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This paper focuses on how growth theory can guide growth policy design. It first argues that policy matters for growth, in particular when policy variables are interacted with country?specific variables (financial development, institutional environment, technological development, and so forth). Second, it argues that the Schumpeterian paradigm does a better job at delivering policy prescriptions that vary with country characteristics. Third, it discusses the advantages and drawbacks of growth regression analysis. Finally, it briefly describes and then questions the recently proposed 'growth diagnostic' approach.

Using the most recent estimates of agricultural price distortions, this chapter studies the economic, poverty, and income inequality impacts of both global and domestic trade reform in Argentina, with a special focus on export taxes. Argentina offers an interesting case study as the only large agricultural exporter that has, at many points in its history, applied export taxes to several of its agricultural products. The chapter combines results from a global economy-wide model (World Bank's linkage model), a national computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, and micro-simulations. The results suggest that liberalization of world trade (including subsidies and import taxes, but not export taxes), both for agricultural and non-agricultural goods, reduces poverty and inequality in Argentina. However, if only agricultural goods are included, indicators for poverty and inequality do not improve and even deteriorate somewhat. This is particularly the case if export taxes are eliminated. The chapter discusses the possible reasons for those results, offers some caveats, and suggests some lines for further research.

How hospitable will the global environment be for economic growth in the developing world as we come out of the present financial crisis? The answer depends on how well the author manage the following tension. On the one hand, global macro stability requires that we prevent external imbalances from getting too large. On the other hand, growth in poor nations requires that the world economy be able to absorb a rapid increase in the supply of tradable produced in the developing world. It is possible to render these two requirements compatible, but doing so requires greater use of explicit industrial policies in developing countries, which have the potential of encouraging of modern tradable activities without spilling over into trade surpluses. The 'price' to be paid for greater discipline on real exchange rates and external imbalances is greater use (and permissiveness) towards industrial polices.

The Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) for Timor-Leste identifies environmental priorities through a systematic review of environmental issues in natural resources management and environmental health in the context of the country's economic development and environmental institutions. Lack of data has been the main limitation in presenting a more rigorous analysis. Nevertheless, the report builds on the best available secondary data, presents new data on the country's wealth composition, and derives new results on the costs of water and air pollution. The CEA calls for urgent attention to gaps in the environmental management framework, the lack of capacity to implement the few regulations in place, and the high cost of indoor air pollution and poor water, sanitation, and hygiene. Timor-Leste is a young country that regained independence in 2002, and it has emerged from a bitter past burdened by colonialism and violent conflicts. It is still a fragile state facing enormous challenges. The report also points out the lack of clean water, appropriate sanitation, and hygiene as an environmental priority. The CEA estimates that this imposes an economic cost of about $17 million per year by way of illness and premature death. The CEA also looks at outdoor air pollution and at natural resource management for land, forestry, and coastal and marine resources. Outdoor air pollution is not a serious problem for the time being, but it could become so in the long run if the economy grows rapidly, urbanization continues, heavy industry emerges, and motorization increases rapidly. This underlines the need for good forward territorial and development planning. In conclusion, much good work has already been done to enhance the quality of the environment in Timor-Leste. Efforts are under way to improve the data base for environmental management.

Author's introductionListening to popular music, accessed via Web 2.0 technologies, such as P2P networks and pay‐per‐track sites, and played‐back on MP3 players, is a central, arguably defining activity of contemporary youth consumer culture. For example, how many of our current undergraduates do not possess some kind of MP3 device, via which they can access their preferred choice of music whenever they want? Very few, I suspect. The above article explored the difficulties we currently face in trying to explain this example of apparently mundane youth practice. Because as soon as we begin to ask why this form of music consumption is popular, what it might mean to individual listeners, and the processes that make it possible and even desirable as something to do, we realize that the extant approaches that could provide possible answers, lie across a range of disciplines: youth studies, popular music studies and media communications. And this is because this taken‐for‐granted contemporary youth consumer practice, is actually the most visible point in a complex set of overlapping industry and organizational practices that make possible the production, mediation and consumption of popular music, in this form. The problem the above‐referenced article raised was that the hitherto existing academic subject domains of youth studies, popular music and media communications, all clearly have a part to play in providing a possibly adequate explanation of this phenomena. Or at least they would be able to do so, if they could be more fruitfully integrated. Because of their origins and development they have remained more or less separate areas of enquiry, with different theoretical and methodological values and concerns, which has resulted in a lack of integration of key areas, such as the relationship between the cultural and structural in youth music consumption and the role of media industries in 'framing' such a process; areas that would appear to be essential to explaining the production, mediation and 'uses' of youth music consumption. However, in the article, I also suggest that there are signs of the emergence, in some recent popular music and culture textbooks, of a more integrated approach, one that examines popular music as a media culture industry that serves a youth demographic. The value of this, is that it appears to offer a way of bringing youth studies, popular music and media studies closer together in the ways in which it is possible to explore the linkages between production, mediation and consumption of music commodities and youth consumer practices. In what follows I identify and comment on these texts and also those texts that offer accessible accounts of popular music and the music industries as well as youth consumption.Author recommendsWall, Tim. 2003. Studying Popular Music Culture. London, UK: Arnold.This book presents itself as an undergraduate 'text book' with panels on case studies, suggestions for student projects and the like. But unlike perhaps other examples of this style the author offers an innovative combination of popular music and media culture approaches, taking the form of concise summaries, analytical points (sometimes with models) and applied thinking‐through of ideas. For example, the section on Popular music histories and the frameworks that inform them, offers a range of student activities based around empirical analysis (historical schematics), theory (models of emergence, innovation, revolution, incorporation and decline), and applied thinking. Accessible to all undergraduates.Longhurst, Brian. 2007. Popular Music and Society. Oxford, UK: Polity, 2nd edn.Another would‐be undergraduate core text. Well‐organized and very clearly written, again using topic‐based panels but in this volume comparatively substantial exerts from classic texts are included with questions. Longhurst's strength is the way the book is informed by knowledge of social theory happening in different areas. This is evident in the section on audiences (in the revised edition), which provides a balanced but also critically informed overview of the most up‐to‐date work in (so‐called) post‐subcultural studies. Accessible to all undergraduates.Osgerby, Bill. 2004. Youth Media. London, UK: Routledge.Osgerby is a cultural historian who is not surprisingly strong on narratives of periods and points of change. The scope of this book is impressive and so is the detail and range of references. Despite the fact that the book is narrative driven the author also pays attention to shifts and changes in theoretical arguments. It also offers a useful guide to further reading. Accessible to all undergraduates.Frith, Simon and Andrew Goodwin. (eds) 1990. On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. London, UK: Routledge.This classic text is still probably the best collection of popular music and music industry related articles and chapter extracts. It includes seminal work that is not easily available elsewhere, such as many pieces mentioned in my article. Another plus point is that the pieces are not edited down, an unfortunate aspect of many newer volumes. I am at a loss as to understand why a 2nd updated version of this text has never emerged. For advanced undergraduates.Bennett, Andy, Jason Toynbee and Barry Shank. 2006. The Popular Music Studies Reader. London, UK: Routledge.This volume offers itself as an update to research in the field of popular music studies in the absence of a revised edition of Frith and Goodwin's tome (p. 6). I think it largely does meet its remit, offering a wide range of themed sections, of which the section on the music industry and music media are especially relevant to the points in my article, as well as the section on Popular music and Everyday life (see the chapters by De Nora and Bull, for example). Each of the themed sections has an editor introduction, which is useful. The selection of texts is generally representative of (mostly) recent work, although occasionally eclectic. Also the volume, despite or perhaps because of its impressive breadth, does drastically edit down material to fit. For advanced undergraduates.Negus, Keith. 1995. 'Popular Music: Between Celebration and Despair.' Pp. 379–93 in Questioning the Media, edited by John Downing, Ali Mohammadi and Anabelle Sreberny‐ Mohammadi. London, UK: Sage.I can't think of a better piece to begin a popular music and media course than this one, although the imaginative use of Sinead O'Connor's song and video 'Nothing Compares to You', to illustrate the theory of 'articulations', may now be somewhat time‐bound. Showing the video (its on You Tube) helps! Accessible to all undergraduates.Negus, Keith. 1996. Popular Music in Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity.This book explicitly sets out to provide a guide to theory and debates in popular music studies and, as one of the few 'theory' books in this area, it achieves an impressive level of clarity and accessibility, without compromising on debate. I have found Negus consistently useful in my own attempts to guide students through areas of debates. The sequence of topics, beginning with Audiences, although integral to the way the book develops, does not always map onto the ways that courses are taught in this area. But an essential theory book accessible to undergraduates.Nixon, Sean. 1997. 'Circulating Culture.' Pp. 177–220 in Production of Culture/Cultures of Production, edited by Paul Du Gay. London, UK: Sage.An elegant theoretical attempt to re‐model the structure/culture/biography 'circuit of culture' framework inherited from Birmingham CCCS work and part of a volume concerned with the folding back of consumption into the flexible production of post‐Fordist or late‐capitalist niche product‐driven markets. See also the extended debate about cultural intermediaries in Cultural Studies (2002) vol. 16. For advanced undergraduates.Peterson, Richard A. 1994. 'Cultural Studies through the Production Perspective: Progress and Prospects.' Pp. 163–189 in The Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives, edited by Diane Crane. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.An impressive, accessible and wide‐ranging discussion of the Culture of Production approach from one of its originators. For advanced undergraduates.Miles, Steven. 2003. 'Researching Young People as Consumers: Can and Should We Ask Them Why?' Pp. 170–185 in Researching Youth, edited by Andy Bennett, Andy Cieslik and Steven Miles. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmilan.Although Miles has written full‐length texts on Consumption (1998) and Youth Lifestyles (2000) it is this short think‐piece that I would recommend, not least because I quote it and borrow some of its insights in my article, but also because it represents a thoughtful attempt to try and develop an approach to youth studies that foregrounds the cultural meanings surrounding commodity consumption as the link between media‐industries/commerce and the meaning frameworks/structural situation of youth. For advanced undergraduates.Willis, Paul. 1990. Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press.Although the examples in this survey and summary of research into youth and commodity culture now seem dated (cassette taping culture, for example), nonetheless it represents a seminal attempt to re‐think subcultural theory in terms of ordinary everyday cultural practices. Obviously, given its perspective 'from below' it has very little to say about the media culture industries themselves. For advanced undergraduates.Online materialsCamp Chaos Entertainment (1998) Napster Bad video (uploaded May 2000):http://www.campchaos.com/blog‐archives/2006/05/napster_bad.htmlCamp Chaos Entertainment (1998) Sue All the World video (uploaded July 2000): http://www.campchaos.com/blog‐archives/2006/05/napster_bad_sue_all_the_world.htmlAs is well‐known, a number of high profiles music artists got involved in the debate about 'free' music, the most lampooned of which is Lars Ulrich (of Metallica) who became (literally) a cartoon effigy of apparent music company greed and control when he threatened to sue fans. These two wickedly satirical animations are great to use as stimulus material for students beginning to think about these issues. But beware – some Metallica fans will not be amused!History of R&B indies: http://www.history‐of‐rock.com/independent.htmThis site relates to the material on Indie Case Studies (see Sample Lect 6), in this case US R&B, blues and soul indies.Progressive rock labels: http://www.my‐generation.org.uk/harvest.htm
Great site on the progressive rock labels (with cool images of vinyl – if you happen to be a vinyl fetishist, like me), both genuine indies, pseudo indies and notable artists and brief history.Reynold's on Post‐Punk: http://www.simonreynolds.net/Music journalist, Simon Reynolds on the neglect of the post‐punk 'indie' project and the idea of an alternative mainstream. Some good links to debates, notes and interviews.RIAA link: http://www.riaa.com/The Recording Industry Association of America records data (in terms of unit sales) of artists and albums, in the largest single popular music market in the world – the US. Very useful in trying to determine the relative popularity of artists/genres/and particular albums….EveyHit WebPage: http://www.everyhit.co.uk/EveryHit.com is a UK search engine/data base that allows analysis of artists, chart positions and duration of Top 20, Top 10 and No. 1s. This can be very useful in trying to decide things like how diverse markets are, how volatile, how consistent artists, genres and trends are; the composition of top 20s over time, etc.BPI site: http://www.bpi.co.uk/index.aspThe home page of the British Phonographic Institute – UK equivalent to the RIAA. Although data breakdown is only available to subscribers the site does offer year‐end reports on sales and artists which can be e‐mailed to your account or printed.Global Artists Sales: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_selling_music_artists#World.27s_best_sellerThis link tries to categorise artists in terms of units of global sales but does not have the precision of the RIAA. Useful for all kinds of arguments, like who is the globally highest selling rap artist?Rock bottom: The music industry in trouble by Charles Shar Murray: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts‐entertainment/music/features/rock‐bottom‐the‐music‐industry‐in‐trouble‐656952.htmlA contemporary 'think piece' by a former doyen of the United Kingdom 'national' rock press, bemoaning the corporate–logic driving a 'worried' music business and the 'narrow‐cast' nature of music consumption, essentially separate markets connected by niche media.Sample syllabusWeek 5Lecture: industryOver the next two sessions we are going to be looking at research into the music business. As Keith Negus has argued 'whether in the words of academic theorists, journalists, fans or musicians, the music industry frequently appears as villain: a ruthless corporate 'machine' that continually attempts to control creativity, compromises aesthetic practices and offers audiences little real choice' (1996: 36). This week's lecture will survey the research that has underpinned and fed into such arguments, from the seminal Peterson and Berger model of how oligopoly = lack of diversity in music markets, to those studies that have sough to continue, revise and update this model to take account of the contemporary global music business. While it is clearly the case that popular music production is currently in the hands of even fewer global media corporations this is not necessarily repeating the same patterns of production and consumption as in the past. While clearly the overall aims of such firms is to exercise as much control as possible over the production of popular music, as in the past, this strategy has not always produced the standardized and stylistically conservative sounds, aimed at a homogenized mass audience, that critics have claimed. One of the ways to begin to explore this is to look at the changing relationship between majors and independents over time and how the strategies of both have lead to an increasingly more complex commercial relationship between the two. This does not mean that the idea of the big, bad music business has gone away or that arguments do not continue to rage over: commerce versus creativity, independents vs. majors and production determining consumption, as we will see.
Seminar: The case of the Sony/BMG merger.
Reading
Longhurst, Brian. 1995. Popular Music and Society Oxford: Polity. Pp. 29–53 in 'The Pop Music Industry.'Negus, Keith. 1996. Popular Music in Theory. Pp. 36–65 in 'Industry.' Cambridge: Polity, ch. 2.Rowe, David. 1995. Popular Cultures: Rock Music, Sport and the Politics of Pleasure. pp. 18–49 in 'Rock industry: Song and Business Cycle.' London: Sage.Frith, Simon. 1988/2005 'The Industrialization of Popular Music.' Pp. 231–8 in The Popular Music Studies Reader, edited by A. Bennett, B. Shank and J. Toynbee. London: Routledge, ch. 26.Chapple, S. and Garofalo, R. 1977. Rock 'n' Roll is Here to Pay: The History and Politics of The Music Industry. Chicago: Nelson Hall.Harker, Dave. 1980. One for the Money: Politics and the Popular Song. London: Hutchinson.Hull, Geoffrey, P. 2000. 'The Structure of the Recorded Music Industry.' Pp. 76–98 in The Media and Entertainment Industries: Readings in Mass Communications Needham Heights, edited by A.N. Greco. MA: Allyn & Bryce.Sanjek, R and Sanjek, D. 1991. The American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Burnett, Robert. 1996. The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry. London: Routledge.Hesmondhalgh, David. 2002. The Cultural Industries. London: Sage, pp. 1–24.Week 6Lecture: Indies vs. MajorsThis second lecture on the music business shifts the emphasis away from political economy models to those that focus on the micro picture of the organizational logic that informs the typical record company within the wider logic of the record industry. Hirsch's (1972/1990) seminal model of the record company as a cultural system that selects and filters product along a linear production line, is relevant here. This is because the inherent instability of popular taste and the difficulty faced by big corporations in anticipating changes in taste, result in the formation of two contradictory tendencies. First, an attempt to control the stages of production, through horizontal and vertical integration and the like. Second the attempt to strategically manage artist and repertoire, genre categories and output itself. It is the second dimension that has become subject to more recent research scrutiny in terms of the 'management of creativity' within the music business and more specifically, the role of record company personnel as 'cultural intermediaries'. This revised theoretical model and a number of case studies of significant independent companies, such as those associated with punk and post‐punk, indie and dance labels, has led to a revised account of the relationship between the smaller or independent labels and the big corporations in terms of concepts such as niche markets, symbiosis and flexible specialization.
Seminar: The progressive underground and the post‐punk indie experiment: what have we learned?
