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Stephen Schloesser, S.J. | THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING: Taking the Roots of our Traditions and Making for the Mountain
Note program change from “Bernstein’s MASS at 50.”
See information below.
In 2015, Pope Francis remarked that “today we are not living an epoch of change so much as an epochal change”—or put another way, “We are not living an era of change but a change of era.”
Five years later, in the midst of the global pandemic, Francis concluded an interview by recalling the ancient poet Virgil’s figure Aeneas. Having lost everything in the defeat of Troy, Aeneas faces a decision whether to remain in despair or move into the future. He picks up his father and heads for the mountain. Francis concluded: “This is what we all have to do now, today: to take with us the roots of our traditions, and make for the mountain.”
We live in a period of fleeting change whose lightness is nearly unbearable. In his lecture, the Hank Center’s 2021 Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. Fellow, Stephen Schloesser, S.J., explored the ways that we can re-source the Catholic intellectual heritage so that we might creatively engender its innovative radiance. What elements of our traditions might we draw from as we as we make for the mountain? What materials, attitudes, and dispositions will we need?
Schloesser integrated a sacramental approach and draw on the insights of figures including Paul Claudel, Annie Dillard, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Milan Kundera, and Denise Levertov, as well as Caroline Walker Bynum and Alfred North Whitehead. The cultivation of awe and wonder —which admittedly also entail some fear—were encouraged as a response to the surprising, puzzling, bewildering, astonishing, and mysterious.
Note program change from “Bernstein’s MASS at 50.”
The Fall 2021 Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. lecture—"The Unbearable Lightness of Being”—surveyed themes related to those recently delivered at Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture: “Things Get Broken: A Jesuit Reflects on Leonard Bernstein’s MASS at 50.” For an overview, visit Fordham News. For published versions, see Stephen Schloesser, S.J., “Things Get Broken: Leonard Bernstein’s ‘MASS’ at Fifty,” in Commonweal (September 24, 2021); and La Croix International (October 2, 2021).
