Cruciform Encounter in a Time of Crisis: Enfleshing an Ethics of Alterity

A “Prior ‘We’”: Lonergan on Intersubjectivity

Lonergan’s thought emphasizes the dynamism underlying, conditioning, and advancing all of Creation. Human beings are participants in this movement, so they are also always engaging in a process of self-transcendence. Ideally, this involves an ever-fuller actualization of subjects’ capacities for inquiry and engagement with the world around them. ¹⁴ As knowing subjects within the world, we raise questions and attend to data, recognizing relations and patterns immanent in the data, and generating concepts, definitions, and formulations of these understandings. In a further step, we come to reflection, deliberating upon the fruits of our inquiry, and passing judgment on the truth or falsity of our understanding of the evidence marshaled. In an even further development, self-transcendence reaches beyond the order of knowing into the order of doing, and questions for deliberation lead to judgments of value regarding how each subject will live her or his life, asserting who she or he wants to be through the actions they choose to perform.

Lonergan frames the exhortation to such self-transcending authenticity through the injunctions he names “transcendental precepts.” ¹⁵ These precepts compel human beings to “Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible.” ¹⁶ Prior to any explicit thematization or linguistic expression, however, these exhortations exist concretely “in the spontaneous, structured dynamism of human consciousness.” ¹⁷ The objectification and reflection upon the operations constituting this structure provides the basis of Lonergan’s cognitional theory, and there is no shortage of literature unpacking and applying Lonergan’s thought on the subject. ¹⁸ One under-resourced component of Lonergan’s writings, however, is the assertion of a primordial, sensitive-psychic intersubjectivity preceding and accompanying these cognitional operations. ¹⁹

Lonergan’s account of intersubjectivity is built upon the assertion that human beings are fundamentally, relationally linked to one another. “Prior to the ‘we’ that results from the mutual love of an ‘I’ and a ‘thou,’ there is the earlier ‘we’ that precedes the distinction of subjects and survives its oblivion.” ²⁰ Intersubjectivity is the psychic link that binds subjects together in this “we.” While each human being has her or his own personal interests and concerns, the self “is no Leibnizian monad,” but a communal, social being, joined to others by the primordial ties “of mother and child, man and wife, father and son.” ²¹ It is within the intersubjective matrix of foundational connections that people grow and learn, developing within the family, clan, tribe, nation, and the human community as a whole. ²² Prior to the specificities accompanying technology, societal structures, and cultural advancement, human beings share intersubjective meanings, and these meanings bind groups together on the basis of an irreducible relatedness. Such meanings emerge naturally and extemporaneously in human life, and Lonergan frequently cites the smile as an example of such intersubjective meaning. ²³ We do not learn to smile as we learn other skills, which necessitate our acquiring habits and developing ordered patterns of actions. Smiles happen spontaneously. Their meaning is irreducible. Their meaning is intersubjective.

Interestingly, the “we” of intersubjectivity extends beyond one’s acquaintances, manifesting itself in spontaneous intersubjective acts on behalf of others, even total strangers. These acts occur prior to any thematization or reflection, and the subject acting only becomes fully aware of his or her action during or after the action’s occurrence. Spontaneous intersubjective acts happen selflessly, in instances where one’s “perception, feeling, and bodily movement are involved, but the help given another is not deliberate but spontaneous, [where] we act as if ‘we’ were members of one another prior to our distinctions of each from the others.” ²⁴ This assistance occurs as instinctively as one would raise an arm to block one’s own head from being hit. ²⁵ Lonergan often cites a particular personal experience as an example of such spontaneous, intersubjective aid:

Leading up to the Borghese Gardens in Rome, where I usually go for my favorite walk, there is a ramp. Coming down the ramp was a small child running ahead of its mother. He started to trip and tumbled; I was a good twenty feet away but spontaneously I moved forward before taking any thought at all, as if to pick up the child. There is an intersubjectivity, there is a sense in which we are all members of one another before we think about it. ²⁶

This pre-reflective response to the need of another serves as an excellent transition to Levinas, whose work provides a useful complement to and expansion of Lonergan’s articulation of the intersubjective.