Reading
Longhurst, Brian. 1995. Popular Music and Society. Pp. 55–90 in 'The Social Production of Music.' Oxford: Polity.Negus, Keith. 1992. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. Pp. 135–150. London: Arnold, 'Between Success and Failure: Collaboration in the Music Industry.' Pp. 38–61. 'Priorities and prejudice; Artist and Repertoire and the Acquisition of Artist., Pp. 62–79 'Images, Identities and Audiences.'Negus, Keith. 1995. 'Where the Mystical Meets the Market: Creativity and Commerce in the Production of Popular Music'Sociological Review43(2): 316–341.Rowe, David. 1995. Popular Cultures: Rock Music, Sport and the Politics of Pleasure. Pp. 18–49 in 'Rock Industry: Song and Business Cycle.' London: Sage.Indie case studies – from R&B pioneers, through the Progressive rock underground to Post‐Punk DIY, Hardcore/Alt, DanceIndustrial to Rap:George, Nelson. 1988. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. Pp 147–169 in 'Crossover.' New York: Plume.Ward, Brian. 1998. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations. Pp. 21–29 in 'Majors and Independents.' London and New York: Routledge.Stump, Paul. 1998. The Music's All that Matters: A History of Progressive Rock. 'Samplers, Subsidiaries and Showmen.' London: Quartet, ch. 3.Reynolds, Simon. 2005. Rip it Up and Start Again: Post‐Punk 1978–84. London: Faber and Faber.Young, Robert. 2006. Rough Trade. London: Black Dog Publishing.Hesmondhalgh, David. 1998. 'The British Dance Music Industry: A Case Study in Independent Cultural Production,'British Journal of Sociology49(2): 234–51.Goshert, John, C. 2000. 'Punk' after the Pistols: American Music, Economics and Politics in the 1980s and 1990s. Popular Music & Society Spring, 24(1): 85–106.Wilson, Tony. 2002. 24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You. Oxford: 4 Books Pan Macmillan.Hesmondhalgh, David. 1996. 'Flexibility, post‐Fordism and the Music Industries'Media, Culture and Society18(3): 469–88.Negus, Keith. 1999. 'The Music Business and Rap: Between the Street and the Executive Suite.'Cultural Studies13(3): 488–508.Week 9Lecture: consumptionThe dominant characterization of the popular music consumer in administrative and 'effects' research has been overwhelmingly the vulnerable, gullible, easily influenced and therefore potentially 'dangerous' individual especially as this characterization coincided and reinforced images of damaged children, dangerous adolescents and troubling youth found in moral panics accompanying the spread and popularity of popular music cultures. Left and radical theories did not fare much better since they too, following Adorno, tended to characterize the consumer of popular music culture as a potential recruit of authoritarian politics or at the very least a passive conformist to the status quo. More recently such views have been challenged by the rise of 'active audience' theories. But it remains the case that we know very little of the detail of how people actually consume music and therefore of the sorts of connections that exist between this activity and other issues such as changing conceptions of social identity, gender and ethnicity, locality and age.
Seminar: Exploring music consumption: technologies and 'uses'
.
Reading
Longhurst, Brian. 1995. Popular Music and Society. Pp. 195–225 in 'Effects, Audiences and Subcultures.' Oxford: Polity.Shuker, Roy. 1994. Understanding Popular Music. Pp. 225–36 in 'My Generation': Audiences, Fans and Subcultures.' London: Routledge, ch. 9.Shuker, Roy. 2001 Understanding Popular Music. Pp. 193–206 in 'My Generation': Audiences and Fans, Scenes and Subcultures.' London: Routledge, 2nd edn., ch.11.Hesmondhalgh, David. 2002. 'Popular Music Audiences and Everyday Life.' Pp. 117–130 in Popular Music Studies, edited by D. Hesmondhalgh and K. Negus. London: Arnold.DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.DeNora, Tia. 2005. 'Music and Self‐identity.' Pp. 141–147 in The Popular Music Studies Reader, edited by A. Bennett, B. Shank and J. Toynbee. London: Routledge, ch. 16.Bull, Michael. 2005. 'No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening'Leisure Studies, 24(4): 343–55, October.Willis, Paul. and Team. 1996. Moving Culture. Pp. 19–26. Buckingham: Open University Press, 'Music.' London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, ch. 4.Peterson, Richard A. 1994. 'Measured Markets and Unknown Audiences: Case Studies from the Production and Consumption of Music.' in. Pp. 171–85. Audience Making: How the Media Create the Audience, edited by, J.S. Ettima and D.C. Whitney. London: Sage.Du Gay, Paul and Negus, Keith. 1994. 'The Changing Sites of Sound: Music Retailing and Composition of Consumers.'Media, Culture and Society16(3): 395–413.Music Consumers (ideologies of consumption):Adorno, Theodor. 1990/1941. 'On Popular Music.' Pp. 301–314 in On Record, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin. London: Routledge.Adorno, Theodor. 1991. 'On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening' in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays On Mass Culture. London: Routledge.Gendron, Bernard. 1986. 'Theodore Adorno Meets the Cadillacs.' Pp. 18–36 in Studies in Entertainment, edited by T. Modleski. Bloomington: Bloomington Indiana Press.Riesman, David. 1990/1950 'Listening To Popular Music.' Pp. 5–13 in On Record, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin. London: Routledge.Horton, Donald. 1990/1957. 'The Dialogue of Courtship in Popular Song.' Pp. 14–26 in On Record, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin London: Routledge.Hall, Stuart and Whannel, Paddy. 1990/1964. 'The Young Audience.' Pp. 27–37 in On Record, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin. London: Routledge.Buxton, David. 1990/1983. 'Rock Music, the Star System, and the Rise of Consumerism.' Pp. 427–40 in On Record, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin. London: Routledge.Frith, S. and Goodwin, A. 1990. 'From Subcultural to Cultural Studies.' Pp. 39–42 in On Record, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin. London: Routledge.Studies of listening/consuming music and 'meaning':Cavicchi, David. 1998. Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Adams, Rebecca G. 2000. Deadhead Social Science: You ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Want to Know. AltaMira Press.Williams, Christina. 2001. 'Does it Really Matter? Young People and Popular Music.'Popular Music20(2): 223–42.Week 10Lecture: subcultures, scenes & tribesFor many years the concept of subculture was thought to provide the most consistent explanation of how class based youth groups were able to make a youth culture out of materials they 'borrowed' from the dominant commercial culture. The resultant style that such groups exhibited was understood to comprise a combination of dress, argot and ritual. It was assumed that this framework could also explain the connections to types of music preference and its use within particular subcultures, such as Ska in the skinhead culture or R&B in the Mod type. This musical connection seemed to become more explicit with Punk – the first post‐war youth subculture to be defined explicitly by the music it preferred. However, after Punk, it became apparent to a growing number of theorists that music based mass movements, like acid house and rave, did not sit very well within the subculture framework and that subsequent changes in youth styles and activities pointed to features – like the cross‐class, mixed ethnic and gender camaraderie of outdoor rave culture and the fluid and changing composition of groups – that were not easily accommodated within the old subcultural model. This impasse has led a number of contemporary theorists to offer a range of alternative ways of understanding youth practices, particularly in relation to urban dance cultures, such as: bunde, neo‐tribe, pseudo‐tribe, scene and post‐subculture. However, it remains the case that the CCCS model of subculture still casts a long shadow over the study of youth and this has lead some commentators to argue that the study of popular music would be better of without it. Others have responded to this position by arguing that what is needed is a greater integration of youth theories with more detailed empirical work on the ordinary consumption of youth that might tease out the connections between music, meaning and identities.
Seminar: Subcultural styles: I can't hear the music over the theory!
Reading
Longhurst, Brian. 1995. Popular Music and Society. Pp. 210–25 in 'Culture, Subculture and Music.' Oxford: Polity.Shuker, Roy. 1994. Understanding Popular Music. Pp. 237–50 'Youth Subcultures, Style and Rock.' London: Routledge.Shuker, Roy. 2001. Understanding Popular Music. Pp. 206–16 in 'Subcultures and Style.' London: Routledge, 2nd edn.Brown, Andy R. 2003. 'Heavy Metal and Subcultural Theory: A Paradigmatic Case of Neglect?,' Pp. 209–22 in The Post‐Subcultures Reader, edited by D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl. Oxford: Berg.Brown, Andy R. 2007. 'Rethinking the Subcutural Commodity: Exploring Heavy Metal T‐Shirt Culture(s).' Pp. 63–78 in Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes, edited by P. Hodkinson and W. Deicke. London: Routledge.Frith, Simon. 1978. The Sociology of Rock. Pp. 37–58 in ch.3, 'Youth and Music.' London: Constable.Frith, Simon. 1983. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock. Pp. 202–234 in ch.9 'Youth and Music,' London: Constable.Willis, P. 1990/1978. 'The Golden Age.' Pp. 43–55 in On Record, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin. London: Routledge.Willis, Paul. 1978. 'Profane Culture.' London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Hebdige, Dick. 1990/1979. 'Style as Homology and Signifying Practice.' Pp. 56–65 in On Record, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin. London: Routledge.McRobbie, Angela. 1990/1980. 'Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique.' Pp. 66–80 in On Record, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin. London: Routledge.Clarke, Gary. 1990/1981. 'Defending Ski‐Jumpers: A Critique of Theories of Youth Subcultures.' Pp. 81–95 in On Record, edited by S. Frith and A. Goodwin. London: Routledge.Wicke, Peter. 1990. Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology. Pp. 73–90 in 'My Generation: Rock Music and Sub‐cultures.' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 4.Negus, Keith. 1996. Popular Music in Theory. Pp. 99–135 in 'Identities,' Cambridge: Polity, ch. 4.Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity,Thornton, Sarah. 1997. 'The Social Logic of Subcultural Capital.' Pp. 200–209 in The Subcultures Reader, edited by K. Gelder and S.Thornton. London: Routledge.Bennett, Andy. 1999. 'Subcultures or Neo‐Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship Between Youth, Style and Musical Taste'Sociology33(3): 599–561.Hodkinson, Paul. 2002. Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford: Berg, Pp. 9–33.Weinzierl, Rupert and Muggleton, David. 2003. 'What is "Post‐subcultural Studies" Anyway?' Pp. 3–23 in The Post‐Subcultures Reader, edited by D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl. London: Berg.Purcell, Nancy, J. 2003. Death Metal Music: The Passion and Politics of a Subculture. North Carolina and London: McFarland and Co.Laughey, Dan. 2006. Music & Youth Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Hesmondhalgh, David. 2005. 'Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above.'Journal of Youth Studies8(1): 21–40.

L'applicazione del principio di avidità in un mondo caratterizzato da incertezza, quale di fatto è quello su cui vengono scambiati i prodotti finanziari, implica la necessità che alla considerazione del possibile rendimento futuro di qualsivoglia portafoglio finanziario debba essere associata la considerazione del rischio finanziario concernente la variabilità del futuro valore del medesimo. All'interno delle diverse tipologie di rischio che concorrono alla formazione del rischio finanziario di un portafoglio, quelle sulle quali si è maggiormente incentrato l'interesse degli studiosi e degli operatori, anche in adempimento a precise normative legislative relative alle attività di vigilanza degli intermediari finanziari, sono costituite dal rischio di mercato e dal rischio di credito. Mentre il rischio di mercato si associa al rischio di prezzo di un dato portafoglio, incentrando così l'analisi sulle possibili fluttuazioni delle variabili di mercato rilevanti, il rischio di credito (credit risk) considera l'eventualità che il valore di un portafoglio sia influenzato dalla situazione finanziaria dei soggetti in esso coinvolti. La quarta fonte di rischio è il rischio internazionale (international risk). Un'impresa si trova a dover fronteggiare questo tipo di rischio quando la valuta nella quale sono misurati gli utili ed è espresso il prezzo del titolo azionario è diversa dalla valuta dei flussi di cassa del progetto, come accade nel caso di progetti intrapresi al di fuori del mercato nazionale. La principale innovazione introdotta da Markowitz nella misurazione del rischio di un portafoglio consiste nella considerazione della distribuzione congiunta dei rendimenti di tutti i titoli in esso presenti. Il modello media varianza, sebbene sia tuttora largamente utilizzato nella pratica, presenta limiti intrinseci dovuti alla considerazione esclusiva dei primi due momenti della distribuzione dei rendimenti. In primo luogo, deve tenere in debito conto la dispersione dei rendimenti effettivi attorno al rendimento atteso, misurata dalla varianza (o dallo scarto quadratico medio) della distribuzione; maggiore è la differenza fra rendimenti effettivi e rendimento atteso, maggiore è la varianza. 2.2.2. Rendimento e rischio: la frontiera efficiente Supponiamo che un investitore abbia delle stime dei rendimenti attesi, degli scarti quadratici medi dei singoli titoli e delle correlazioni tra i titoli. Nella scelta della migliore combinazione di titoli da detenere, un investitore cercherà ovviamente un portafoglio con un rendimento atteso elevato e un basso scarto quadratico medio dei rendimenti. Pertanto è opportuno considerare: la relazione tra il rendimento atteso dei singoli titoli e il rendimento atteso di un portafoglio composto da questi titoli; la relazione tra gli scarti quadratici medi dei singoli titoli, le correlazioni tra questi titoli e lo scarto quadratico medio di un portafoglio composto dagli stessi. Consideriamo un portafoglio composto da due titoli. Il titolo A ha un rendimento atteso di µA e una varianza dei rendimenti di σ2A, mentre il titolo B ha un rendimento atteso di µB e una varianza dei rendimenti di σ2B . Il rendimento atteso e la varianza di un portafoglio di due titoli può essere scritta come funzione di questi input e del peso che questi hanno sul valore del portafoglio. Dove e rappresentano la quota del titolo A e del titolo B nell'intero portafoglio. L'eliminazione di parte del rischio è possibile perché di solito i rendimenti dei singoli titoli non sono perfettamente correlati tra loro; pertanto parte del rischio viene "eliminata grazie alla diversificazione". Concettualmente, il rischio di un singolo titolo dipende da come il rischio di un portafoglio cambia quando quel titolo viene aggiunto. Come avremo modo di evidenziare in seguito, il Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) mostra che il rischio di un singolo titolo è rappresentato dal suo coefficiente beta che, in termini statistici, indica la tendenza di un titolo azionario a variare nella stessa direzione del mercato (per esempio, l'indice composito S&P): il beta misura la reattività del rendimento di un singolo titolo rispetto al rendimento del portafoglio di mercato. In generale, il numero dei termini di covarianza può essere scritto come una funzione del numero dei titoli. dove n è il numero dei titoli presenti nel portafoglio. Per motivi di semplicità, assumiamo che i titoli abbiano in media una deviazione standard dei rendimenti di , che la covarianza dei rendimenti tra coppie di titoli sia in media e che i tutti i titoli siano presenti nel portafoglio nella stessa proporzione: Il fatto che la varianza possa essere stimata per portafogli composti da un ampio numero di titoli suggerisce un approccio di ottimizzazione nella costruzione del portafoglio, nel quale gli investitori contrappongono rendimento atteso e varianza. Se un investitore può specificare l'ammontare massimo di rischio che è disposto a sopportare (in termini di varianza), il problema dell'ottimizzazione del portafoglio diventa la massimizzazione dei rendimenti attesi dato questo livello di rischio. Graficamente, questi portafogli possono essere rappresentati sulla base delle dimensioni del rendimento atteso e della deviazione standard come nella figura sottostante. Per passare dall'approccio tradizionale di Markowitz a quello del Capital Asset Pricing Model, dobbiamo considerare l'aggiunta di un titolo privo di rischio all'interno del mix dei titoli rischiosi. Il titolo privo di rischio, per definizione, ha un rendimento atteso che risulta sempre uguale al rendimento attuale. Mentre il rendimento dei titoli rischiosi varia, l'assenza di varianza nei rendimenti dei titoli privi di rischio li rende non correlati con i rendimenti dei titoli rischiosi. Per esaminare ciò che accade alla varianza di un portafoglio che combina un titolo privo di rischio con un portafoglio rischioso, assumiamo che la varianza del portafoglio rischioso sia e che sia la quota dell'intero portafoglio investita in questi titoli rischiosi. Il rendimento atteso cresce data la pendenza positiva della retta passante per il livello del tasso privo di rischio. Detta retta prende il nome di Linea del mercato dei capitali o Capital Market Line (CML). Piuttosto, combinerà i titoli di M con l'attività priva di rischio nel caso in cui abbia un'alta avversione al rischio. In un mondo in cui gli investitori tengono una combinazione di due soli titoli (titolo privo di rischio e portafoglio rischioso) il rischio di ogni titolo individuale verrà misurato in base al portafoglio di mercato. In particolare, il rischio di ogni asset diverrà il rischio aggiunto al portafoglio di mercato. Per giungere all'appropriata misurazione di questo rischio aggiunto assumiamo che sia la varianza del portafoglio di mercato prima dell'aggiunta del nuovo titolo, e la varianza del titolo individuale che verrà aggiunto a questo portafoglio sia . Il peso del titolo sul valore di mercato del portafoglio è e la covarianza dei rendimenti tra il titolo individuale e il portafoglio di mercato è . Conseguentemente, il primo termine dell'equazione dovrebbe essere prossimo a zero, e il secondo termine dovrebbe tendere a , lasciando così il terzo termine ( , la covarianza) come misura del rischio aggiunto dal titolo i. Dividendo questo termine per la varianza dei rendimenti del portafoglio di mercato si determina il beta del titolo: Beta del titolo = 2.2.3. Un esempio di diversificazione Supponiamo di fare le seguenti tre ipotesi : 1. tutti i titoli hanno la stessa varianza, che indichiamo con . Il rischio di portafoglio ( ), è il rischio corso anche dopo aver raggiunto la completa diversificazione. Il rischio di portafoglio è spesso chiamato anche rischio sistematico o rischio di mercato. Nel modello base si stabilisce una relazione tra il rendimento di un titolo e la sua rischiosità, misurata