The White Smoke

Ritual and Religion

The whole world waited for a puff of white smoke.

Catholic, non-Catholic, secular news agencies from all over the world filled St. Peter’s Square with crews of their best reporters. This was not a small story.

Since the conclave began the world took note. Who would it be? How would they choose the next Pope to lead the Church? And why, why do we care?

Rituals hold a particular fascination. Anything done the same way for thousands of years breeds a sense of awe, a bit of wonder that a process could survive generations of the men and women who created it. No change, No updating. Just repetition, renewal, reaffirmation. There is something magical in that.

The power of ritual is that makes us feel small and large at the same time. We become part something much bigger than our own lives and yet feel tiny in the one moment of generational history we share by making it our own.

Religion, in its best moments, offers all the benefits of ritual that humans crave: a story of meaning, a sense of connection to ancestors and to a future beyond this earth; a community of belonging; a guide for how to live and why. Those who reject religion often struggle to find adequate replacement, a secular philosophy big enough, powerful enough to frame their lives.

But religion has not had a lot of good moments recently. I don’t want to tarnish this one by repeating them here. They are familiar to all of us. And I have certainly lived the failing moments of the Catholic Church in my own lifetime, in my own parishes, in my own experience. But I too was drawn to the White smoke, my phone refreshing beside me for more than an hour, set on the live feed from Vatican Square, waiting for the announcement.

I was raised in an Irish Catholic environment of faith. My mother’s was a simple, powerful, incredibly open faith that valued goodness over all else, and looked for it in every religious tradition she encountered. My father ‘s a more studied Jesuit perspective that taught me three things I have never forgotten:

1. The Church is the People of God. The institutional Church will always be a few steps behind.

2. The Primacy of Conscience is the ultimate guide for people of faith. Doing what you believe to be right, guided by Christ’s gospel, is living your faith, and that will lead the institutional Church toward progress.

3. The word catholic in the creed has a small c: “I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church”. Catholic with a small c. meaning one universal church, one universal path of goodness we are all seeking that has little to do with institutions and dogmas, separations and sects. We are all ultimately meant to find God’s truth together.

These three lessons, added to forty years of clinical practice, lead me to one clear statement: I believe in believing. I believe that the spiritual aspect of mankind needs to be nurtured as much as his physical body, his intellectual capacity, his artistic energy. Mental wellness is enhanced when we find something beyond ourselves that frames meaning and defines the purpose of our lives.

The past fifty years in America been an experiment in the alternative. Generations of young people have rejected organized religion entirely and sought to create alternative paths of “spirituality” that substitute and support emotional wellness. They wanted to be free of religion’s oppressive, shaming side, and free to make autonomous goals, uniquely and individually determined, the framework of a happy life.

The results are mixed at best. Hyper- individualism has not made us happier. It has made us more self-centered, more entitled, angrier and more resentful toward anything that interferes with getting what we believe we deserve. It has also increased isolation and emptiness. There are no easy answers.

But this week, we experienced a world-stopping moment when we all looked up for a puff of smoke. This was a good moment for religion. It was a moment we stopped to pay attention to the promise of faith, the ideal of what believing ought to give us. The hope that the Church might answer our prayer for guidance.

And stunningly, the College of Cardinals gave us an American.

More importantly, they chose an American who embodies qualities diametrically opposed to those of DJT’s model American. They chose a man of intellect, humility, kindness and social conscience.

Maybe I want to read more into the smoke signals than they intended. Maybe Pope Leo was just the right man for their Church, for their needs, for their political process.

But I’d prefer to believe the Holy Spirit guided them to choose something more. A man who gives us back our faith in goodness again. Even American goodness.