Alterity and Similarity in Tension

In order to more adequately and integrally approach the relationship between alterity and similarity, I will draw from Robert Doran’s expansion of Lonergan’s work on dialectic. ³⁶ According to Doran, it is necessary to recognize two meanings of “dialectic” operative throughout Lonergan’s writings. Doran identifies these two types as (1) dialectics of contradictories, which present an either/or, and (2) dialectics of contraries, which present a both/and. ³⁷ Examples of dialectics of contradictories include good and evil, authenticity and inauthenticity, truth and falsity, insight and bias. ³⁸ These opposed principles cannot be reconciled with one another. The choice between them is divisive. In a dialectic of contraries, on the other hand, the choice is not one of either/or, but of the constant, creative push-and-pull of a both/and, a unity in tension, which results in a reconciling, creative dynamism, wherein both principles continue to exist in mutual benefit to the other. ³⁹ The paradigmatic example of a dialectic of contraries is the productive tension between the unfolding of unconscious neural demands manifested in the psyche, and the operations of intentional consciousness (Lonergan calls this tension the dialectic of the subject). ⁴⁰

In such dialectics of contraries, a principle of limitation is held in tension with a principle of transcendence, and the harmonious interdependence of these principles is constitutive of the dialectic. ⁴¹ When such interdependent principles are mistakenly dichotomized, the result is an imbalanced, distorted dialectic of contraries, or, perhaps more precisely, a false dialectic of contradictories. ⁴² It is my contention that the relationship between alterity and similarity is often (perhaps even usually) construed with this incorrect mutual exclusivity. This can happen for a number of reasons, with a wide range of regrettable results.

First, the genuine desire to avoid doing violence to the Other can be stressed to such a profound degree that any possibility of truly knowing the Other is automatically ruled out of the question. ⁴³ This authentic impulse can also create a false binary from the opposite end of the dialectic, as similarity can be overemphasized at the expense of fostering and valuing genuine plurality and difference. While stressing the similar may result from the legitimate desire to celebrate commonality, shared values and experiences, and so on, if pushed too far such a tendency can result in the half-measures of watered down dialogue and patchwork rapprochement.

Lastly, a false dialectic of contradictories can also be caused by a reversionary, fundamentalist, or—in extreme cases—xenophobic overemphasis of the need to preserve similarity and avoid alterity. In such cases, the “others” who stand outside of a particular group are deemed totally alien, and similarity within one’s own group is mistaken for sameness. Those who are not deemed “the same as we are” (or, perhaps more accurately, as I am) are labeled a threat, and dialogue is rendered nearly impossible. In less overt forms, a more moderate reaction to overemphasized and opposed alterity can result in condescension, lack of meaningful conversation, and exclusion.

Instead of understanding the Other and the similar as irreconcilable, the application of Lonergan’s and Doran’s work allows for the possibility of identifying alterity and similarity for what they really are: the interdependent poles of a dialectic of contraries. Holding these linked yet opposed principles in creative tension, we can affirm both Lonergan’s assertion of a “prior ‘we,’” and Levinas’s insistence on the radical obligation to the Other. Lonergan names the spontaneous intersubjectivity underlying and connecting all human beings. These contributions are grounded in the recognition of the element of similarity inherent in the relational. Levinas, for his part, identifies the irreducibly ethical element both underlying and constituting this intersubjective field, as the subject has an overwhelming, pre-intentional responsibility for the Other. Lonergan addresses the psychic similarity and spontaneous solidarity constituting and manifesting the “we” prior to individuation, and Levinas argues that each instantiation of this “we” demands a self-forgetfulness of the “I” on behalf of the Other, whose very real alterity holds the “I” accountable for something completely beyond itself, transcending easy limitation and control. Examining Levinas’s entreaties in light of Lonergan’s project and Doran’s expansion of it, it becomes clear that, while the intersubjective and relational are a natural, even a spontaneous element of the human subject’s self-transcendence, we are called to respond to, foster, and exercise authentic intersubjectivity and relationality vis-à-vis all others, and this precarious task requires the integration of the sensitive-psyche and the operations of intentional consciousness.