tramite un unico fattore di rischio, detto beta. Il beta misura quanto il valore del titolo si muova in sintonia col mercato. Matematicamente, il beta è proporzionale alla covarianza tra rendimento del titolo e andamento del mercato; tale relazione è comunemente sintetizzata tramite la Security Market Line (SML) , illustrata nel grafico sottostante. Figura 3.1. La Security Market Line: relazione tra rischio (beta) e rendimento atteso nel CAPM La SML, solitamente chiamata linea di "mercato degli investimenti", presenta come intercetta il tasso privo di rischio e come pendenza la differenza tra il rendimento del mercato e quello privo di rischio: la retta è positivamente inclinata se il rendimento atteso del mercato è maggiore del tasso privo di rischio ( È facile dimostrare che la linea della Figura 5 è retta. Questo aggiustamento dei prezzi farebbe aumentare i rendimenti attesi dei due titoli e continuerebbe finché i due titoli non si trovassero sulla linea di mercato degli investimenti. La linea del mercato rappresenta la frontiera dei portafogli efficienti formati sia da attività rischiose che dall'attività priva di rischio; ogni punto sulla retta rappresenta un intero portafoglio. Il portafoglio composto da ogni attività trattata sul mercato viene chiamato portafoglio di mercato (market portfolio). Seguendo tale impostazione ogni investitore sceglierà lo stesso identico portafoglio, cioè il portafoglio di mercato, quindi la diversa propensione al rischio di ciascun investitore nelle scelte di investimento emerge nella decisione di allocazione, vale a dire nella decisione di quanto investire nel titolo privo di rischio e quanto nel portafoglio di mercato. Investitori più avversi al rischio sceglieranno di investire gran parte o la totalità del proprio patrimonio nel titolo privo di rischio, mentre investitori meno avversi al rischio investiranno principalmente o esclusivamente nel portafoglio di mercato. Anzi, potranno investire nel portafoglio di mercato non solo tutto il loro patrimonio, ma anche fondi presi a prestito al tasso privo di rischio. La prima è che esista un titolo privo di rischio, ovvero un titolo il cui rendimento atteso sia certo. La seconda è che gli investitori, per ottenere la combinazione ottimale fra titolo privo di rischio e portafoglio di mercato (data la propria propensione al rischio), possano dare e prendere in prestito fondi al tasso privo di rischio. Come già ricordato in precedenza il rischio di ciascuna attività per un investitore corrisponde al rischio aggiunto da quell'attività al suo portafoglio. Nel contesto del CAPM, dove tutti gli investitori scelgono di detenere il portafoglio di mercato, il rischio di una singola attività per un investitore corrisponde al rischio che quest'attività aggiunge al portafoglio di mercato. Statisticamente, questo rischio addizionale è misurato dalla covarianza dell'attività con il portafoglio di mercato. Maggiore è la correlazione fra l'andamento di un'attività e l'andamento del portafoglio di mercato, maggiore è il rischio aggiunto da tale attività ( i movimenti non correlati all'andamento del portafoglio di mercato vengono invece eliminati quando si aggiunge un'attività al portafoglio). Possiamo tuttavia standardizzare la misura del rischio dividendo la covarianza di ciascuna attività con il portafoglio di mercato per la varianza del portafoglio di mercato. Otteniamo in questo modo il cosiddetto beta di un'attività: Dato che la covarianza del portafoglio di mercato con se stesso non è altro che la varianza del portafoglio di mercato, il beta del portafoglio di mercato (e quindi il beta di una ipotetica attività media) è 1. Quindi le attività più (meno) rischiose della media saranno quelle con un beta superiore (inferiore) ad 1. Il titolo privo di rischio avrà ovviamente un beta pari a zero. Il fatto che ciascun investitore possieda una combinazione del titolo privo di rischio e del portafoglio di mercato ha un'importante implicazione: il rendimento atteso di un'attività è strettamente correlato al suo beta. In particolare, il rendimento atteso di un'attività sarà una funzione dal tasso di rendimento del titolo privo di rischio e del beta dell'attività. Il nucleo del CAPM è una relazione attesa tra il rendimento di un qualsiasi titolo ( ) e il rendimento del portafoglio di mercato, che può essere espressa come: dove sono il rendimento lordo del titolo in questione e del portafoglio di mercato e è il rendimento lordo privo di rischio. Secondo questa formula il rendimento atteso di un'attività rischiosa è dato dal rendimento di un titolo privo di rischio maggiorato di un premio per il rischio, che sarà più o meno elevato a seconda del rischio aggiunto dall'attività al portafoglio di mercato. È chiaro quindi che per usare il CAPM sono necessari i seguenti tre input: Tasso di rendimento del titolo privo di rischio. Per titolo privo di rischio si intende il titolo il cui rendimento atteso nel periodo di riferimento sia noto all'investitore con certezza. Di conseguenza, il tasso di rendimento di un titolo privo di rischio da utilizzare nel CAPM varierà a seconda che il periodo di riferimento sia 1, 5 o 10 anni. • Premio per il rischio. Il premio per il rischio indica la remunerazione richiesta dai risparmiatori per investire nel portafoglio di mercato (che comprende tutte le attività rischiose) piuttosto che nel titolo privo di rischio. Il beta è l'unico input specifico del titolo analizzato (ad es. un'azione). Per esempio, abbiamo ipotizzato che investire nei Buoni del Tesoro sia completamente senza rischio. (Nel CAPM, tali portafogli sono i Buoni del Tesoro e il portafoglio di mercato.) Nei CAPM modificati i rendimenti attesi dipendono ancora dal rischio sistematico, ma la definizione di rischio sistematico dipende dalla natura del portafoglio di riferimento. Il CAPM ipotizza che un investitore richieda un rendimento atteso più elevato per un rischio maggiore, e non ammette che un investitore accetti un rendimento minore, o un rischio maggiore, ceteris paribus. L'ipotesi cruciale nella derivazione proposta sopra è che le preferenze degli investitori siano formulate esclusivamente in termini di media e varianza dei rendimenti dei titoli; l'ipotesi di normalità dei rendimenti (lognormalità dei prezzi) è una condizione sufficiente, ma non necessaria, affinché ciò sia verificato. Il CAPM ipotizza che il profilo rischio-rendimento atteso di un portafoglio possa essere ottimizzato, determinando un portafoglio ottimo, che presenti il minimo livello di rischio possibile per il proprio rendimento atteso. Nel secondo passo, si utilizzano le stime come osservazioni dei regressori nei modelli di regressione lineare, nella dimensione cross-section: Il CAPM risulterà non rifiutato se, sulla base della regressione sopra, il coefficiente a sarà pari al tasso d'interesse privo di rischio , e se il coefficiente b sarà pari al premio per il rischio del portafoglio di mercato. Usando dati dagli anni trenta agli anni sessanta, alcuni ricercatori dimostrarono che il rendimento medio di un portafoglio di azioni è una funzione crescente del beta del portafoglio , una scoperta coerente con il CAPM. In sostanza, qualunque test del CAPM sarebbe per Roll riconducibile all'ipotesi che il portafoglio di mercato, il cui rendimento è indicato da sopra, appartenga alla porzione efficiente della frontiera dei portafogli. Un test del CAPM si tradurrebbe di fatto in un test sull'appartenenza alla frontiera efficiente della particolare proxy del portafoglio di mercato utilizzata. La popolarità del CAPM è essenzialmente legata alla sua semplicità, nonché alla capacità di ricondurre il valore di un titolo a un singolo fattore di rischio, rappresentato dal rischio legato al portafoglio di mercato. Dunque, un investitore può creare un portafoglio abbastanza simile al portafoglio di mercato del CAPM combinando vari fondi indicizzati, ciascuno in proporzione al valore di mercato del mercato cui l'indice fa riferimento. Così, in questo periodo di 60 anni, i rendimenti sono davvero aumentati all'aumentare del beta. Come risulta dalla Figura 3.2, il portafoglio di mercato negli stessi 60 anni ha fornito un rendimento medio di 14 punti percentuali sopra il tasso risk-free e , è ovvio, ha avuto un beta pari a 1. Il CAPM sostiene che il premio per il rischio dovrebbe aumentare in proporzione al beta, in modo che i rendimenti di ciascun portafoglio si collochino sulla linea del mercato azionario inclinata positivamente delle Figure 3.4 e 3.5. Figura 3.4. Premio per il rischio e beta dei dieci investimenti nel periodo 1931-1965 Figura 3.5. Premio per il rischio e beta dei dieci investimenti nel periodo 1966-1991 Poiché il mercato ha fornito un premio per il rischio del 14%, il portafoglio dell'investitore 1, con un beta di 0,49, dovrebbe avere fornito un premio per il rischio leggermente inferiore al 7% e il portafoglio dell'investitore 10, con un beta di 1,52, dovrebbe avere fornito un premio leggermente superiore al 21%. Sia l'APT che il CAPM implicano una relazione crescente tra rendimento atteso e rischio. Inoltre l'APT considera il rischio in maniera più generale rispetto alla semplice covarianza standardizzata o al beta di un titolo con il portafoglio di mercato. Come il CAPM, anche l'Arbitrage Pricing Model scompone il rischio in rischio specifico d'impresa e rischio-mercato. In primo luogo, il rendimento normale o atteso del titolo, cioè la parte del rendimento che gli azionisti sul mercato prevedono o si aspettano. La seconda parte è il rendimento incerto o rischioso del titolo. Nella misura in cui gli azionisti avevano previsto l'annuncio del governo, tale previsione dovrebbe essere incorporata nella parte attesa del rendimento calcolato all'inizio del mese, cioè in . D'altro canto, se l'annuncio del governo è una sorpresa, nella misura in cui influenza il rendimento del titolo azionario farà parte di U, la parte non anticipata del rendimento. La parte non anticipata del rendimento, quella che deriva dalle sorprese, costituisce il vero rischio di ogni investimento. In termini statistici, 4.2. Le fonti del rischio-mercato Il fatto che le componenti non sistematiche dei rendimenti di due società non siano correlate tra loro non implica che anche le componenti sistematiche siano incorrelate. Nonostante il CAPM e l'APM facciano entrambi una distinzione fra rischio specifico d'impresa e rischio-mercato, essi si differenziano poi nell'approccio alla misurazione del rischio-mercato. Il coefficiente beta, β, indica la reazione del rendimento di un titolo azionario a un tipo di rischio sistematico. Nel CAPM il beta misurava la variazione del rendimento di un titolo a uno specifico fattore di rischio, il rendimento del portafoglio di mercato. Viene utilizzato questo termine perché l'indice impiegato come fattore è un indice dei rendimenti dell'intero mercato (azionario). Il modello di mercato può essere quindi espresso come M) + ε dove rappresenta il rendimento del portafoglio di mercato e β è detto coefficiente beta. Considerando Xi la proporzione del titolo i nel portafoglio, sappiamo che la loro somma deve essere pari a 1 e che il rendimento del portafoglio è la media ponderata dei rendimenti delle singole attività nel portafoglio Nel paragrafo precedente abbiamo visto che il rendimento di ciascuna attività è a sua volta determinato sia dal fattore F che dal rischio non sistematico rappresentato da . La prima riga è la media ponderata dei rendimenti attesi dei singoli titoli. Il rendimento di un portafoglio può essere rappresentato come la somma di due medie ponderate: la media ponderata dei rendimenti attesi delle attività nel portafoglio e al media ponderata dei beta associati a ciascun fattore. La componente dei rendimenti specifica della singola impresa (ε) scompare a livello di portafoglio per effetto della diversificazione. Se assumiamo infatti che il portafoglio sia composto da molti titoli tutti presenti nella medesima proporzione , possiamo notare che al crescere del numero dei titoli compresi nel portafoglio la componente del rischio idiosincratico si annulla: Per ogni singola azione ci sono due fonti di rischio. Il premio atteso per il rischio di un'azione dipende dai fattori macroeconomici di rischio e non è influenzato dal rischio specifico. Il portafoglio A ha un beta (rispetto a questo unico fattore) di 2,0 e un rendimento atteso del 20%; il portafoglio B ha un beta di 1,0 e un rendimento atteso del 12%; il portafoglio C ha un beta di 1,5 e un rendimento atteso del 14%. Si noti che investendo la metà del proprio patrimonio nel portafoglio A e la metà nel portafoglio B, si potrebbe ottenere un portafoglio con un beta (sempre rispetto all'unico fattore) pari a 1,5 e un rendimento atteso del 16%. Di conseguenza nessun investitore vorrà investire nel portafoglio C finché non scenderanno i prezzi delle attività in tale portafoglio, portandone così il rendimento atteso al 16%. In alternativa, un investitore può comprare la combinazione dei portafogli A e B, con un rendimento atteso del 16%, e vendere il portafoglio C, con un rendimento atteso del 15%, ottenendo così un profitto pulito dell'1% senza investire nulla e senza assumere alcun rischio. Per impedire tale "arbitraggio", il rendimento atteso di ciascun portafoglio deve essere una funzione lineare del beta. Ogni azione deve offrire un rendimento atteso coerente con il suo contributo al rischio del portafoglio. Secondo l'APM questo contributo dipende dalla sensibilità dei rendimenti dell'azione alle variazioni inattese dei fattori macroeconomici. 5.1. Il tasso di interesse privo di rischio La maggior parte dei modelli di rischio e rendimento in finanza partono da un investimento definito "privo di rischio" e considerano il rendimento atteso da quell'investimento come tasso privo di rischio . I rendimenti attesi da investimenti rischiosi vengono poi calcolati aggiungendo al tasso privo di rischio un premio per il rischio atteso. Abbiamo definito "investimento privo di rischio" un'attività della quale l'investitore conosce con certezza il rendimento atteso. Il rendimento atteso su di un portafoglio pienamente diversificato deve essere misurato in relazione al tasso di rendimento atteso su un titolo privo di rischio . Quando ci riferiamo ai rendimenti (yields) di un titolo di stato come titolo risk-free rate, ci riferiamo al fatto che esso sia privo del rischio di fallimento, riconosciamo però che esso incorpori il maturity risk: la sola parte del rendimento che risulta priva di rischio è dunque la componente degli interessi. Come risultato, l'evidenza empirica di lungo termine è che i rendimenti dei bond a lunga scadenza in media eccedono i rendimenti dei T.Bill. L'horizon premium compensa gli investitori per questo rischio di mercato. Nel primo caso, dovrebbe utilizzare come tasso privo di rischio il tasso di un Treasury Bond statunitense, nel secondo invece un tasso privo di rischio in pesos. Per calcolare un rendimento atteso in termini reali, è necessario partire da un tasso di rischio espresso in termini reali. La soluzione più comune in questi casi (sottrarre al tasso di interesse nominale un tasso di inflazione attesa) fornisce nel migliore dei casi soltanto una stima approssimativa del tasso privo di rischio in termini reali. Nell'approccio basato sul premio per il rischio realizzato, la stima dell'ERP è il premio per il rischio (rendimento azionario realizzato in eccesso rispetto al tasso privo di rischio) che gli investitori hanno, in media, realizzato su periodi di investimento passati. Se i rendimenti periodali dei titoli azionari (ad esempio rendimenti mensili) non sono correlati (i rendimenti di questo mese non sono stati adeguatamente predetti dai rendimenti dell'ultimo mese) e se i rendimenti attesi sono stabili nel tempo, allora la media aritmetica dei rendimenti storici fornisce un'adeguata stima dei rendimenti futuri attesi. Conseguentemente, la media aritmetica dei premi per il rischio realizzati fornisce una stima appropriata dei premi per il rischio futuri attesi (ERP). Differenze nell'approccio per la stima dell'ERP scaturiscono dalla misurazione dei rendimenti attesi sui titoli rischiosi (equity securities). Nell'applicare l'approccio basato sul premio per il rischio realizzato, l'analista seleziona il numero di anni dei rendimenti storici da includere nella media. L'SBBI Yearbook contiene il riassunto dei rendimenti delle azioni e dei titoli di Stato degli USA derivanti da questi dati . (Nel primo periodo, il mercato era composto quasi interamente da titoli bancari, mentre nella metà del diciannovesimo secolo, il mercato era dominato dai titoli delle ferrovie. ) Per questi periodi sono stati assemblati anche i rendimenti dei titoli governativi. La tabella 5.1 fornisce il premio per il rischio medio annuo realizzato da titoli azionari tratti da varie fonti con riferimento a differenti periodi fino al 2006. Si misura il premio per il rischio realizzato confrontando i rendimenti del mercato azionario realizzati durante il periodo con il rendimento dei titoli governativi di lungo termine (o lo yield to maturity per gli anni precedenti il 1926). Dall'osservazione del tabella quello che può risultare sorprendente è che il valore più grande della media aritmetica dei rendimenti annui è quello degli 81 anni dal 1926 al 2006. Per il calcolo dell'ERP viene impiegato il rendimento dei titoli governativi a lungo termine perché in ogni periodo rappresenta il rendimento atteso dei titoli al tempo dell'investimento. Tabella 5.1 Premi per il rischio storici: Rendimenti del mercato azionario – T.Bond 5.3. Il premio per il rischio (risk premium) Il premio per il rischio è un elemento essenziale nel contesto dei modelli di rischio e rendimento. Nel presente paragrafo esamineremo le determinanti fondamentali del premio per il rischio e diversi approcci pratici alla sua stima. Nel CAPM il premio per il rischio misura il rendimento addizionale richiesto in media dagli investitori per spostarsi da un investimento privo di rischio a investimenti rischiosi (il portafoglio di mercato). Ne consegue che il premio per il rischio dovrebbe essere una funzione di due variabili: L'avversione degli investitori al rischio: maggiore l'avversione al rischio, maggiore il premio richiesto dagli investitori. Tale avversione al rischio è in parte congenita, ma dipende anche dalla situazione economica (in un'economia in crescita, gli investitori saranno più propensi ad assumere rischi) e dalla recente performance del mercato (il premio per il rischio tende a salire in seguito a un significativo calo del mercato). Allo stesso modo, nell'APM e nei modelli multifattoriali, i premi per il rischio utilizzati per ciascuno dei fattori saranno pari alla media ponderata dei premi richiesti dai singoli investitori per ciascuno dei fattori. 