By: Gilbert Pilayre
Split-Level Christianity or of any other Faith
It is the unconscious coexistence of two contradictory value systems within a single believer, where formal Christian doctrine occupies the surface while conflicting day-to-day habits rule the depths. Perhaps, the oft-quoted persons on this matter are Fr. Jaime Bulatao, a Filipino Jesuit Psychologist, another is the German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, SJ.
It is so manifest among people who were colonially subjugated for centuries. When liberated by others or at least by themselves, they seem not to know what to do with their newfound freedom. They waste it away on unproductive or useless things. This was once exemplified by Viktor Frankl about former Auschwitz inmates who deliberately trudge on a field of potatoes thinking they can –
that they are free. Inconsiderate of the poor farming communities who also suffered because of the war.
In the same vein, Filipinos who are awashed with dogma from the Catholic faith can easily justify their behavioral choices on every social issue despite how it antagonizes the faith. Some are okay with murders or what most call now extrajudicial killings in the face of the Ten Commandments.
That even includes ordained ministers or priests. Bishops don’t!
We know that much of this regression stems from a desperate, collective desire for some semblance of societal order—a pursuit that is notoriously tricky. Human societies historically find it challenging to institute a one-size-fits-all system that runs fairly for everyone. Perhaps the only viable broker we have at present is the absolute “Rule of Law.”Yet there is a profound, aching beauty in this struggle; it reminds us that our brokenness is a byproduct of our drive for survival. The Rule of Law may serve as our necessary, rigid scaffold, but it cannot cure the split soul of a people who still carry the ghosts of their chains. We continue to stumble through our own fields of potatoes, fiercely guarding a fragile liberty we are still learning how to love.
According to Fr. Jaime Bulatao, SJ (1922-2015) founder of the Ateneo Psychology Department in 1960 and co-founded the Psychological Association of the Philippines:”Many Filipinos profess Christian beliefs intellectually but continue to operate emotionally and behaviorally according to pre-Christian fears, superstitions, or social habits,” “At one level he professes allegiance to ideas, attitudes and ways of behaving which are mainly borrowed from the Christian West; at another level he holds convictions which are more properly his/her own ways of living and believing. Bulatao’s notion of split-level Christianity describes the Filipino tendency to profess the Gospel while living according to contrary social values. Rahner, from a different angle, argues that authentic Christianity demands an interior conversion so deep that faith becomes experienced rather than mere profession.
According to Karl Rahner, SJ: “The Christian of the future will be mystic, or he/she will not exist at all.” In other words, the Gospel survives only when it is lived from the inside.
“Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all,” wrote the Bard, yet here, in this fractured land, conscience hath not made us cowards, but ghosts—inhabiting a house of two minds, split cleanly down the middle.
We stand upon the sunlit parapets of our formal altars, cloaked in the fair and borrowed vestments of the West, chanting the sweet lullabies of the Decalogue with English tongues. Yet, beneath these white-washed stones, in the dark and cavernous vaults of the unmapped soul, old kings and older fears still hold their silent court. We are a people caught between the dawn of an unpractised grace and the twilight of a stubborn memory.
Like the dazed captive newly broken from his cell, we look upon the wide expanse of our deliverance and mistake the license to destroy for the license to live. We trample the very soil that fed us, calling it liberty, while the heavens weep at our confusion. We have built a world where a man may kiss the crucifix with lips still wet with the praise of slaughter, and see no shadow in his mirror.
Is it a comedy, that we should so neatly sever our intellect from our blood? Or a tragedy, that our shepherds and our flock alike should build a scaffold of laws to save us from ourselves, only to find the cage is empty because the captive chooses to dwell within?
The future cometh apace, and it demands no mere actors upon a religious stage, but mystics who have survived the night. Until that holy fire consumes the mask and melts the split soul into one true metal, we shall remain a wondrous, broken pageant: ever wandering the potato fields of our own making, fiercely guarding the heavy, golden chains we call our freedom, weeping for a heaven we can speak of, but dare not yet inhabit.–
Those who would give light must endure burning.
-Viktor Frankl