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Feb. 12, 2005 Fr. Charlie Costello, SJ, died a few months ago. I’ve thought of him a lot in the last few days, and I offer these comments about him for your reflection. Charlie was a friend, and for me, a role model. If there was a man whom I wished I could be, it was Charlie. Of course, I have a long way to go, but Charlie represented a virtue I'll always need to improve. To me, Charlie represents hospitality. Several recent events prompt me to remember Charlie. One was the whole Ward Churchill fracas. Another was the anti-Churchill backlash, partly led by Bill O’Reilly. I watch political shows all the time, and I’m mostly conservative, but they’re hard to watch these days. The election burned me out on these shows. No one can reasonably unpack and examine national issues in a four-minute segment, so they resort to labels, slogans, and attitude. If you hunger for some deeper analysis, you turn to journals or books, but these have lately turned into merely longer versions of what you see on television. We can no longer discuss broad national policy without crossing through narrow politics. That’s what made me remember Charlie. Charlie was a gentleman, and he didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body. He also felt no need to demand respect. I think of the contrast between Charlie and Bill O’Reilly. I’m a conservative, but O’Reilly is too aggressive for me. O’Reilly is always bragging about how powerful his show has become. He challenges opponents to come on his program, and if they don’t, he questions their courage. Maybe it’s just for the ratings, but O’Reilly comes off like a journalistic capo, if you want to be in the news, you have to wet his beak. He demands respect. To demand respect is to signal that you don’t feel you’re getting enough. Often enough, disrespect leads to feeling threatened, and aggression follows. It reminds me of gorillas. When gorillas feel threatened, they thump their chest, growl, and bare their teeth. Scary though it may be, such behavior instead shows fear. The threatened gorillas are afraid to attack. If they were simply angry, they’d just attack. The fact that they’re holding off is a sign that they’re not sure they can win, so they posture and growl, hoping to scare off attackers instead of risking the fight. The same threat ritual shows itself in human behavior all the time. When a person feels threatened, they magnify themselves as much as possible. (Again, O’Reilly.) When we see someone on TV going out of their way to magnify their importance, it always leaves us knowing that the person is simply threatened. Charlie Costello was exactly the opposite. I first met Charlie when I joined the Jesuits, and Charlie was the rector of the novitiate. (Jesuits are the largest order of Roman Catholic priests. I’ve since left the order, but I cherish my time with them.) As it was, our novitiate shared the campus with a retreat center, and Charlie was the rector of the whole house. Charlie often told us that the mission of the combined novitiate/retreat center was “hospitality.” The purpose of the novitiate was to welcome novices to religious life, and the purpose of the retreat center was to welcome others into a spiritual life. You can’t be hospitable unless you feel secure, and only someone who felt as secure as Charlie could pull it off as a mission. I think about Charlie today. I contrast his mission of hospitality with contemporary culture. Hospitality is all about making people feel welcome. When a novice first enters the Jesuits, he’s scared. He’s coming into a world of differences, and that’s scary. He’s threatened, you might say. The mission of hospitality, then, is to show him how he can become comfortable in that different world. Charlie made me comfortable in a world that was very different from the one I’d known. For Charlie, hospitality was about ideas as well. I’ve never met anyone so widely-read as Charlie. He devoured books. He read five books at a time, each of a different genre. If there was any idea in the world, I’m sure Charlie read about it somewhere. That’s why he read; he welcomed every idea possible. He may not have agreed with every idea, but he enjoyed every moment entertaining them. That was part of what his hospitality was all about. If there’s anything missing in our public conversation, it’s hospitality. How can we be hospitable to ideas, even those we strongly disagree with? The chief skill is not to feel threatened by ideas. Ward Churchill’s words needn't threaten us. I work for a firm that lost over 300 people in the World Trade Center attack. I didn’t know all of them, but I knew some of them. None was a “little Eichmann,” and so his accusation simply bounces off my ears. Knowing the truth gives me that confidence. I may not like the guy, but Ward Churchill certainly doesn’t threaten me, and I see no need to threaten him in return. Like anyone else, I disagree with many ideas and cultural trends. But that doesn’t mean I have to feel threatened by them. I oppose abortion, but I don’t imagine hundreds of heartless baby-killers trying to maliciously undermine morality and truth. We just disagree. I’ll be glad to explain my positions as fully as possible, and if you agree with what you hear, fine. If you’re in a position to be persuaded, fine. If not, then we’ve lost nothing by the conversation. If we can’t find common ground, we’ll just vote on it. If my side loses this vote, that’s OK, there will be more votes in the future. I can hope that the truth will out in the end, even if we lose some votes along the way. Charlie taught me to prize hospitality. I’m still learning what that means. ------------ About the author: KC Mulville holds graduate degrees in philosophy, and is an ex-Jesuit. Now a husband and father of four, he is a programmer for databases and for the web. Email KC Mulville: kcmulville@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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