5.3.1. Equity Premium Puzzle In finanza, l'Equity Premium Puzzle o enigma del premio azionario si riferisce all'osservazione empirica che i rendimenti osservati sui mercati azionari nell'ultimo secolo sono stati superiori a quelli dei titoli di stato; in particolare, il premio per il rischio medio per i titoli azionari nell'ultimo secolo sarebbe pari a circa il 6%, laddove il rendimento medio dei titoli di stato a scadenza breve (considerato una buona approssimazione del rendimento privo di rischio) sarebbe intorno all'1%. La teoria economica suggerisce che gli investitori dovrebbero sfruttare l'evidente opportunità d'arbitraggio rappresentata dalla differenza tra premio per il rischio azionario e rendimento medio dei titoli di stato. Una maggiore domanda provocherebbe a sua volta un aumento dei prezzi medi dei titoli azionari; essendo il rendimento nient'altro che una misura dello scarto tra il prezzo attuale e quello futuro, un aumento del prezzo attuale, ceteris paribus, riduce il rendimento atteso, e con esso il premio per il rischio (dato dalla differenza tra rendimento atteso e tasso di rendimento privo di rischio). In equilibrio, si ridurrebbe dunque lo scarto tra il premio per il rischio dei titoli azionari e il tasso di rendimento privo di rischio, fino al punto in cui tale scarto riflette il premio per il rischio che un investitore rappresentativo richiede per investire nei titoli azionari, caratterizzati da una maggiore rischiosità. Rovesciando questo ragionamento, lo scarto osservato tra i due rendimenti dovrebbe riflettere la valutazione del rischio da parte dell'investitore medio. Gli studiosi che negano l'esistenza del premio per il rischio fondano il proprio convincimento nelle seguenti considerazioni: L'evidenza empirica mostra che negli ultimi quaranta anni (1969-2009) non c'è stato un significativo premio per il rischio azionario sul mercato USA; - Errori di selezione (selection bias) del mercato statunitense: il mercato azionario di maggior successo nel corso del XX° secolo. 5.4.2. Premi storici Il metodo più comune per stimare il premio (o i premi) per il rischio nei modelli di rischio e rendimento è l'estrapolazione da dati storici. Nel CAPM il premio viene calcolato come differenza fra rendimenti medi azionari e rendimenti medi su titoli privi di rischio lungo un esteso periodo di tempo. Nella maggior parte dei casi, questo tipo di approccio consta di tre tappe successive: 1) definire un arco temporale per la stima; 2) calcolare il rendimento medio di un indice azionario e il rendimento medio di un titolo privo di rischio nel periodo in questione; 3) calcolare la differenza fra tali rendimenti e utilizzarla come stima del premio per il rischio atteso per il futuro. La rischiosità media del portafoglio "rischioso" (l'indice azionario nel nostro caso) non sia cambiata in modo sistematico nel tempo. 5.4.3. Premi azionari impliciti Esiste un altro approccio alla stima dei premi per il rischio che non richiede dati storici né correzioni per tenere conto del rischio-Paese. Sottraendo da tale rendimento il tasso privo di rischio, si ottiene un premio implicito per il rischio azionario. Inoltre affinché il premio per il rischio risultasse positivo , dovrebbe verificarsi che: Al fine di illustrare questo metodo, supponiamo che il livello attuale dell'indice S&P 500 sia 900, che il tasso di dividendo atteso sull'indice sia del 2%, e che il tasso di crescita atteso degli utili e dei dividendi nel lungo termine sia del 7%; risolvendo per il rendimento atteso sul capitale netto otteniamo: ; Dato un tasso privo di rischio del 6%, il premio implicito per il rischio azionario sarà pari al 3%. • Risolvendo l'equazione per r, si ottiene una stima del rendimento atteso sul capitale netto pari a 8,39%. Sottraendo da tale stima il tasso dei Treasury Bond (4,02%) si ottiene un premio azionario implicito del 4,37%. Da tali input emerge un rendimento azionario atteso del 10,70% che, se confrontato con il tasso dei Treasury Bond a quella data (4%), implica un premio azionario implicito del 6,70%. Questo fatto ha interessanti implicazioni per la stima del premio per il rischio. Allo stesso modo, il premio del 2% che abbiamo osservato alla fine della bolla speculativa delle società Internet (dot-com boom) degli anni '90 è tornato rapidamente ai livelli medi, durante la correzione del mercato del 2000-2003. Data questa tendenza, possiamo concludere con una migliore stima del premio per il rischio implicito, guardando non solo al premio corrente, ma anche alle linee di tendenza storiche. Tre motivi, tuttavia, spiegano l'esistenza di stime del premio per il rischio così diverse. Ad esempio, data una deviazione standard annuale dei prezzi azionari fra il 1928 e il 2003 pari al 20%, la Tabella 6.1 riporta l'entità dell'errore standard associato alla stima del premio per il rischio in funzione della lunghezza del periodo di stima. Tabella 6.1 Errori standard nelle stime dei premi di rischio La scelta del titolo privo di rischio La banca dati Ibbotson riporta i rendimenti si a dei Treasury Bill sia dei Treasury Bond, sicchè il premio per il rischio degli investimenti azionari può essere stimato rispetto a entrambi. Il tasso privo di rischio alla base della stima del premio deve essere coerente con il tasso privo di rischio utilizzato nel calcolo dei rendimenti attesi. Nella maggior parte dei casi, in finanza aziendale, il tasso privo di rischio rilevante è quello di lungo periodo. Le medie aritmetiche e geometriche Un ultimo elemento di controversia nella stima dei premi storici consiste nel modo in cui calcolare le medie dei rendimenti. La media aritmetica consiste nella semplice media dei rendimenti annuali, mentre la media geometrica si riferisce al rendimento composto. In effetti, se i rendimenti annui non sono correlati nel tempo, la media aritmetica rappresenta la stima più corretta del premio per il rischio atteso per l'anno prossimo. In primo luogo, studi empirici sembrano indicare che i rendimenti degli investimenti azionari sono negativamente correlati nel corso del tempo. Tabella 6.2 Premi di rischio storici (%) del mercato statunitense, 1928-2008 Tirando le somme, le stime del premio per il rischio possono variare a seconda delle differenze in termini di periodo di stima, scelta del titolo di Stato come tasso privo di rischio (a breve o lungo termine), e utilizzo di medie aritmetiche oppure geometriche. Se ci atteniamo al proposito di selezionare un premio basato sulla media geometrica a lungo termine rispetto al tasso dei Treasury Bond a lungo termine, la stima migliore del premio per il rischio sulla base di dati storici è 4,82%. 6.1. Periodicità dei dati storici Anche se accettiamo l'ipotesi che i rendimenti siano effettivamente indipendenti, la media aritmetica dei premi per il rischio realizzati basati su rendimenti di 1 anno potrebbe non essere la migliore stima dei rendimenti futuri. I tradizionali modelli dei rendimenti dei titoli (es. CAPM) sono generalmente modelli uniperiodali che stimano i rendimenti su orizzonti di tempo non specificati. Allora nell'utilizzare i rendimenti realizzati per stimare i rendimenti attesi, dobbiamo calcolare i rendimenti realizzati su periodi di due anni (media geometrica dei rendimenti annui di due anni consecutivi) e poi calcolare la media aritmetica delle medie geometriche dei due anni per ottenere una stima incondizionata dei rendimenti futuri. Gli autori mostrano che l'utilizzo della media geometrica dei rendimenti storici a un anno produce una stima dei rendimenti cumulati che approssima maggiormente la mediana dei rendimenti cumulati (il 50% degli investitori realizzerà un rendimento maggiore di quello mediano e il 50% un rendimento inferiore a quello mediano). Essi dimostrano che la differenza tra la mediana dei rendimenti cumulati ottenuta dall'impiego della media aritmetica rispetto alla media geometrica dei rendimenti storici a un anno aumenta poiché aumenta l'orizzonte d'investimento atteso. 6.2. Selezione del periodo di riferimento Il premio per il rischio realizzato medio risulta essere sensibile al periodo che viene scelto per calcolare tale media. I modelli di rendimento possono cambiare nel tempo. Concentrandosi sul recente passato si ignorano i drammatici eventi storici e il loro impatto sui rendimenti del mercato. Gli anni dal 1942 fino al 1951 furono un periodo di stabilità artificiale dei tassi dei bond statunitensi. Includendo questo periodo nel calcolo dei rendimenti realizzati equivale a valutare i titoli delle linee aere di oggi facendo riferimento ai titoli delle linee aeree prima della deregulation. Tabella 6.4 Premi per il Rischio realizzati sui rendimenti dei T.Bond Se il premio per il rischio medio è cambiato nel corso del tempo, allora la media del rischio realizzato utilizzare la più lunga serie dei dati disponibili diviene discutibile. A partire dalla metà degli anni '50 fino al 1981, i rendimenti dei bond hanno registrato un trend crescente, dettando una generalizzata diminuzione del prezzo dei medesimi. I rendimenti realizzati dai bond erano generalmente più bassi dei rendimenti attesi al momento della loro emissione (l'investitore che avesse venduto prima della scadenza avrebbe registrato una perdita). Dal 1981 i rendimenti dei titoli di Stato hanno iniziato a diminuire, provocando una generalizzata crescita del loro prezzo. Nella tabella 6.5 presentiamo statistiche riassuntive per i rendimenti dei titoli azionari, dei Treasury Bill a 6 mesi e dei Treasury Bond a 10 anni dal 1928 al 2008: Tabella 6.5 Statistiche riassuntive Utilizzando questa tabella possiamo iniziare a stimare un premio per il rischio facendo la differenza tra il rendimento medio delle azioni e il rendimento medio dei titoli di Stato: il premio per il rischio è del 7,30% per le azioni rispetto ai T.Bills (11,09% - 3,79%) e 5,64% per le azioni rispetto ai T.Bonds (11,09% - 5,45%). I premi per il rischio storici per i mercati emergenti possono fornire interessanti spunti di riflessione, ma non possono essere impiegati nei modelli di rischio e rendimento. Consideriamo per prima cosa l'assunzione fondamentale che il premio per il rischio per gli investitori non sia cambiato nel corso del tempo e che l'investimento rischioso medio (nel portafoglio di mercato) sia rimasto stabile nel periodo di tempo esaminato. Nel periodo compreso tra il 1926 e il 2000, gli investimenti in molti degli altri mercati dei capitali avrebbero prodotto premi molto più contenuti rispetto al mercato USA, e alcuni di essi si sarebbero tradotti, per gli investitori, in rendimenti più contenuti o negativi nel corso del periodo. Tabella 6.7 Premi per Rischio storici di differenti mercati: 1900-2005 Dall'analisi della tabella risulta che i premi per il rischio, risultanti dalla media dei 17 mercati, sono più bassi dei premi per il rischio degli Stati Uniti. Per esempio, la media geometrica del premio per il rischio tra i vari mercati è solo del 4,04%, più bassa del 4,52% del mercato USA. La figura 5.1 riporta i premi per il rischio – ossia i rendimenti addizionali – ottenuti investendo in azioni piuttosto che titoli di Stato a breve e lungo termine nel periodo in questione per ciascuno dei diciassette mercati. In Francia, invece, le cifre corrispondenti sarebbero state del 9,27% e del 6,03%. Nella prima parte di questa sezione, rimarremo all'interno del mercato statunitense tentando di apportare delle modifiche al premio per il rischio facendo riferimento a specifiche caratteristiche dell'impresa (la capitalizzazione del mercato rappresenta l'esempio più comune). Nella seconda parte, estendiamo l'analisi osservando mercati emergenti come Asia, America Latina e Europa orientale, provando l'approccio basato sulla stima del premio per il rischio Paese che aumenta poi il premio per il rischio statunitense. Il primo si riferisce a se ci dovrebbe essere un premio per il rischio addizionale quando si valutano i titoli in questi mercati, dovuto al rischio Paese. Il secondo quesito si ricollega invece alla stima del premio per il rischio dei mercati emergenti. L'altro è considerare i rendimenti eccedenti come l'evidenza che i beta sono misure inadeguate del rischio e come compensazione del rischio tralasciato. Per giungere a questo premio gli analisti fanno riferimento ai dati storici sui rendimenti degli small cap stocks e del mercato, aggiustato per il beta risk, e attribuiscono il rendimento eccedente allo small cap effect. Tabella 6.8 Excess Returns per classi del valore di mercato: titoli USA 1927-2007 Se si aggiunge al costo del capitale delle piccole imprese uno small cap premium del 4-5%, senza attribuire tale premio ad un rischio specifico, siamo esposti al pericolo di conteggiare doppiamente tale rischio. 6.5.2. Il Premio per il Rischio Paese Per molti mercati emergenti, sono disponibili pochissimi dati storici, e quelli che esistono sono troppo volatili per giungere a una stima sensata del premio per il rischio. In questi casi, il premio per il rischio può essere così calcolato: Il premio per il rischio-Paese riflette il rischio addizionale associato a un mercato specifico. Per determinare il premio base per un mercato azionario maturo è opportuno fare riferimento al mercato azionario statunitense che, oltre ad essere il mercato finanziario più efficiente, offre dati storici sufficienti a ottenere una stima ragionevole del premio per il rischio. 1. Gli analisti che utilizzano i differenziali per il rischio di insolvenza come misure del rischio-Paese di solito li sommano sia al costo del capitale netto sia a quello del debito di ciascuna impresa quotata nel Paese in questione. Per esempio, il costo del capitale netto di una impresa brasiliana, stimato in dollari statunitensi, sarà del 2,15% maggiore del costo del capitale netto di un'impresa statunitense simile. Dato un premio per il rischio per i mercati azionari maturi (Stati Uniti) del 4,00% e un tasso privo di rischio del 3,80% (Treasury Bond statunitensi), il costo del capitale netto di una società brasiliana con un beta di 1,2 può essere stimato nel modo seguente: Alcuni analisti sommano il differenziale per il rischio di insolvenza al premio per il rischio statunitense, moltiplicando la somma così ottenuta per il beta. Questo procedimento risulta in un maggiore (minore) costo del capitale netto per le imprese con beta maggiore (minore) di 1. Volatilità del mercato azionario rispetto a mercati azionari maturi Alcuni analisti ritengono che i premi per il rischio azionario dei mercati debbano riflettere le differenze in termini di volatilità fra i diversi mercati. Una misura convenzionale del rischio azionario è la deviazione standard dei prezzi azionari: deviazioni standard più elevate indicano di solito un rischio maggiore. Questa deviazione standard relativa, moltiplicata per il premio utilizzato per le azioni statunitensi, fornisce una possibile stima del premio per il rischio totale di un mercato. Se assumiamo una relazione lineare tra il premio per il rischio e la deviazione standard del mercato azionario, oltre alla possibilità di calcolare il premio per il rischio del mercato statunitense (utilizzando ad esempio dati storici), allora il premio per il rischio del Paese X è: Assumiamo, per il momento, di utilizzare per gli Stati Uniti un premio per il rischio del 4%. La tabella 6.9 elenca i dati della volatilità del Paese per alcuni mercati emergenti ed i risultanti premi per il rischio totale e Paese per questi mercati, basato sull'assunzione che il premio per il rischio degli Stati Uniti sia del 4%. Tabella 6.9 Volatilità del mercato azionario e Premi per il rischio Per esempio, il premio per il rischio della Cina è 5,52%, utilizzando questo approccio, ben al di sopra del premio per il rischio di Nigeria, Namibia e Egitto, ognuno dei quali dovrebbe essere un mercato rischioso quanto la Cina. Differenziali per il rischio di insolvenza + volatilità del mercato rispetto ai titoli di Stato I differenziali per il rischio di insolvenza del Paese associati ai rispettivi rating, pur rappresentando una prima tappa importante, misurano soltanto il premio per il rischio di insolvenza. Per capire di quanto, si può calcolare la volatilità del mercato azionario di un Paese rispetto alla volatilità dei titoli di Stato utilizzati per la stima del premio per il rischio azionario del Paese. A titolo illustrativo, prendiamo il caso del Brasile. Il premio addizionale per il rischio azionario del Paese che ne risulta per il Brasile è il seguente: Va notato che il premio per il rischio del Paese aumenterà al crescere del differenziale per il rischio di insolvenza del Paese e della volatilità del mercato azionario. Inoltre, va ricordato che esso va sommato al premio per il rischio azionario di un mercato maturo. I primi due approcci per la stima dei premi per il rischio del Paese tendono a risultare in una stima più bassa rispetto al terzo. Nel caso del Brasile, per esempio, i premi per il rischio del Paese vanno dal 2,76% (secondo approccio), al 6,01% (primo approccio), fino a un picco del 4,43% (terzo approccio). Va ricordato che l'unico rischio rilevante ai fini della stima del costo del capitale netto è il rischio di mercato, ossia il rischio non diversificabile. Se, al contrario, i mercati azionari dei Paesi si muovono nella stessa direzione, il rischio-Paese avrà una componente di rischio di mercato no diversificabile e per la quale è necessario un premio. 7. PARAMETRI DI RISCHIO Gli ultimi dati di cui abbiamo bisogno per mettere in pratica i nostri modelli di rischio e rendimento sono i parametri di rischio per una specifica attività. Nel CAPM il beta di un'attività deve essere stimato rispetto al portafoglio di mercato. Nel contesto del CAPM, il beta viene poi ottenuto esaminando la relazione fra questi rendimenti e i corrispondenti rendimenti di un indice del mercato azionario. Infine, nell'APM è l'analisi fattoriale dei rendimenti azionari a fornire i vari beta. 7.1.1. Procedura per la stima dei parametri del CAPM Il beta di un'attività può essere stimato come coefficiente di una regressione dei rendimenti di una singola azione (Rj) sui rendimenti del mercato azionario (Rm). L'intercetta della regressione fornisce una semplice misura della performance effettivamente ottenuta nell'arco temporale analizzato, rispetto alla performance attesa alla luce del CAPM. Dal punto di vista finanziario va interpretato come proporzione del rischio complessivo di un'azione (varianza) attribuibile al rischio di mercato; ne segue che la differenza (1-R2) indica invece la proporzione del rischio complessivo di un'azione attribuibile al rischio specifico d'impresa. Un ultimo dato statistico di interesse è l'errore standard della stima del beta. La prima riguarda la durata del periodo di stima. 7.1.2. Procedura di stima dei parametri di rischio nell'APM e nel modello multifattoriale Come il CAPM, anche l'APM considera solo il rischio non diversificabile; tuttavia, nella misurazione del rischio, a differenza del CAPM, l'APM tiene conto di una molteplicità di fattori economici. Sebbene il processo di stima dei parametri di rischio sia diverso, molti problemi legati alle determinanti del rischio nel CAPM si presentano anche per l'APM. La derivazione del beta dai fondamentali rappresenta un approccio alternativo alla stima del beta, in cui si dà minore rilievo alla stima basata su dati storici e maggiore rilievo all'intuizione economica. Intensità della leva finanziaria (financial leverage) Il beta delle attività dell'impresa è la media ponderata del beta del capitale netto (rischio a carico degli azionisti) e del beta del debito (rischio a carico degli obbligazionisti). A parità di condizioni, a un aumento della leva finanziaria (cioè del rapporto d'indebitamento ) seguirà un aumento del rischio a carico degli azionisti (e quindi del beta del capitale netto). Il beta dell'insieme di due attività è la media ponderata del beta di ciascuna attività, con i pesi proporzionali al loro valore di mercato. 1. Calcolare il beta unlevered dell'impresa come media ponderata dei beta unlevered delle varie attività, usando come pesi la percentuale del valore di mercato dell'impresa rappresentata da ciascuna attività.