Understood as a dialectic of contraries, the dual poles of alterity and similarity can work in a productive tension for the growth of the subject or group without sacrificing prior experiences, understandings, beliefs, and so on, or forgoing authentic, open encounter with the Other. This creative push-and-pull does not imply the simple commensurability of all differing positions, nor does it suggest that the alterity each person or group embodies to all others is so radical as to preclude any real knowledge or growth. Instead, thematizing the dialectical relationship between alterity and similarity in this way opens up the possibility of real encounter and meaningful exchange, as people, groups, or ideas perceived as “other” are not automatically understood as “opposed to me.” Alterity and similarity can be simultaneously present in the same place, idea, group, or even individual person without threatening, limiting, or destroying either identity or openness. ⁴⁴

Establishing an integral approach to this interplay is central to the tasks of the present article, as embodiment (one of Copeland’s primary areas of emphasis) is perhaps the most acute exemplar of the ever-present, productive tension between simultaneous alterity and similarity. According to Levinas, “The body is not only an image or figure […]; it is the distinctive in-oneself of the contraction of ipseity and its breakup. […] It is a recurrence to oneself out of an irrecusable exigency of the other, a duty overflowing my being, a duty becoming a debt […]. Here what is due goes beyond having, but makes giving possible.” ⁴⁵ Such “contraction” of ipseity emphatically places the onus for ethics, not on selfhood or ego in the abstract, but on the concrete “me.” It is only in my concrete, particular body that I experience the universal obligation in the face of the Other, and I only experience the human Other in and through her or his embodiment. My corporeality serves as the precise locus of my exposure to this call. Levinas speaks of such accountability in terms of prophetic election, and his articulation of the response to such election is (in a typically Levinasian fashion) biblical. If I am truly being-for-the-Other, I meet this divine injunction by offering up my body in solidarity, replying, “Here I am.” ⁴⁶

This divine command implicates me prior to any thematization, and, as Levinas explicitly states in one interview, “It is not a metaphor: in the Other, there is a real presence of God. In my relation to the Other, I hear the Word of God. […] I am not saying that the Other is God, but that in his or her Face I hear the Word of God.” ⁴⁷ The face of each particular, embodied Other speaks the divine prohibition against murder. I can choose either to use my own body to inflict violence upon her, or I can open myself up to obligation, exposing myself to danger on her behalf, helping bear the brunt of her sufferings.

Copeland’s Christological Contributions

This attentiveness to the suffering of particular others provides an excellent transition to the work of M. Shawn Copeland. Like Levinas, Copeland’s concern for the poor, the widow, and the orphan permeates her entire project. Similarly, just as Levinas’s deeply personal, traumatic experiences of the Holocaust underpin his whole intellectual undertaking, so too Copeland’s writings are saturated with very real experiences of racism, misogyny, and their insidious insertions into deviated social, cultural, and even religious structures.

Copeland connects the visceral ways such surds “mark” human bodies, the enduring scars seared into the psyche and spirit by bias and embitteredness, and the long-term, widespread decline initiated by these evils. ⁴⁸ Instead of drawing false binaries between the individual and the communal, she adamantly asserts the interconnectedness of particularity and universality (and, I would suggest, of alterity and similarity): “Rather than exclude or overturn or punish other bodies or persons, specificity and particularity insist that we are all subjects.” ⁴⁹ Unfortunately, this interconnectedness is severed by the tendency to determine social bodies according to the desires of a privileged few, imposing a falsely constructed conception of normativity, and exercising indifference or brutality toward those who fall outside said norms. ⁵⁰

