as 
naked power, must recognize that religious obedience does not 
destroy human rights, must grasp anew how sacred is man's 
conscience even when in error. The Church is indeed the Body of 
Christ; and still the Church is not God. 

Ultimately, no one else can define for you where your specific 
involvement lies. Knowing yourself and your situation, your gifts 
and your opportunities, you will grasp best what you can do. A 
dear friend of mine used to say: "I'm a brave man, but not a 
hero." Only the few are called to be heroes: a Solzhenitsyn 
challenging the tyranny of Russia, a Martin Luther King non-
violently attacking white violence. But all of us are called to be 
brave: to look at the land, to look at persons, to look within us— 
and then to do . . . something. The Book of Isaiah says much in a 
short space when it puts these words on the lips of the Lord: 

"Fasting like yours this day 
will not make your voice to be heard on high. . . . 

Is not this the fast that I choose: 
to loose the bonds of wickedness, 
to undo the thongs of the yoke, 
to let the oppressed go free, 
and to break every yoke? 

36 



Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, 
and bring the homeless poor into your house; 
when you see the naked, to cover him, 
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? 

Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, 
and your healing shall spring up speedily; 
your righteousness shall go before you, 
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. 

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; 
you shall cry, and He will say: Here I am." 

(Is 58:4-9) 

37 



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