Issue 68.3 of the Review for Religious, 2009. ; ~Spiritu.a~ Growth ,~. --.,,Practicall~ Wisdom'iQ-UAoRFERLY 68.3 2009 - " Review for Religious fosters dialogue with God, dialogue with ourselves, and dialogue with one another about the holiness we try to live according to charisms of Catholic religious life. As Pope Paul Vl said, our way of being church is today the way of dialogue. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published quarterly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 Telephone: 314-633-4610 ¯ Fax: 314-633-4611 E-Maih reviewrfr@gmail.com ¯Web site: www.reviewforreligious.org Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108-3393 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©2009 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribution, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. ~ gournalof Ca~ho~c ~piri~uah~y Editor Associate Editor Scripture Scope Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer sJ Eugene Hensell OSB Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp Paul Coutinho sJ Martin Erspamer OSB Margaret Guider OSF Kathleen Hughes RSCJ Louis ~nd Angela Menard Bishop Terry Steib SVD QUARTERLY 68.3 2009 contents prisms 228 Prisms 230 consecrated life stories. ~'~ I! The Impact of Women Religious on the Church of New York Regina Bechde SO, two centuries after New York became a large suffragan diocese of Baltimore, recounts its history-- which, as in dioceses everywhere, is inseparable from stories of its women religious. Looking for what was really going on, she finds the faith-meaning underneath the sisters' social and ecclesial achievements. 226 250 261 ignatian prayer Communal Examen Philip Shano SJ suggests ~ way of adapting the general examen found in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises to a communal examen that can help the community as a group to attend to its daily life in a prayerful w~y. Questions for Personal and Group Reflection Ignatius's Contemplatio ad Amorem Louis M. Savary re-examine.s how Ignatius's Fourth Week contemplation asks us to observe closely the way God loves us and to put into practice our love of God and the rest of creation in a similarly unconditional .and generous way. A Prayer Response Review for Religious 276 289 298 spiritual growth Job's Difficult Transformation Marian Maskulak CPS, making grateful use of Stephen Mitchell's The Book of Job, explores the spiritual changes Job undergoes and suggests their relevance to ourselves. Questions for Personal and Group Reflection The Central Paradox of John of the Cross James W. Kinn presents and, like a good teacher, emphasizes John's teaching for proficient beginners. Connecting through Prayer John H. Zupez SJ suggests a way of praying that gives us a greater sense of connectedness to God and to one another in our lives. Questions for Personal and Group Reflection 3O6 313 practical wisdom When Pragmatists Become Mystics Rabbi Allen S. Mailer shares a variety of Hassidic wisdom sayings for our inspiration and for the deepening of our faith. AGame You Should Not Play Birney Dibble MD discusses the candor that people often find difficult around terminally ill patients. departments 318 Scripture Scope: Understanding the Psalms 323 Reviews 22 7 68.3 2009 prisms 228 Tsis a landmark issue of Review for Religious. You as reader will note that there is no Canonical Counsel article. From the first volume of our journal in January 1942 there was a department called Questions and Answers that dealt primarily with canon law issues for men and women liv-ing consecrated or religious life. The writer of this department was not identified. Likely the editor was the canon lawyer Father Adam C. Ellis SJ, one of the three founding editors. In volume 14 (September 1955) we find the first acknowledgment of an author for the Questions and Answers department. "The fol-lowing answers are given by Father Joseph E Gallen SJ, professor of canon law at Woodstock College, Woodstock, Maryland." As a matter of fact, it seems that Father Gallen had already been doing the work in a couple of preceding issues. He was also a consistent contributor of articles dealing with canon law perspectives or with the implications of recently issued Roman documents throughout the decades from 1950 to 2000. In volume 44 (January 1985) Father Richard A. Hill sJ, professor of canon law at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, began writ-ing the newly titled Canonical Counsel arti-cle. After five years as contributing editor for Canonical Counsel, Father Hill asked to be relieved because of his responsibilities at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and at the University of San Francisco. Review for Religious In volume 49 (July/August 1990) Sister Elizabeth McDonough OP became our Canonical Counsel editor. From that issue up to our past issue (68.2, 2009) she has contributed one hundred articles dealing with all aspects of the 1983 Code of Canon Law dealing with conse-crated or religious life. She literally has written a valuable commentary on the Code for all of us living consecrated life. Sister Elizabeth McDonough believes that she has completed her task, and has said she would appreciate having more time for her teaching and other writing. As of this issue, then, we have no department of Questions and Answers or its successor Canonical Counsel. As edi-tor, I hope that we will have occasional articles to update us on canonical issues as they may arise. I express my deep gratitude to Sister Elizabeth McDonough for her masterful contribution to religious life through this journal. Besides the fact that she writes clearly and concisely, I as editor was especially apprecia-tive at how prompt she was to meet every deadline over this twenty-year period. It is our intention that Review for Religious will publish the compilation of McDonough's Canonical Counsel articles as a readable disc/book in the fall of 2009. We intend that the disc-form of the book will allow for valuable and easy reference. Without trying to replace Canonical Counsel as a department, my advisory board encourages me and the staff to consider regular contributions in the liturgical area, especially with the revision of the missal, and also regarding the continuing development of new forms of religious life and affiliations. So the journal hopes to keep contributing to our living of religious life and our sharing it with the wider church. David L. Fleming SJ 229 68.3 2009 REGINA BECHTLE The Impact of Women Religious on the Church of New York consecrated life stories On a spring day in 2008, I stood in the majes-tic St. Patrick's Cathedral amid representatives of the 116 congregations of women religious serving in the archdiocese of New York. In the processional hymn, Benedictine Sister Delores Dufner's "Sing a New Church," we sang "summoned by the God who made us, rich in our diversity, gathered in the name of Jesus, richer still in unity." These words of struggle, promise, and affirmation can only hint the reality of women religious in dioceses all through the United States. Our story is indeed a rich and diverse one, focused in a grand unity.! The year 2008 marks the bicentennial of the establishment of four dioceses--New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Bardstown (Kentucky)--and Baltimore's designation as an archdiocese. The church in New York serves Regina Bechtle SC is Charism Resource Director for the Sisters of Charity of New York; 6301 Riverdale Avenue; Bronx, New York 10471. R~iew for Religious two and a half million Catholics in ten counties, from the urban density of Manhattan and the Bronx, to an underserved rural population in the north. The story of this diocese, like dioceses everywhere, is inseparable from the story of its women religious.2 The bicentennial invited us all to reimagine our story within the story of larger social and ecclesial movements, movements we helped shape and were shaped by. Let me suggest an image. Our seminary's excellent library holds many books about religious congregations and provinces connected with this archdiocese. Some use the pious, purple prose of the glory days, others pack a more modern, journalistic punch. But they all tell how communities came here, what needs confronted them, and what they did about those needs. Imagine all those volumes on the shelves, flanked by histories of the church in this country and region, bolstered by studies of the many immigrants who came here and by surveys on education, public health, child care, human services, pastoral ministry, catechesis, lay leadership, spiritual for-marion, race relations, community development, advo-cacy and action for peace and justice, environmental concerns, and global awareness. Now imagine all those volumes in conversation with one another, comparing, connecting, cross-referencing. Only an eavesdropper on all of those conversations could write the full story of women religious, the meta-story that cries out to be told in each diocese and in the country at large. My purpose here is modest. I speak not as an histo-rian but as a theologian and spiritual director who tries to listen both to a person's story and to the story under-neath the story. I listen to hear what is "happening" and what is "really going on." I propose to apply those questions to the stories of women religious in this and, 231 68.3 2009 Bechtle ¯ The Impaa of Women Religious in New York mutatis mutandis, other dioceses.3 What was happening during those many years? And what was "really going on"? In other words, how was God at work in it? How do we measure impact? I suggest we measure',impact by the tributes of a socie : 232 Measuring Impact First, a word about the meaning of "impact." For New Yorkers, the searing memory of 11 September 2001, of giant planes crashing into the World Trade Center's towers, forever colors the word's meaning. Yet over its lifetime this city, like most others, has absorbed the impact of many other traumatic events--epidem-ics from yellow fever, cholera, and influenza to HIV/AIDS; fires and floods; riots and gang wars; economic upheavals and finan-cial despair; wartime anxiety and loss on the home front. How do we measure impact? In New York City, where real estate rules and media coverage makes you or breaks you, some judge impact in terms of stone and steel, of buildings constructed, renovated, retrofitted. Some measure impact by best sellers and column inches, by prime-time coverage and website hits. Others mea-sure impact in the flesh-and-blood realities of bodies blessed and bandaged, minds mentored, hearts healed, spirits sustained. Impact is about relatonships as much as headlines. I suggest we measure impact by the trib-utes of a society, like the tens of thousands who lined the streets in 1896 to honor the passing of Sister of Charity Mary Irene Fitzgibbon, founder of the New York Foundling and conscience of a city.* Review for Religious Impact is measured in the halls of Congress by Sister Patricia Cruise SC and Sister Mary Rose McGeady DC testifying about the runaway youth served by Covenant House; by the words of Sisters Patricia Wolf RSM, Regina Murphy SC, and Arlene Flaherty OP, whose advocacy on behalf of justice in shareholder meetings and public forums has heralded the gospel in our day; by the lumi-nous theological writings of Sister Elizabeth Johnson csJ; by Sister Theresa Kane RSM calling in 1979 on Pope John Paul II to hear the desire of women to participate fully in the church; and by the gunshots that murdered Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke MM and Ita Ford MM in 1980 in El Salvador and Sister Barbara Ford SC in 2001 in Guatemala; by the vision of Mother Irene Gill OSU, who in 1904 began the College of New Rochelle, the first Catholic college for women in New York State, and Mother Buder RSHM, who opened Marymount College in Tarrytown in 1907; by the steadfast peace witness of women like Sister Anne Montgomery RSCJ and Sister Eileen Storey SC in Iraq and the West Bank. Even this hard-to-impress city recognizes the impact of these exceptional women. Yet they would be the first to protest that the vast majority of their sisters, the thousands of women religious who have served the people of New York, have lived equally extraordinary lives, only in a less public sphere. The everyday impact of their faithfulness has been felt for generations by families, neighborhoods, parishes, and institutions that never make the headlines. What Was Happening? The Catholic historian Gary Macy describes history as "the stories that we tell ourselves so that we know better how we got to be who we are.''5 Before I address what was happening, let me make a few introductory 68.3 2009 Becbtle ¯ The lmpaa of Women Religious in New York remarks. It behooves us to tell the whole story, all of it, because that helps us to see who we are now and to believe we can be still better. We need to include the shadow as well as the light. We were instrtm~ents of social grace and social sin. We were victims of prejudice and injustice, but we were perpetrators as well. Until recently, women religious have not been telling our story well. Why not? One reason is that a certain understanding of the virtue of humility has conditioned us to be hesitant about promoting ourselves. Another reason might be that our entertainment-hungry, attention-deficient culture seems able to hear only a particularly loud voice. To tell what was happening, we might consider chapter headings like these for our story: ¯ Some Came and Stayed, Some Passed Through and Left Their Mark ¯ With Their Own Blood, Sweat, Tears-- and Money ¯ "Open a Hospital? But We Thought You Wanted Us to Teach" ¯ They Don't Trust Catholics, but They Want Sisters' Care When They're Injured ¯ How Many Communities in This Diocese? Only God Knows! Some of our communities started here on the bed-rock of this ever-changing place. Most were seedlings transplanted from elsewhere into its stubborn soil. All soon found themselves irrevocably transformed. Some came to New York and moved on, up and down the Atlantic coast, or west, into the heartland and frontier. Some came and stayed here. There was always plenty of work to do here, no matter when they came. We can imagine a common story line that begins with a letter something like this: Revie~v for Religious Reverend Mother Superior: We beg you to send Sisters to take care of [one or more of the following kinds of needy persons]: orphans, uneducated, sick poor, abandoned infants, girls working as domestics who are being seduced by their employers, youngsters needing to learn a trade, elderly folks, homeless, families at risk, immigrants who can't speak the language, people hungry for food and knowledge, Catholics who need to be counted and catechized. Please come yourself if you can, Mother, or at least send us your best workers--the strongest, the bright-est, the most fearless. We need you desperately. Respectfully yours, Bishop or Pastor or Trustee Also part of the story line, though rarely found writ-ten down in the letters, are facts and observations like these: ¯ Never mind that the house won't be ready for you. You'll probably have to count on the hospitality of another community until you find your own. ¯ We can't promise you much money--you'll have to raise most of it yourself. ¯ You may end up as martyrs to cholera, dysentery, influenza, tuberculosis, and violence and to the poverty of the poor you came to serve. ° You may find that the demands of your work make it hard, even impossible, to live your Rule, your way of living and praying that you cherish so deeply.6 What was happening? Two hundred years ago, in 1808, John Carroll was breathing a sigh of relief, after a fashion. Since 1789 he had been bishop of the one diocese in the U.S.A, a territory that stretched from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from Canada to the Spanish Floridas. Now Baltimore was named .an arch-diocese, and Carroll's pastoral burden was lessened by the creation of four suffragan dioceses.7 The New York diocese comprised all of New York I! 68.3 2009 Becbtle * The Impact of Women Religious in New York 236] State and part of New Jersey. The 80,000 inhabitants of New York included about 14,000 Catholics, mostly Irish, with some French and Germans, served by one Catholic parish, St. Peter's, on Barclay Street. In 1808 the non-Catholic majority of New Yorkers viewed the parish with disdain, and its mostly poor, immigrant con-gregation as uncouth, dirty, and decidedly lacking in proper religious sensibility. Also in 1808 a young widow was about to leave New York. She was a convert, and Catholic Baltimore seemed infinitely more hospitable than her native city, where the disdain could be hostile. I speak of Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, saint of New York. We cannot tell the story of women religious in this archdiocese without her, though she never lived here as a religious. The school she began in Baltimore became the catalyst for a new religious community. In July 1809, on donated land in Emmitsburg, in the Maryland hills, she (a Catholic for only four years) began the Sisters of Charity of Saint Joseph's. It was the first active women's congregation founded in and native to the United States. Elizabeth and her advisers modeled it on the noncloistered Daughters of Charity founded by Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac in 17th-century France, but they adapted the Rule to the circumstances and needs of 19th-century America. The language and faces Changed, but many of those needs remain today. To the Ursulines belongs the distinction of being the first women religious in the New World. They came to Canada in 1639 and to French New Orleans in 1727. Twelve nuns came from France to nurse, but soon found themselves teaching, caring for orphans, and working with wayward women. One of their novices wrote home: "We are determined not to spare ourselves Review for Religious in anything that will be for the greater glory of God.''8 Some Ursulines from Ireland came to New York in 1812, began a school that lasted only three years, and then returned home. In 1817, nine years after the diocese was established, Mother Seton yielded to the pleas of New York Catholics and sent, as a gift to her home church, three sisters to care for orphans in what was then St. Patrick's Cathedral parish on Mott and Prince Streets. At that time Catholics numbered about 20,000. Concerning the New York Catholics, Mother Seton wrote: "So much must depend . . . on who is sent to my 'native city' they say, not knowing that I am a citizen of the world.''9 Soon demands for sisters increased, as they were to do again and again in all our stories. Mother Seton had her native New York pegged: "so distracted a place." Later correspondents would be even more grim in their descrip-tion of the poverty, filth, and violence of the city in which sisters taught, nursed, and cared for orphans. Bishop John Hughes, known to friend and foe alike as "Dagger John," would later call New York "Babylon the Great." An estimated one-seventh of the city's population of 15,000 depended on public relief in the winter of 1817. By 1820, health and housing issues in the city were critical. In the economic slump after the War of 1812, a huge influx of immigrants and annual yellow-fever epidemics created what amounted to a continuous state of emergency.l° I To the, Ursulines belongs ,the distinction of being ' 'ihe first women religious in the New World, 68.3 2009 Becbtle * Tbe Impaa of Women Religious in New York 238 In 1827 Bishop John Dubois wrote that his flock included about 30,000 mostly poor Catholics, and com-plained ~that property in New York was very expensive. That same year several Religious of the Sacred Heart stopped in New York en route to St. Louis. In 1841 their congregation would return for good as the city's second religious community of women when Mother Aloysia Hardey opened on Houston.and Mulberry Streets an academy that would later move to Astoria. Catholic-and-immigrant is a recurring theme. In 1785, when St. Peter's Church was dedicated, people said the pastor needed to be fluent in six languages-- English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Irish--to serve his two hundred parishioners. Today Mass is celebrated in thirty-three languages in the New York archdiocese, and most large urban dioceses report similar statistics. The numbers of Irish and German immigrants com-ing in the 1830s brought strong anti-Catholic feeling to the surface. In 1836 The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk was published, a slanderous account of cruelty and abuse in a Montreal nunnery. The falsity of it did nothing to keep it from becoming the best-selling American book before Uncle Tom's Cabin.