In stark contrast to this tyranny of inauthenticity, Copeland presents the person of Christ, the one who prioritizes the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the imprisoned, and states bluntly, “Truly I tell you, just as you [do] to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you [do] to me” (Matt 25:40 NRSV, used throughout). Jesus identifies himself as the one anointed on behalf of the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed (cf. Luke 4:16–21), and also as the one who “will draw all people to [him]self” (John 12:32). Copeland connects this simultaneous emphasis on particularity and universality to Jesus’s offering of his own flesh, writing, “For these [poor, dark, despised bodies], for all, for us, [Christ] gave his body in fidelity to the basileia tou theou, the reign of God, which opposes the reign of sin. Jesus of Nazareth is the paradigm of enfleshing freedom; he is freedom enfleshed.” ⁵¹

In his interactions with the tax collectors, lepers, adulterers, and all other pariahs of his historical period, Jesus provides the paradigm for evaluating our own responses to the marginalized in our milieu. In his engagements with a Samaritan woman at a well, a man born blind, or a centurion with a sick servant, Christ calls into question the inauthentic narratives and norms prevalent in his time. He openly and lovingly encounters those who social, cultural, and even religious authorities label “unclean” or “sinful,” directly opposing these presumptions and their consequences. As Copeland observes, we are obligated to imitate Christ’s unmasking of unjust assumptions and attitudes, patterns, and paradigms: “We are incarnate origins of value and love. Questioning and decoding the given or constructed narratives, assumptions, rules, preferences, and attitudes implicit in those meanings and values we espouse, informing and expressing ourselves as a culture, calls for ongoing, serious, and authentic critique.” ⁵²

In her ethics of enfleshment and imitation, Copeland articulates how Christ embodies and incarnates the epitome of attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and loving relationality. He meets, engages, ministers to, and heals the wounded, weakened, and reviled bodies of the marginalized. In short, Christ gives us the way, because he is the Way. ⁵³ We traverse this way through basileia praxis: “These acts of justice-doing, empire critique, love, and solidarity mark us as his flesh made vivid leaven in our world.” ⁵⁴ The values incarnated by and in Christ present a non-totalizing, non-systemizing, enfleshed ethic, obliterating our reductive expectations for the Image of God. Jesus’s encounters with others eschew false bifurcations of alterity and similarity, and Copeland highlights his unprecedentedly authentic relationship with what “otherness” means. I would expand these observations even further, arguing that in Christ and through Christ, alterity and similarity converge perfectly.

As the Word become flesh, Christ takes a tension already present in human existence—what Erich Przywara names the “in-and-beyond” relation between humanity and God—and embodies it. ⁵⁵ Even more unexpectedly, Jesus humbles himself relative to both his fellow human beings and his Father in Heaven. In his complete openness to the will of the Father, poignantly demonstrated in the garden of Gethsemane (Matt 26:36–46), Christ draws vertical alterity (i.e., the apophatic experience of dissimilarity between God and Creation) into an unprecedented relationship with the similarity he shares with all of us: his humanity. In the concrete, particular body of Christ, all humanity is redeemed, drawn more deeply into communion with God. This does not obliterate the distinction between God and creatures, as Christ’s kenotic love only highlights the gratuity of a gift wholly beyond (and, in a sense, “other” than) our created capacities.

Christ’s concrete universality fleshes out Levinas’s emphasis on the contraction of theoretical ipseity into my being concretely called into question and elected by and for the Other, and Lonergan’s observation that we are all bound together by a profound connection. In Christ, all of our responses to the obligation to the poor, the widow, and the orphan are inherently linked. We are all integrated and made new in and by the body of Christ, but this integration abolishes neither the particularity of Christ’s body, nor the particularity of the ones made new in Christ:

[Christ’s] taking us in, this in-corporation, is akin to sublation, not erasure, not uniformity; the basileia praxis of Jesus draws us to him. Our humble engagement in [Christ’s] praxis revalues our identities and differences, even as it preserves the integrity and significance of our body marks [i.e., the particularities of race, gender, sex, etc.]. At the same time, those very particular body marks are relativized, reoriented, and reappropriated under his sign, the sign of the cross. Thus, in solidarity and in love of others and the Other, we are remade and remarked as the flesh of Christ, as the flesh of his church. ⁵⁶