~l Across the country, fear of immigrants and foreigners went together with a viru-lent opposition to Catholicism. The 1834 burning of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, was but one expression of anti-Catholic hatred. Yet, in the face of such rabid Nativist prejudice, over and over it was sisters--nursin.g, teaching, risking their lives for the poor--who gradually tempered society's perception of the church and of its immigrant flock. By 1848 one-third of New York's population was foreign born, swelled by thousands of Irish desperate to Review for Religious escape the terrible famine in their homeland. The eighty-two women religious in the diocese included a new group, the Sisters of Mercy. Mother M. Agnes O'Connor and six Sisters from Dublin, the "walking nuns," visited the sick in their homes, taught adults, took in young women seeking to escape from prosti-tution, and visited prisons. Mother Seton's daughter Catherine became one of their first postulants. In 1849 a cholera epidemic killed five thousand New Yorkers. In November of that year, the diocese's first Catholic hos-pital, St. Vincent's, opened with thirty beds, five doc-tors, and four Sisters of Charity. The needs of a rapidly expanding Catholic popula-tion prompted Rome to carve new dioceses from the see of New York: in 1847 Albany and Buffalo, and in 1853 Brooklyn (including all of Long Island) and Newark (including all of New Jersey). The area of the diocese of New York, named an archdiocese in 1850, had shrunk to one-tenth of its original size, but its people had grown to more than three hundred times its original number, between 300,000 and 400,000 Catholics?2 By 1855 over half of New York City's population was foreign born. It was known as the largest Irish city in the world and the third largest German city. In 1867 the Good Shepherd Sisters took in 275 young women who had been coerced into a life of pros-titution. Many of them were domestics whose employers By 1855; New York City ~as, known as the largest ,,Irish ,ei~in the World and the , third !argest German city, 23,9 68.3 2009 Becbtle * The Impact of FVomen Religious in Nay York had, in polite terms, ruined their reputations. Another 500 had to be turned away. In 1869 Sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbon SC opened the New York Foundling asylum. By the time of her death in 1896, this pioneer Catholic child-welfare agency had cared for 28,000 infants and many pregnant unwed and working mothers as well. By 1885 women religious supervised most of New York's child-welfare system, with more than eighty per-cent of its dependent children in their care. The New York Foundling (Sisters of Charity) and the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin (Sisters of St. Francis), the two largest institutions--along with those operated by Sisters of Mercy, of Divine Compassion, of Notre Dame, of the Good Shepherd, and others--provided a safe and caring environment for approximately 15,000 children.13 As needs grew, so did the religious work force. By 1875 there were about a thousand Catholic sisters in New York City. In ten years the number doubled. Child welfare was a major social problem. According to 1904 statistics, New York City harbored one-third of all insti-tutionalized and dependent children in the whole country. At the beginning of the 20th century, the archdiocese included 42 national parishes that served 11 different eth-nic groups. By 1911 women religious had founded three Catholic colleges for women: the Ursulines' College of New Rochelle (1904), the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary's Marymount College (1907), and the Sisters of Charity's .College of Mount St. Vincent (1911). In 1939, when Francis Spellman became New York's archbishop, this local church had over 2,500 priests, 10,000 nuns, and two million members. (It was also $26 million in debt.)14 What was happening? After World War II, in most U.S. religious congregations, there was a peak period Review for Religious of growth that lasted until the late 1960s. Those boom years and the winds of change that Vatican Council II set swirling deserve fuller analysis and reflection than is possible here)5 What Was "Really Going On"? I turn now to my second question: Amid all the facts and statistics in the story of women religious, what was "really going on" in, with, through, and even in spite of what was happening? How was and is God's work evident? I asked a few lay colleagues to describe the impact of women religious. A female pastoral associate responded, "Women religious have paved the way for the rest of us." A male theology professor replied that religious "have been gatekeepers of religious information, vital to identity formation." And from a male sociology profes-sor: "Women religious have helped us rethink our world and understand that mission is local and global." Some might find meaning in the story of New York's women religious by charting a trajectory: ¯ from assimi-lation to accompaniment, ¯ from competition to col-laboration, ¯ from convent lifestyles of cookie-cutter conformity to distinguishable diversity, ¯ from provin-cialism to global connection, ° from presence in institu-tions to presence to issues of our day. For others, the story of women religious in New York is a story of collective self-awakening that parallels the major social movements of the past two centuries, for example, from being the church's cheap labor force to being "catalysts to conscience.''~6 What was "really going on"? How was the Spirit present in our blind spots and flashes of light, in our so-called successes and so-called failures? What signs of 68.3 2009 Becbtle * The Impact of Women Religious in New York 242 God's moving and shaking, God's transforming energy and grace, can we notice? Underneath the narrative, faith always senses a deeper story, marked with the signs of God's pervasive presence. That story speaks of risk, of courage, of loss, and of love that transcends loss. It reveals themes of faithfulness, of relationship, of witness, and of power. It is a story much bigger than that of any one religious community. In assessing the impact of women religious, assess-ing what was "really going on," I offer four replies: (1) Faithfulness was (and is) going on. In the lives of the women named earlier in this article, faithfulness wore a highly public face. It shaped thought, molded institu-tions, awakened conscience, crafted public policy, acted and spoke out against ignorance, war, and poverty and for education, compassion, peace, and justice. Margaret John Kelly DC speaks of our legacy of "charity embrac-ing justice," a legacy that "generated energy as it moved from the hovels and points of entry in the 19th century to the halls and courts of power in our 21st century.''17 In their fierce fidelity, some among us are impelled by the Spirit to make private pain a public issue. In the lives of most of us, faithfulness takes a more ordinary form. (2) Relationship was (and is) going on. For example, there were relationships with the laity. Lay benefac-tors often saw needs more clearly than ecclesiastics did. Catholic and Protestant laywomen invited the Sisters of the Good Shepherd to minister to prostitutes in New York's prisons and almshouses in 1857. (Some while earlier, Archbishop Hughes would not acknowledge the fact of prostitution among Irish immigrant women.)~s From the earliest days, women religious knew that Review for Religious we could never carry out our mission alone, even though we sometimes pretended that we could. New York's first parish schools were begun by lay people, who soon invited sisters and brothers to staff them. The same was true in the first orphanages and hospitals, where lay managers, physicians, and clinicians supervised--and sometimes locked horns with--the sisters who served there. Before long, sisters assumed leadership of those same institutions and shaped them into vital providers of service in society. In our day, relationships are shift-ing again. Today, as they seek new ways to be in part-nership for the sake of the mission, religious and the laity depend on each other as never before. There were and are relationships with non-Catholics. Again and again, by their heroic behavior in epidemics, wars, and disasters, women religious won over the very Nativists and Know-Nothings who had vilified them. A prominent WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), Mr. Edwards Pierpont, exemplified the change of heart that sisters wrought. During the Civil War he told the Secretary of War that he wanted only a certain commu-nity of sisters to staff a military hospital in New York's Central Park, because they were "the most faithful nurses in the world." There were and are relationships among and between religious communities. In the early years, one arriving community after another was greeted with hospital-ity rather than aloofness or competitiveness by those already established here. In New York's urban vineyard, with plenty of work to be done, there were always too few laborers. In 1889, with the blessing of Pope Leo XIII, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini and six Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart came to New York to work with Italian orphans. No one knew anything about the 68.3 2009 Becbtle ¯ Tbe Impact of Women Religious in New York convent they had been promised, so they spent their first night in a rundown rooming house. The Sisters of Charity took them in until a house hastily rented by a benefactor was ready. Unfortunately, that sisterly spirit could and often did yield to smug self-sufficiency. Rivalries, turf battles, and isolating rules kept members incommunicado from other congregations. Perhaps our large numbers and institutional presence during the peak years 1940-1969 inflated our corporate egos and narrowed our vision. Certainly, much of pre-Vatican II Catholic theology did little to dispose us to build bridges of understanding beyond boundaries. Today, happily, collaboration is a way of life for women religious. In theory and in prac-tice, we know that "none of us is as smart as all of us." (3) Witness was (and is) going on. Witness, intention-ally directed towards others, about what should be and against what should not be if God's dream is to be real-ized, expresses religious life's prophetic vocation. From our first days in this archdiocese, the not-so-subtle sub-text of our lives was: "Look. See. Pay attention. The poor are always among us--not invisible, not forgotten." The women religious who pioneered child-care insti-tutions in the late 19th century did more than mother countless orphans and foundlings. In a society that wanted to punish the poor for their poverty and ostra-cize unmarried women for their sexual conduct, they aligned themselves with the least ones. Their actions of compassion witnessed to the worth and dignity of every human being. Today our witness is the same: it is not about ourselves. It is about people in need, whether here or far away, in cardboard shacks on city streets or in huts with dirt floors in faraway parts of the world. "With whom do you believe your lot is cast?" asks the Review for Religious I! poet Adrienne Rich.19 Our answer has been clear: the least of Christ's sisters and brothers. (4) Power was (and is) going on. Interwoven with our stories are stories of power used and abused, for good and for ill. We have been agents and victims of power, subjects and objects of power. In our liminal status as neither clerics nor laypersons, we walk a fine line. As public persons in the church, we are subject to more sanctions and less freedom than the laity. Like them, we are closed off from much decision-making where we could exercise power for appropriate change. More than once we have given over our power and col-luded with unjust social and ecclesial structures. Diminishment, not power, seems the over- . ,~religious life today. riding theme in conver-sations about religious life today. But it is hardly the whole story. Our Catholic heritage gives us other angles from which to view the reality. We should look clearly and sensitively at things seen, but also in faith be sensitive to things unseen. The cold hard facts of the past forty years--declining numbers, more women dying than entering, the rising median age, retirement expenses, and cherished ministries sold, merged, or lost--do not tell the whole story, any more than the success and solidity of the 1940s and 1950s captured the whole story. The key question is: What wisdom have we learned from the success and the suffering that have been part of every stage of our existence? (And how do believers ~ i ~D~minishrnent, , not power, "~, ,seems tlie overriding theme ~ ¯ in, conversations about [245 68.3 2009 Becbtle ¯ The Impact of Women Religious in New York 246] measure success anyway?) As one congregational leader asked, "Do life's traumatic events serve as catalysts for transformation or stagnation in our religious congrega-rions?'' 2° What does all of it have to do with the mystery of dying and rising with Christ, the mystery of transfor-marion, that is the core of being Christian believers? In our beginnings, struggles, growth, and letting go, how have we tasted grace? Questions like these can move us to imagine an alternate view. We have claimed, explicidy and unapolo-gerically, power to create and re-create, to realize God's dream, in imitation and remembrance of the Jesus whom we vow to follow. We have used power to make a differ-ence in people's lives, to bring about change in society. Pope Benedict XVl recognized this in his address last year to U.S. Catholic educators: "Countless dedicated religious sisters, brothers, and priests together with selfless parents have, through Catholic schools, helped generations of immigrants to rise from poverty and take their place in mainstream society." We have used power to translate dreams and imaginings into buildings and behaviors, programs and policies; to shape the spiritual sensibilities of a people; to build relationships, widen the circle, and bring others to the table. This Spirit-story of power fought for and claimed, energy released and transformed, gifts shared and multi-plied, is the story of women religious. From what source do we draw this power? Does our deep life in God have anything to do with our story, with our impact? The answer may be obvious to us in religious life, but it needs to be voiced unambiguously. Not long ago Doris Gottemoeller RSM said of women religious, "We struggle to make our daily efforts transpar-ent to the love of God which animates us and the hope Review for Religious that guides us into the future." It is "the love of God which animates us," and it is that love alone which gives us the heart and energy of our committed response. I began with two questions: What was happening? And what was really going on? The course of these remarks has led me to two different but related ways of posing those questions, namely, With whom do we believe our lot is cast? And from where have we drawn our strength? Indeed, women religious in the church of New York and elsewhere have written a long scroll of faithfulness. We have aided people everywhere. The faithful witness of our efforts has changed public perception of religion and shaped public discourse about charity and justice. But our impact is most authentically measured, I believe, not by the visible standards of institutional presence or even the calculus of service, but rather in the incalcu-lable, invisible source of our energy and service, the passionate presence of God in us, the deep wellsprings of Spirit-life from which we live. No words, no story, can tell how God in us has touched our hearts and the hearts of others, and changed our world for the better. Matthew 2.5 makes it clear: it is love that matters. Surely, that final revealing of all that was obscure and hidden, that final tally of impact, will tell the story of women religious and their love--their immense, faith-ful, relational, witnessing, and powerful love--lived from deep within the heart of God. 1 This article is adapted from an address given at St. Ignatius Loyola Parish in New York, 3 April 2008, in a series commemorating the arch-diocese's 200th anniversary. Speakers were asked: "To what next step, to what new place, are women religious and our local church being invited? 68.3 2009 Becbtle ¯ The Impact of Women Religious in New York 248 What would the future look like through the eyes of your foundress?" 2 About 2,900 professed women religious live and minister in the archdiocese of New York. 3 Though this article focuses on New York, it is easily applicable to other dioceses. ~ Readers will know similar stories wherever they live. s "Diversity as Tradition: Why the Future of Christianity Is Looking More Like Its Past," Santa Clara Lecture, Santa Clara University, 8 November 2007. http://www.scu.edu/ignatiancenter/events/lectures/ index.cfm 6 For example, the Dominican sisters in Blauvelt, New York, a rural area in the 1880s, could not keep the rule of enclosure because their work with orphans required frequent trips to the New York City courtS~ 7 Thomas Spalding, The Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1789-1994 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), notes that Carroll did not want to foster a lot of strictly Catholic institutions, but rather "wished the local church to blend imperceptibly into the social fabric" (p. 62). The needs of the growing immigrant Catholic population would soon dictate otherwise. s [Sister Therese Wolfe OSU], The Ursulines in New Orleans and Our Lady of Prompt Succor: A Record of Two Centuries, 1727-1925 (New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1925), pp. 199-200. 9 Elizabeth Seton to Rev. Simon Brute, 1 August 1817, in Elizabeth Barley Seton Collected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Regina Bechtle SC and Judith Metz SC; ross. ed., Ellin M. Kelly (New York: New City Press, 2000- 2006), vol. 2, p. 494. l0 Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789- 1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), pp. 8-9 & 19. l~ See John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003). ~2 Thomas J. Shelley, The Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York, 1808-2008 (Strasbourg: Editions du Signe, 2007), p. 171. ~3 Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 133. ~4 1 am indebted to Maureen Welsh SHCJ for compiling and sum-marizing many of the statistics used in this article. ~s See, for example, Lora Ann Quifionez CDP and Mary Daniel Turner SNDdeN, The Transformation of American Catholic Sisters (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). Review for Religious I! 16 Joan Chittister OSB has written that the purpose of religious life is to be "a searing presence, a paradigm of search, a mark of human soul, and a catalyst to conscience in the society in which it emerged." ,7 Margaret John Kelly DC, address to Catholic Charities of New York, 21 February 2008, reported in Catholic New York, 28 February 2008. 18 See Shelley, Bicentennial History, p. 356. 19 Adrienne Rich, "The Spirit of Place." z0 Mary Persico IHM, "Welcoming the Storm," LCWR Occasional Papers, Winter 2007. Deadheading Deadheading daffodils is sad but necessary work. When the rich yellow trumpet goes all papery and transparent it begins to draw life from the bulb which stores it for next year's flowering. So, like a minor executioner, I lop offheads - snip, snip, snip - watch them fall haphazardly to the gentler earth which gathers up old life to make it new again. Bonnie Thurston 68.3 2009 PHILIP SHANO Communal Examen ignatian prayer Father George Aschenbrenner's groundbreaking article of 1972 on the "consciousness examen" led to a renewed understanding of the tradi-tional Ignatian exercise and its dynamic role in our personal lives2 His work dealt with the personal examen. In recent years occasional efforts have stressed Ignatian spirituality's communal dimension. Among those efforts is the work of a group called Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for the Corporate Person (ISECP), uniting the dynamic of the Exercises with insights of group facilitation.2 Also, an entire issue of The Way Supplement was devoted to communal discernment.3 John English SJ's book Spiritual Intimacy and Community deals with it.4 It stresses our nature as members of a community and helps readers to reflect on discernment's communal dimension. Philip Shano SJ last wrote for us in 2008. His address is soon to be Canadian Martyrs Residence; 2 Dale Avenue; Toronto, Ontario; M4W 1K4 Canada. Review for Religious This article, however, is not about communal dis-cernment per se; the pieces mentioned above are good starting points for that purpose. This article simply describes a "communal" examen of consciousness, an exercise based on the realization that Ignatian spiritual-ity is applicable to communities, not just individual men and: women. Where is Christ to be found in daily com-munity living? Communities, families, organizations, and even nations can experience collective consolation or desolation, a sense of being connected with God's movements in the world or a sense of being separated from them. Spirituality is communal. Though Ignatius's definitions and rules in the Exercises apply primarily to persons' relationship with God, they are also applicable to communal situations, to persons' relationship with one another. The communal examen, then, can help the community as a group to attend to its daily life in a prayerful way. The communal examen adapts the general examen found in the Spiritual Exercises (§§32-43). I divide this exercise into two connected parts. The first involves guiding our community prayerfully through the steps of the examen--a loving and contemplative look at our life together. The second part invites dialogue or conver-sation so that we share with the others our reflections on our community's life. I will refer to the parts as the guided examen and the conversational examen. One of the attractions of the communal examen is the power of a community praying together. In an arti-cle on Jesuits and the liturgy, Robert Taft SJ, professor emeritus of oriental liturgy at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, makes a distinction between freedom and obligation in Jesuit communal prayer. He points out that Ignatius did not want his men to be obligated to [25! 68.3 2009 Sbano ¯ Communal Examen celebrate the Hours regularly, but did want them to have the freedom to do this. He quotes a litde-known text. To his secretary, Juan de Polanco, Ignatius said: "We remain free to have choir when and where it may seem to contribute to God's greater service. Only the obligation is removed."5 In initiating the communal examen in my commu-nity, a Jesuit novitiate, my desire was that this exercise be truly communal. Early in our experience, we realized that, although we called it communal, it had a personal focus. As one member said, we were sitting with the others in a quiet space and praying about the week just past, but we were reflecting more on how "I" live in the community. The difference can be subtle, but our aim in our weekly examen is to move the primacy from "oneself in the community" to "ourselves as the com-munity." To that end I avoided using the pronoun "I" when I led the examen. The Method In our novitiate we keep the communal examen in .our weekly calendar. With few exceptions it takes place each Friday morning. We look in a prayerful and discerning way at the past week and then to the week coming up. The leader prepares the examen a day or two earlier, prayerfully considering what has been hap-pening. The leader asks himself: Where is the energy in the community? What are the Spirit's movements? Do people in the community look tired, or are they energized and upbeat? Are they engaged, or are they withdrawing? The leader has .tried to pick up the gen-eral flow of life in the community--at the dining-room table, in living-room conversations, in classes, at Mass, and so on. He does this not as an external observer, but Review for Religious as one of the community. He "listens" for subtle move-ments; he tries to be a discerning presence in the com-munity. (The leader should probably be the superior or some other person of authority in the group.) We spend about forty minutes on the communal exa-men. The first twenty or so are devoted to the guided examen. Then, after a transitional prayer, we begin our conversation, our dialogue. The guided examen uses the five elements of traditional conscious-ness examens. After an opening prayer, we begin with gratitude. Adapting Ignatius's words and making them relevant for this com-munity at this time, the guide invites the community to "give thanks to God our Lord for the benefits [we] have received" (SpEx §43). He simply and prayerfully reminds us of some of the highlights (either scheduled or spontaneous) in the community's life in the past week. After a few more guiding words, several minutes of silence follow, during which all get in touch with experiences for which they are grateful to God. The purpose of the leader's guiding words, of course, was to jog people's memories. Communities busy with many things may easily have forgotten some noteworthy things, or may have taken them for granted. Next the guide again offers, as at each stage, a few guiding points or questions and then leaves the group to silence. We pray for the enlightening grace to see our week as God's sees it and to use this time prayerfully. Third, and probably most significandy for the com- Did some event have a very positive and consoling effect on the community? 6g.3 2009 Sbano ¯ Communal Examen munity's discernment, we look again at things we are grateful for and then we pray for awareness of where and when we, as a community, experienced consolation or desolation, union of minds and hearts, or separation and isolation. What were significant moments in the community this week? Was there a lot of internal move-ment in the community because of a particular event? Which events are worthwhile for the community to go back and revisit, letting God's grace shine in a new way? My practice in this third step is to be as specific as pos-sible, especially if at some time energy and consolation were clearly present, or there were evident moments of desolation and a loss of energy. For instance, was there a very real source of tension in the community that week? Was there a jarring argument, or did a big public event cause concern? Did some event have a very positive and consoling effect on the community? In the fall of 2008, the election campaign in the United States was clearly having an impact on conver-sations in the living room and at table. Likewise, the community was not immune to the daily news of war, terrorism, economic turmoil, and political scandal. The ministry that novices were doing one or two days a week gave Mondays and Wednesdays a distincdy different feel at table than other days. There was usually an upbeat atmosphere as the men recounted experiences from their ministries. How do we let God's grace into the things that have an impact on the life of the community? All of this is fruit for prayerful reflection together. Our fourth step is to look at our sin as a commu-nity. That means looking to our relationships with one another or with others outside the community. It involves a look at our life as a community: Where or when are we wasteful of time or money, food or drink, electricity or Review for Religious paper? Where are we avoiding others? How are we as a community not attentive to our brothers and sisters in the city around us? What effect did the negative mood of one or two of us have on the rest of us? Are we hospi-table? As with the "discernment" step, it is helpful to be as specific as possible. In some areas we may know we are sinful or wonder whether we are. Perhaps a well-stocked refrigerator stands as a stark reminder of our difference from most peo-ple in the world. Or per-haps our garbage cans tell us something about our waste and the gifts we take for granted. Or maybe the fatigue and moodiness of one member has influenced all of us that week. If a community is honest, it does not take long to realize some communal sinfulness. Realization is one step. Sorrow is another. The final step is a hope-filled look at the week com-ing up, in the light of what we are learning about the week just ended. From what we know about our life together--both virtue and sinfulness--is there some-thing specific we should be especially attentive to? What special or ordinary events are coming up next week? Does anything there need special grace? What hopes and prayers do we have for next week? As with the earlier steps, here the leader offers a few guiding words and then leaves the group in silence. This much takes us about twenty minutes. After a simple transitional prayer, we go to the sec-ond part, the conversational examen, something notably different. The leader does not guide here. The members of the community raise points and offer reflections. The iMayhe the f ti ue and moodiness of one ,member has nfluenced all of us, 68.3 2009 Shano ¯ Communal Examen assumption is that they have thoughtfully focused on their life together and that their remarks will be more communal than personal. Dialogue is expected. The aim of this medium of exchange is to help the community itself grow in spirit and in practice. For instance, if one person says "I am disturbed by our community's sin of wastefulness," the hope is that others will respond either by asking for clarification or by adding their own obser-vations. Otherwise, an important opportunity for the community's growth has been missed. It is good when members recognize together how much the community has been in consolation, or deso-lation, in the wake of specific occurrences or choices. That can lead to shared thanksgiving and shared self-awareness (or community-awareness), or to shared sor-row for our communal sin and shared hope for the week coming up. Do we have commonly shared desires? That questi.on may involve subdeties that are hard to commu-nicate, but, when there is a prayerful disposition in the group, members can more easily hear one another. Some Other Things We Learned What have we learned about this trial-and-error exercise? First, the setting should be a prayerful one, but not overly prayerful. We used to conduct both phases in the chapel, but found that, understandably, it did not foster conversation. We took each other's words a little too sacredly there, and thus not communally enough. Then we tried using the chapel for the guided examen and a seminar table for the conversational section. That was all right, but it seemed two businesslike after our time in the chapel. Now we use a living room. The weekly communal examen helps us look at how we are living together in community: things that "work" Review for Religious by orienting us toward God and community, and things that lead to isolation and its attendant problems. Being a novitiate, we do that regularly anyhow, but the exa-men provides a prayerful setting for this to happen. It serves, in a way, as a weekly and prayerful community meeting. It offers us a chance to pray together in an easy way over the logistics and mechanics of how we actually live together. The weekly examen needs to have flexibility built into it. A good analogy is the personal consciousness examen. That prayerful habit changes and develops over time. Likewise, the communal examen needs to grow. A community looks and acts differently after a few months of living together.6 And, when new members move in, it changes and needs to develop new habits. Let me restate the obvious. The guides need to be in tune with the movements in the community. Their guid-ance questions cannot be generic or rote; they have to resonate with the community. Is there an ongoing issue that needs continual attention? VChat issue does this community need to attend to this week? In what ways are we in harmony with God's activity in the world? What do we need to be monitoring? Perhaps it is our tendency to overwork or overanalyze. Or are we weak at hospitality and just "wasting time" with one another and our guests? Do we neglect the playfulness or creative side of life in community? Do we mention the same discernments or the same kind or degree of sinfulness week after week? All of those things tell us something about how we are living. The communal examen needs to be adapted to this community's uniqueness. It can be a good way of being honest with one another. In our practice we end the exercise with a brief clos-ing prayer. I have thought, however, that it could be 68.3 2009 Shano * Communal Examen Guidance questions have to resonate with the community,: expanded, It could wrap up some of what we discussed in the second half. On the other hand, that may depend on whether the conversation has led to the resolution of something. Presumably, as time goes on, the group will deal better with issues that arise. In that regard, the hope for the communal examen is no different than people's hope that their personal praying of the exa-men of consciousness will help them keep growing and developing spiritually. One caution needs mentioning. Just because a com-munity is committed to the weekly examen does not mean that community members should store up issues till the formal exercise concludes another week. People should use the present moment and informal opportunities to deal with many things. The communal examen simply offers a chance to look back from the perspective of a week. It offers another occasion to commend or affirm each other--something that can happen naturally enough all week long. It may offer a better way of dealing with pat-terns of behavior. It can be a time of gende challenges to both individuals and community. It offers us the chance to take a long, loving look at our community living. More than thirty-five years ago George Aschenbrenner said, "We are talking about an experience in faith of growing sensitivity to the unique, intimately special ways that the Lord's Spirit has of approaching and call-ing us.''7 Over the decades, we have grown to recognize the need not only for me tO pray better but for us to pray together better.8 Review for Religioua Notes ' George A. Aschenbrenner sJ, "Consciousness Examen," Review for Religious 31 (1972): 14-21. Aschenbrenner wrote a follow-up article about the examen in Review for Religious 39 (May 1980): 321-324. 2 Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for the Corporate Person (ISECP) was founded in 1977 as a joint Canadian-American project involving several Jesuits and their colleagues working to bring together some insights and methods based on merging group dynamics/facilitation with the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. It was based in the University of Scranton (Pennsylvania). The group still exists, under a new name and acronym, International Society of Community Engagement Professionals (ISCEP), based in Appleton, Wisconsin, with Judith A. Roemer OSF at the helm. Information and resources are available at www.iscep.org. 3 The Way Supplement 85 (Spring 1996), titled "Discerning Together." It offers articles by writers experienced in communal dis-cernment. It presents a way of doing communal discernment and deals with issues such as conflict, social sin and grace, and cross-cultural communication. q John English SJ, Spiritual Intimacy and Community: An Ignatian View of the Small Faith Community (London: Darton, Longrnan and Todd, 1992). 5 Juan de Polanco is quoted in Robert E Taft sJ, "Liturgy in the Life and Mission of the Society of Jesus," in Liturgy in a Postmodern World, ed. Keith Pecklers SJ (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 51. 6 My experience is with a formation community that changes from year to year. The members, mostly novices, presumably change and grow amid new challenges and opportunities. The weekly examen will look a little different in a community that has more stability. 7 Aschenbrenner, "Consciousness Examen," p. 15. s Some of the ideas in this article are from my experience of working on the Leadership Formation Programme at Loyola House, Guelph, Canada, in the 1990s. This programme was offered prin-cipally to the Waterloo Region Roman Catholic Separate School Board. I acknowledge, too, my Jesuit novitiate community in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, with whom I have been able to put into practice the communal examen. 68.3 2009 Shano ¯ Communal Examen Questions for Personal and Group Reflection 1. In our apostolic community, how might we adopt this approach to a communal examen that Philp Shano uses within a formation (novitiate) community? 2. What are the benefits to our way of living community life if we regularly schedule a communal examen? What are some pitfalls that we need to avoid if we regularly schedule a communal examen? I Confession We chase butterflies Fluttering fresh From the chrysalis of creation And entangle inarticulable wonders Of sorrow and delight In rough nets of words And pin them to the page. For the presumption, Lord Of our faded Lepidoptera Unable to survive The trauma of their capturing We ask forgiveness Even if not promising Never to sin again. Ian A.T. While Review for Religious LOUIS M. SAVARY Ignatius' s Contemplatio ad Amorem One of the most memorable experiences of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises is its final exercise, commonly referred to in Latin as the Contemplatio ad Amorem.1 The title has been traditionally translated as "The Contemplation for Attaining Divine Love" or "The Contemplation to Reach Love," which is Jesuit Joseph Tetlow's interpretation.2 Notice that neither translation mistakenly says "obtaining" God's love, for Ignatius knows that we already are receiving that divine love in infinite abundance. Rather, in this experience Ignatius offers us a way to learn how to "reach for" and hopefully "attain" and "possess" the ability to love the way God loves. In line with this clarification, accord-ing to Jesuit George Aschenbrenner, some have sug-gested retitling this experience "Loving the Way God Loves."3 Louis M. Savary has given lectures and workshops on Teilhardian spirituality for many years. His address is 3404 Ellenwood Lane; Tampa, Florida 33618. lousavary@yahoo.com 68.3 2009 Savary ¯ Ignatius's Contemplatio ad Amorem Starting with the Contemplatio I have heard it secondhand that some well-respected Ignatian retreat directors, when presenting the Spiritual Exercises to those who have made the Exercises before, perhaps many times, begin with the Conternplatio. Starting at the end, though counterintuitive, seems an excellent idea, for at least three reasons. First of all, by beginning with the Contemplatio, sea-soned retreatants reconnect with where they left off the last time they made the Exercises. Reentering the Contemplatio during their first rediscover their wonder and cious presence in their lives, day in retreat, they quickly gratefulness at God's gra-and they recall the gener-ous and loving response they made to God in the "Take and Receive" prayer during earlier retreats. When they enter the First Week in this way, they are approaching the Exercises from a new vantage point, with gratitude and love for God renewed, and they are more likely to be open to making an ever greater (magis) offering of themselves to God during the coming days of prayer. The second reason comes from a beautiful insight of Michael J. Buckley SJ, who describes in his now famous article how Ignatius's four points of the Contemplatio recapitulate in succession the Four Weeks of the Exercises.4 By beginning an Ignatian retreat with the Contemplatio, the retreatants summarize--and anticipate, as it were--the various graces and spiritual dynamics they can look forward to during the coming "Weeks" of the Exercises.5 Third, other retreat directors have complained that they must sometimes spend a full day or two (of an eight-day retreat) just to help busy, stress-filled retreatants to slow down enough to experience God's presence. Beginning the retreat with the Conternplatio, Review for Religious the retreatants would probably feel immersed in God's presence upon noticing with greater awareness the coundess gifts of God they have been receiving in their daily lives. Two Spiritual Truths In his introduction to this contemplation, Ignatius wants us to be mindful of two spiritual truths. The first is that "love ought to manifest itself more by deeds than by words.''6 The second is that "love consists in mutual communication between the two per-sons. That is, the one who loves gives and communicates to the beloved what one has, or a part of what one has or can have; and the beloved in return ~ does the same to the lover. Thus, if one has knowledge, one gives it to the other who does not; and similarly in regard to honors and riches. Each shares with the other." What Ignatius describes here is the way God, as Lover, loves. God's loving is an unconditionally gener-ous sharing of the divine life with all that he loves. And the sharing is done in deeds, not just in words. The grace we are to seek in this contemplation is not primarily gratitude and wonder at realizing how unconditionally God loves us, though this is a very nat-ural response. To stop there is to miss the main point. The grace we want is to respond appropriately to this divine Lover. To this end Ignatius, the great "technician Thel gra.ke We are to seek in this contemplation is not primarily gratitude and wonder at realizing how ,unconditionally God loves us. 263 68.3 2009 Savaty ¯ Ignatius's Contemplatio ad Amorem 2 41 of the sacred," designed this experience in four stages. At each stage he asks us (1) to observe closely the way God loves us and (2) to put into practice our love of God and the rest of creation in a similarly unconditional and generous way. In this contemplation, Ignatius has us observe God's love at four points, which I prefer to call stages, for at each there is an advance. At the first, we note God giv-ing us gifts. At the second, we note that God is pres-ent in the gifts and even in. the gift of our very selves. At the third stage, we take notice of God continuously acting (and laboring) in and through those gifts and in and through ourselves as well. Finally, at the fourth and fullest stage, we realize that God is personally sharing the divine Life with us. We find ourselves loved com-pletely and desiring to return that love in the complete way that God loves us.8 Four Developmental Stages The first stage of showing love is the giving of a gift in the form of a tangible object, like a carefully cho-sen birthday present. Ignatius expects not only that we will feel wonder and gratitude at the gifts a passionately loving God has given us, but also that we will hope to give gifts in return--as lavishly as we can. Even at this first stage, Ignatius brings in the theme of magis that permeates the Exercises. For Ignatius, actions are not done merely for the glory of God, but for the greater glory of God. No matter what we do for God, we yearn to do more.9 The second stage of showing love adds presence to the gift. The Giver does not simply hand over the gift and then leave, but remains present in the gift and is present to the recipient opening it. Review for Religious The third stage of showing love adds personal inter-action with the gift and with the recipient. The Giver does not merely stand by as the beloved opens the gift, but interacts with the gift and the person, perhaps by subtly showing him or her how the gift operates or can be used. The fourth stage of showing love goes much further. It is about sharing oneself--becoming one with the beloved. That is, (1) the tangible gift, (2) the divine presence, and (3) the divine interaction with the recipient indicate (4) that God wants to share the divine Life with the beloved's life; there is a bonding. In this contemplation we do not observe and reflect on these four stages of loving only to unite us and God in a kind of private spiritual communion. Such commu-nion is a wonderful thing, but it is only a preliminary result. Ignatius wants more. He wants us to be with God while these four