This remaking and remarking reinforces the responsibility each of us has to all others, to each Other, impelling us to prioritize the struggles of the marginalized, placing “the bodies of the victims of history at the center of theological anthropology, [turning] to ‘other’ subjects.” ⁵⁷

Cruciform Encounter in a Time of Crisis

In light of these christological reflections, how ought we incorporate the insights of Levinas, Lonergan, and Copeland into the concrete praxis of an embodied ethics of cruciform encounter? In Enfleshing Freedom, Copeland stresses the central role the Eucharist plays in incarnating the fellowship and healing at the heart of basileia praxis. ⁵⁸ I agree that sacramentality and fellowship ought to be fostered, especially as they are made present in the integrating, healing, and elevating communion of the Eucharistic table. Given the polarization of our present moment, however, I want to examine and emphasize a complementary component of Copeland’s work, examining how our horizons—and, consequently, our encounters—are shaped by prayer. This exploration of prayer will connect Copeland’s concern for the marginalized with Lonergan’s focus on self-appropriation and interconnectedness, Levinas’s prioritization of otherness, and my own dialectical framework for integrating the tension between alterity and similarity.

Copeland’s approach to prayer is holistic. She sees no disconnect between the life of prayer and the life of solidarity, service, or sacrifice. Prayer provides “the ground of lived spirituality and love as option and action”; it is the fertile soil “that nourishes lived spirituality, that makes self-transcendence credible, and that sustains compassionate active solidarity.” ⁵⁹ More than a specific method, technique, or exercise,

This grounding prayer is a mode of being, of living in and with Christ as response to the invitation “to come and see” (John 1: 39). Prayer expresses and responds to love, seeks to live in love for love of and with God even as the gracious gift of God’s love draws us on to deeper encounter, deeper love. Prayer becomes our mode of being; we become beings-in-love with God. ⁶⁰

This mention of becoming “beings-in-love with God” is a reference to Lonergan’s writings on religious experience and sanctifying grace. ⁶¹ In the dynamic state of being-in-love with God, we find our intentionality and capacity for self-transcendence fulfilled. In this paramount instance of being-in-love, the object of one’s love is God, and such a love results in a complete reorientation of one’s whole way of being. Copeland describes how, in this dynamic state and its deepened engagement through prayer, “We are transformed. No longer do we attempt to fit God into our lives, but seek to fit our lives into God. All that we are and all that we do is absorbed in being loved by God and loving God.” ⁶² Prayer draws us more deeply into this state, and this state draws us more fully into prayerful engagement with the object of our affection: God.

Because God loves all beings, this overflowing of grace flooding our hearts transforms our horizons, compelling us to spread God’s love to the entire human family. In the sense that the dynamic state, “as principle of acts of love, hope, faith, repentance, and so on, is grace as cooperative,” we are called to responsibly respond to it of our own will and volition, outwardly manifesting our reply to God’s love by loving our fellow human beings. ⁶³ This love heals any psychic baggage or biases encumbering our intersubjective spontaneity, elevating our attentiveness to the needs of the Other, our understanding of our own obligations, our judgment concerning the myriad ways we ought to follow through on the responsibility inherent in this relationality, and—most importantly—integrating our actions in the habit of charity. ⁶⁴ The dynamic state of being-in-love helps us to know others as God knows them, bearing “fruit in a love of one’s neighbor that strives mightily to bring about the kingdom of God on this earth.” ⁶⁵

Returning to Copeland’s observation that prayer draws us ever more deeply and fully into this dynamic state, it becomes clear that our prayerful response to God’s love is intimately linked to our response to God’s grace reaching out to us in and through the face of the Other. ⁶⁶ Our response to others and our response to God are mutually connected: “without fidelity to a life of prayer, our words are hollow, our living shallow, our capacities for discernment distracted.” ⁶⁷ At the same time, our prayer must be concretized and galvanized by our acts of compassion and concern for the Other, as “actions speak louder than words, [and] preaching what one does not practice recalls sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.” ⁶⁸ How ought we go about fostering a prayer life at once ordered toward action and grounded in love? What resources can Copeland, Lonergan, and Levinas offer for growing in prayerful engagement with and response to the needs of the Other?

First, we must continually remind ourselves that no one prays in a bubble or a vacuum. All prayer emerges from within personal and communal horizons of experiences, understandings, and concerns. Furthermore, these horizons of experiences, understandings, judgments, beliefs, and so on, are all connected to particular, embodied subjects. None of these horizons is exhaustive, and mistaking any particular perspective as permanent and universal leads to what Lonergan calls the classicist notion of culture. In Lonergan’s writings, classicism refers to the belief that culture is a fixed, universal, normative, and permanent achievement. ⁶⁹ The classicist exalts a particular culture (e.g., fourth-century Greece, nineteenth-century Rome, 1950s “Middle America,” etc.) above all others, holding this particular culture or society’s norms, beliefs, customs, and rituals as the standard toward which all other (and, therefore, inferior) cultures must strive. This understanding of a monolithic, unchanging cultural ideal overlooks or denies that philosophy, theology, politics, biology, economics, and so on, are ongoing processes. It precludes the humility and receptivity that are essential to healing and creating in history, especially in a time of crisis.

The facet of prayer most pertinent to the present article, therefore, is openness. Such openness and humility ought to shape the horizons in which we pray, and from which we respond to the voice of the one to Whom we pray. Each of us needs to consider the possibility that many of those positions shaping our horizons, especially those regarding race, gender, sexuality, and so on, are predicated upon misinformation, misunderstandings, and remnants of past and/or present misanthropy. Prayer, and especially lament—both personal and collective—opens up the space for naming and owning corporate complicity or intentional participation in structures and patterns of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia vis-à-vis other religions, and so on. ⁷⁰ When incarnated in instances of open, honest encounter, such lament can help restore and foster our spontaneous intersubjectivity, and lead to its intentional correlate, mutual self-mediation, helping both persons and institutions foster respect and lovingness toward and with the Other, each other, all others. ⁷¹

In a Catholic context, this ties back in a special way to the reframing of alterity and similarity as an integral dialectic of contraries, especially as Christ so dramatically incarnates this necessary, productive tension. As Copeland highlights, “For those of us who identify ourselves, no matter how halting or fitful, as followers and disciples of the Jewish rabbi from Nazareth, [the contemporary] situation of societal and existential impasse prod us to self-examination and to conversion, to witness and to action.” ⁷² Now, more than ever, if Catholic theology is to be truly Christian theology, it must be attentive and open to the needs of all those on the margins. Prayer and liturgy give us the space for recognizing, acknowledging, and lamenting our all-too-common inattentiveness to the experiences and struggles of black Catholics, brown Catholics, female Catholics, gay Catholics, trans Catholics, and especially those Catholics who embody multiple categories marginalized as “Other.” Furthermore, we ought to reflect upon our responses to those who do not identify themselves as Catholics or Christians, or those who we may tend to demarcate as distinctly “outside” the fold of Catholicism or Christianity. Are we sufficiently attentive and responsive to the fact that these people and their bodies are also incorporated into the body of Christ, by virtue of “that body’s openness to, turn toward, and solidarity with even radically different others; and because of that body’s pledge to be given and poured out for all others”? ⁷³

When we pray to this same Christ, the one who gave himself for all others, we sign ourselves in his name, naming ourselves in conformity with his sacrifice. We affirm our desire to follow in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth, the one who willingly walked through Gethsemane and Calvary on behalf of all peoples, without exception. When we sign ourselves with the Cross, offering our supplication, contemplation, praise, and/or lament in the name of the Triune God whose very immanent constitution is love itself, we are (however tacitly) expressing our fidelity to this love, a love manifested in cruciform cooperation with grace. For this reason, we must recognize that prayer is a practical response to crisis, not a request for God to simply break into the created order and short-circuit events on our behalf. God acts in the world in many ways, yes, but God does so at least partially through transforming and converting us. Prayer plays a major role in this process of conversion. The way we pray shapes us.

If our prayer is itself cooperation with grace, and if grace acts on us in and through our encounters with others, our prayer cannot be considered as something entirely independent from our ethical response to alterity. As self-appropriative subjects, linked to one another and impelled by the ethical obligation in the face of each Other, we need to reflect upon our own practices, questioning our individual and/or communal complicity in injustice and marginalization. We need to take candid, even uncomfortable stock of whether we have allowed fear, bias, or hatred to impact our actions or institutions, particularly if this has resulted in ignorance toward or exacerbation of the struggles of those on the margins. Taking an honest look at our own prayer lives, do we actively ask for and foster openness to being challenged and changed, not from within the easily defined confines of our preconceptions, but in encounter with God’s image in all others? ⁷⁴ Similarly, we might ask, even if we actively seek to open ourselves to encounter with and prioritization of the marginalized, whether we do so having already decided which groups are allowed to fall within this category, and, by extension, to be met with full openness. Do we conclude in advance (whether we thematize it or not) that certain groups are too problematic, too challenging to our own understandings, relegating them to an-other class of Other? Are there certain faces, certain bodies from which we turn away, whether out of confusion, discomfort, or fear?

Building upon this last question, I would highlight the importance of asking whether our prayer truly attunes itself to the full influence of the God infinitely transcending our tendencies—however unintentional—toward limitation, totalization, and reductive categorization. Following Christ’s example, we need to open ourselves to the will of the one who sends us, seeking to discern the profoundly creative movements of the Spirit who defies our expectations, lest we add ourselves to the list of hypocrites decried by Jesus. God’s influence manifests itself in many ways, not least of which is speaking to us in and through the needs of the Other, and the shift toward “a listening church” advocated by Pope Francis offers a starting point for hearing these needs. ⁷⁵ Reflecting upon this ecclesial approach in light of present paranoia and polarization, another quote from Francis’s TED Talk resonates powerfully with the themes I have drawn from Lonergan, Levinas, and Copeland: “The future is made of ‘yous,’ it is made of encounters, because life flows through our relations with others. […] Each and everyone’s existence is deeply tied to that of others: life is not time merely passing by, life is about interactions.” ⁷⁶

If our interactions are to begin from a place of true listening, we must be open to real encounter with the voices, faces, and bodies of all the marginalized. This is true even, and perhaps especially, if their struggles speak to ways the church and its members have been—or may continue to be—indifferent to, silent about, or complicit in particular, concrete injustices. Bearing any such individual or corporate shortcomings in mind, I would nevertheless emphasize the overwhelming and unexpected excess of God’s love, a love that is always operatively beckoning to us, seeking to draw us to fuller conformity with Christ. It is this love with which we are called to cooperate, participating in the dynamism at the very heart of the Trinity. ⁷⁷ As Copeland stresses, “the Spirit, who is Good and Love, moves us, draws us, and leads us into ‘love creating koinonia’ with the Triune God. The Spirit perfects us through and in communion and conversation, contemplation and prayer; our consent to the Spirit’s gentle will, without at the same time renouncing our intelligence and our dignity as human beings, constitutes true freedom.” ⁷⁸

This is the freedom Copeland urges us to embody, the freedom to exercise the authentic subjectivity toward which Lonergan impels us, the freedom to respond to the ethical exigence Levinas identifies. Christ enfleshes this freedom, and we are called to imitate it in our own encounters. Such attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility, and lovingness is the only thing capable of meeting and overcoming contemporary crises of relationality. Its exercise is what allows us to imagine and incarnate an ethical future, a future where each “I” will act on behalf of each “you,” recognizing that all are bound up in a “we” where otherness and similarity can coexist in love.