ways of God loving us and all of creation are being shown to us, and then he wants us to ask God what, in a similar fourfold manner, God has in mind for us to do. This goes beyond a spiritual-ity focused simply on "me and God." It stretches us to include all human beings and all creation in our four stages of loving. Inspiring Teilhard de Chardin The Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin dedicated his revolutionary spirituality book The Divine Milieu "to those who love the world."1° Teilhard, a true son of Ignatius and pray-er of the Contemplatio, saw no con-tradiction between loving God with all our heart and soul and loving the human family and all of creation with all our heart and soul. For Teilhard, the human family and all of creation were, in fact, the living Body 68.3 2009 Savary * Ignatius's Contemplatio ad Amorem of the Cosmic Christ. To love that Body is to love its Head, for the two are one being. The Divine Milieu can be summed up as a spirituality that shows us, as Ignatius would say, how "to find God in all things." Teilhard's spirituality begins with the Contemplatio and develops it to new heights. Like Ignatius, Teilhard would have us not avoid the world or try to withdraw from it (as many traditional spiritualities would have us do), but plunge into it with mind and heart for love of Christ. George Aschenbrenner, like most contemporary skilled and experienced interpreters of the Exercises, has been influenced consciously or unconsciously by Teilhard's thought on the integration of the sacred and the secular. It is a stretch to believe that Ignatius could have written in the 16th century the following para-graph of Aschenbrenner's, but he would have if alive today: The Ignatian pilgrim mysticism of service finds God in all things by entering carefully into the tangled human situation rather than by withdrawing from it. The special contemplative nature of this expe-rience [the Contemplatio] makes the service always radically religious, however secular it may appear. This radically grateful religious service can heal the sacred-secular split in your experience that often saps apostolic energy. ~l This perspective of finding and loving God in all things permeates the four stages of the Ignatian Contemplatio. To forget this "all things" perspective is to miss the grandeur and greatness of God's salvific plan for his creation. The First Stage of Loving: Giving Gifts At the first stage of the Contemplatio, Ignatius tells us that God gives gifts. He has said that love is shown Review for Religious in action. Giving gifts is an action; it is more than words. All of creation is God's gift to us. Creation is the Original Blessing. Teilhard would tell us to begin to list these divine gifts that science has revealed to us--including gifts that Ignatius in his day had litde or no awareness of, or of how and when they were given. For example, Ignatius had no sense of the vastness and almost fourteen-bil-lion- year existence of the universe with its galaxies, stars, planets--many hundreds of billions of them. Today, with the help of science in all its forms, we have come to recognize that God's original act of cre-ation has been continually evolving. Original simple particles at the Big Bang were attracted to other par-ticles to form connections and unions. As these new unions kept attracting other unions, creation evolved to higher levels of complexity. New chemical elements, more complex than those before, kept appearing. Over eons insects, fish, reptiles, plants, grasses, trees, and ani-mals appeared. Finally, hominids evolved. Over many hundred thousands of years, and before homo sapiens, many hominid forms came into existence and then became extinct. Eventually humans created language, art, and music, forms of government, science, literature, and all the other elements of civilization and culture. And still evolution continues. Even St. Paul recognized that divine creation is still incomplete, still in process.12 Through discoveries in science and technology, we have come to recognize in our limited way the fundamental law driving evolution-ary creation--another gift of God. We have come to recognize the evolutionary law of attraction-connec-tion- complexity-consciousness that God has placed in every particle he created, and that this law is designed to 68.3 2009 Savary * Ignatius's Contemplatio ad Amorem culminate in the spiritualization of all matter.~3 Through our faith we believe that all creation lives in, with, and through God in a divine milieu, and that there is noth-ing outside this divine milieu.~4 On the microscopic side, science has revealed the incredible complexity and activ-ity of each living being--the human genome, the tril-lions of cells that live in our bodies, each with its own highly complex intra-active life. Ignatius, of course, recognizes the gift of Earth itself, and so do we: all the beauties of mountains, plains, and skies, all the power of tornadoes, hurri-canes, tidal waves, floods, deserts, and frozen tundra. Nor can we forget the gifts humans have been able to give to each other and back to God, gifts such as civi-lization, music, art, literature, society, communication, transporta-tion, recreation, science, mathematics, architecture, entertainment, film, radio, television, computers. The technologies developed in the past century would have astounded Ignatius. We can add to Ignatius's list all the gifts we have personally received--family, talents, skills, education, opportunities, friends. Along with these are our five senses, our memory, intelligence, and willpower, our freedom to love and make commitments, our accom-plishments, our team building, our worship. For Ignatius, these four capacities of the human mind and, spirit. liberty, memory, understanding/ and will-areothe greatest gift we can offer to God,, Review for Religious Ignatius created his "Take and Receive" prayer to end each of the four stages of this Contemplatio. We can see how it summarizes especially the first of the four stages of the contemplation. We bring gifts to God, the gifts of our liberty, memory, understanding, and will. They are the best of what any human possesses: "You have given them to me; I return them to you, Lord. Everything is yours. Dispose of it all according to your will. Give me the grace to love you, and that is enough for me.''Is For Ignatius, these four capacities of the human mind and spirit--liberty, memory, understand-ing, and will--are the greatest gift we can offer to God. Today a psychologist might suggest adding things such as my imagination, my creativity, my physical energy, my talents, the skills I have developed, my contacts, my influence, my financial resources, and my experience. The Second Stage of Loving: Presence At the second stage, in Ignatius's words, "I will consider how God dwells [is present] in creatures; in the elements, giving them existence; in the plants, giv-ing them life; in the animals, giving them sensation; in human beings, giving them intelligence; and finally, how in this way he dwells also in myself, giving me existence, life, sensation, and intelligence; and even further, mak-ing me his temple, since I am created as a likeness and image of the Divine Majesty" (SpEx §2 3 5). We can for-mulate a prayer appropriate to this experience of loving presence. The "Take and Receive" prayer does not quite capture literally this second stage of loving, namely, that, in response to God's loving presence to me, my own presence to God is a loving gift in return. Although, traditionally, directors suggest that the "Take and Receive" prayer be repeated at each of the four stages, 269 68.3 2009 Savary * Ignatius's Contemplatio ad Amorem Ignatius allows the retreatant to proceed "in the manner described in the first point, or in any other way I feel to be better.'n7 Perhaps such a second-stage prayer, emphasizing mutual presence, might go something like this: Just as you, God, remain present in your gifts--giv-ing them existence, life, and purpose--and just as you remain present to me, I choose to remain actively pres-ent in the gifts I offer to you, God, by not wasting them or disregarding them or neglecting to use them, but rejoicing in using them for your purposes and for your greater glory. In my loving of you, I wish also to remain present to you. To do this, I beg the grace to remain conscious that I am working side by side with you and with Christ helping to build the Great Christ Body. The Third Stage of Loving: Cooperative Interaction The third stage of loving focuses on personal inter-action. In Ignatius's words, "I will consider how God labors and works for me in all the creatures on the face of the earth; that is, he acts in the manner of one who is laboring. For example, he is working in the heavens, elements, plants, fruits, catde, and all the rest--giving them their existence, conserving them, concurring with their vegetative and sensitive activities, and so forth" (SpEx §236). God keeps, acting in and through those gifts, as well as in and through the beloved. God does not just act once and then stop. God continues acting and interacting at every moment with, in, and through the gifts of creation. By that continuous action, creation grows and develops; it becomes more complex and con-tinues to evolve in consciousness. For us to love in the same interactive way, we need to keep acting and interacting with the gifts we already possess and the gifts we are still being given so as to Review for Religious help creation to grow and evolve in complexity and con-sciousness. Here it is appropriate to formulate a prayer of sustained commitment to use our gifts to grow per-sonally and to encourage similar growth in those with whom we interact. This third stage of loving invites a new stage of prayer, one of interactive commitment beyond the "Take and Receive" prayer. It might be something like this: Ever-working God, in reflecting on your almost four-teen billion years of divine revelation and original blessing, I have come to recognize the law of attrac-tion- connection-complexity-consciousness that you have placed in me and in every particle of matter you created, and that this law is designed to culminate in the spiritual transformation of all matter. Therefore I dedicate myself, for your greater glory, to growing in complexity and consciousness by working alongside others--in Christ--with those talents and gifts you have given me. I will strive to find ever-new ways to spiritualize the material things in my life. The Fourth Stage of Loving: Mutual Indwelling At the fourth stage, in Ignatius's words, "I will con-sider how all good things and gifts descend from above; for example, my limited power from the supreme and infinite power above; and so of justice, goodness, piety, mercy, and so forth--just as the rays come down from the sun, or the rains from their source" (SpEx §2 3 7). God shares the divine Self with the beloved. God does not only give gifts that are external to himself, as it were, but gives himself to us as an involved, interactive personal presence--like the sun's rays are giving us the sun itself, bringing an active and interactive presence. The incarnation of the divine Word is one way God shares the divine Self and demonstrates this fourth stage 271 68.3 2009 Savary ¯ Igngtius's Contemplatio ad Amorem 272 of loving. Christ's mystical incarnation in the Eucharist is another self-giving of God to us. In the Universal Christ we are offered a way to reciprocate this self-giv-ing love, so that with St. Paul we can say, "I no longer live, but I am alive in Christ.''7 At the fourth stage of showing love, Ignatius wants us to learn to live our day and our destiny within God the Beloved. We live out our day within and alongside our Beloved, that is, we remain present in the gifts we offer to God, acting in and through those gifts as well as in and through the Beloved. When Ignatius speaks of "finding God in all things," he is talking not about finding a mere Presence and qui-etly resting in it. That famous expression means much more. It means being with God all day long in our daily duties and activities, doing each thing with God and in God. After all, at every moment God is keeping every-thing in being, from the smallest microbe to the farthest galaxy. God and we are acting and working side by side (stage three) and as one (stage four). We are building the kingdom of God together--God in me and I in God.~8 In this way we become "contemplatives in action." As Aschenbrenner points out, "A busy disciple encounters many people in a great variety of situations, but the direct, immediate encounter is always with the Divine Majesty. A mysticism of service stretches your soul in an awareness of the fidelity of God's loving service to you.''~9 To express in prayer this fourth way of loving, we might say something like this: O Great God, I no longer wish to live and simply work for you. My deepest desire and the grace I ask is that I may live consciously in you and with you and, in Christ, that I may realize that my primary privi-lege and honor is to be a cell in the Cosmic Body of Christ. I wish to live and work no longer just as me, Review for Religious but consciously as belonging to Christ--on our way to you. I desire to know and see how the Christ Body as a whole is working toward its fulfillment, and I wish to cooperate consciously and ever more gener-ously with whatever you wish and desire. Something that has always surprised me about the Exercises is that, although Ignatian spirituality in gen-eral is quite Eucharistic,2° there is little or no mention of receiving the Eucharist or of the Eucharist's centrality in Catholic Christian liturgy and life. To me, the Eucharist provides the simplest and most profound synthesis of the Contemplatio, since it integrates simultaneously the four stages of that contemplation, namely, Eucharist as gift, presence, active working, and mutual indwelling. When the Cosmic Christ who lives today comes to the altar during the celebration of the Mass, there we find God in all things and all things in him. Notes 1 In the Latin "Versio Litteralis" of Ignatius's Spanish text of the Exercises, the Contemplatio is titled "Contemplatio ad Obtinendum Amorem." The Latin verb obtinere is not to be simply transliterated as "to obtain" or "to get," but rather means "to have" or "to possess." Interestingly, in the "Versio Vulgata" from Ignatius's lifetime, the tide is "Conwmplatio ad Amorem Spiritualem" followed by the words "in nobis excitandum" (to be aroused in us) in small print. 2 See Joseph A. Tedow SJ, Ignatius Loyola: Spiritual Exercises (New York: Crossroad, 1992), p. 145. 3 George A. Aschenbrenner SJ, Stretched for Greater Glory: What to Expect from the Spiritual Exercises (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004), p. 134. 4 Michael J. Buckley SJ, "The Contemplation to Attain Love," Way Supplement 24 (Spring 1975): 92-104. s For another development of this correlation, see Aschenbrenner, Stretched for Greater Glory, pp. 141-146. 6 SpEx §230. Unless otherwise noted, translated excerpts of the Spiritual Exercises are from George E. Ganss SJ, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1992). 68.3 20O9 Savary * Ignatius's Contemplatio ad Amorem 7 Tedow, Ignatius, p. 145. 8 Although Tedow lists these as "four points on how God loves" (p. 145) and shows how they are distinct from each other, I feel he does not adequately show their developmental or evolutionary character. 9 In the Exercises, magis typically means choosing one of two or more authentic goods as more (magis) conducive to God's glory than the others. Once a person has chosen the magis in a major decision (such as a life path or career), magis in later retreats can pertain to whether one is continually improving one's skills, cooperation, generosity, and so forth. 10 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, The Divine Milieu (New York: Harper & Row, 1960). The complete dedication ironically juxtaposes two expressions: "Sic Deus Dilexit Mundum: For Those Who Love the World." 11 Aschenbrenner, Stretching, p. 147. 12 See Ep 1:10, Col 2:19. t3 Teilhard discusses this law extensively in his Phenomenon of Man. See also my book Teilbard de Chardin: The Divine Milieu Explained (New York: Paulist Press, 2007), esp. pp. 27ff. ~4 See Paul's speech in Ac 17:22-31. is Note that this final sentence of the Suscipe prayer, here taken from the Versio Vulgata, differs from that in the ~rsio Litteralis, which translated reads: "Give me your love and your grace, for that is enough for me." In the Vulgata, the sentence is about my love for God (that is, about learning how to love the way God loves); in the Litteralis, it is a prayer asking God to love me. See Thesaurus Spiritualis Societatis Jesu (Rome: Jesuit Curia, 1953), pp. 226-228, §234. 16 SpEx §235. In the Thesaurus Spiritualis, Father Jan Roothaan SJ, focusing in his footnote on the word "better," suggests a response dif-ferent from the "Take and Receive" prayer of the first point, a response that might better recognize the advance--the magis--reflected in this point's theme of presence. In later notes Roothaan makes similar sug-gestions, that colloquies reflect the magis, expressing increasing love in successive points. t7 See Ga 2:20. is If Ignatius were alive today, he might nuance his position to agree with many New Testament scholars who would probably use a different rhetoric here. They might want to make a distinction between building the kingdom of God and building the City of God. They would prefer to see God as the one who builds the kingdom or reign of God, with us humans offering our essential cooperation and contributions. And they Review for Religious might prefer to see us humans primarily focused on building the City of God, with God's total involvement, of course. Teilhard might solve the issue by saying that in Christ and with the Father we are together working to fulfill the divine project (the kingdom of God). In any case, Ignatius sees building the kingdom as a joint project. Also see Juan Luis Segundo, The Christ of the Ignatian Exerdses (New York: Orbis Books, 1987), pp. 90-103. ,9 Aschenbrenner, Stretching, p. 139. 20 For example, Ignatius urged members of the Society to attend Mass much more frequently than was usual in the church at that time. He celebrated Mass daily for discernment in composing the Society's Constitutions. He and his early companions took their first vows at Montmartre in Paris during Mass, and, when the Society was officially approved, they renewed their vows at Mass in St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome. A Prayer Response Lord, once again I ask: which is the more precious of these two beatitudes, that all things are means through which I can touch you, or that you yourself are so "universal" that I can experience you and lay hold on you in every creature? Some think to make you more lovable in my eyes by praising almost exclusively the charm and the kindness of your human face as men saw it long ago on earth. But if I sought only a human being to cherish, would I not turn to those whom you have given me here and now in all the charm of their flowering? Do we not all have around us irresistibly lovable mothers, brothers, sisters, friends? Why should we go searching the Judaea of two thousand years ago? No, what I cry out for, like every other creature, with my whole being, and even with all my passionate earthly longings, is something very different from an equal to cherish: It is a God to adore. The Divine Milieu [275 68.3 2009 Job's Difficult Transformation spiritual growth 2761 It seems that the story of Job never fails to capture readers' interest. To a greater or lesser degree, Job's experience reflects our experience. In The Book of Job,~ Stephen Mitchell provides both a dynamic introduction and a captivating translation of the biblical book. This article engages some of Mitchell's themes--such as submission, surrender, innocent suffering, pun-ishment, being a victim, and justice--as they relate to Mitchell's understanding of Job's main theme, transformation (Mitchell, p. xxix). I agree with that main theme, and I also think transformation is the theme of the sto-ries of all of us. This theme comprises and unites many other themes. Suffering--indeed, tremendous suffering--starts Job's transforma-tion and involves others: his wife and friends. Marian Maskulak CPS is an assistant professor of Theology and Religious Studies (with a special interest in spirituality) at St. John's University; 8000 Utopia Parkway; Queens, New York 11439. The transformation moves from the innocent, submis-sive, and fearful Job to the rebellious and more compas-sionate Job, and it culminates in the Job who surrenders his whole being to God. Transformation requires hon-est acknowledgment of one's thoughts and feelings, and includes a growing understanding of God, oneself, and the world and a letting go of many previous ideas. Job comes to understand that limited and often narrow con-cepts of morals and justice are not to be ascribed to God, that innocent suffering is neither victimization nor punishment by a wrathful god, and that suffering and justice remain within the mystery of creation's God, for whom there is neither past nor future. The Bible's Book of Job consists of a prose prologue based on an ancient legend, the poem that constitutes the body of the book, and a prose epilogue. The pro-logue presents Job as a good, innocent, and God-fearing man who is enjoying a blessed and prosperous life. In a meeting between God and the Accuser, the latter con-tends that, if God takes away all that Job has, Job will curse God. God then allows hardship to befall Job: the loss of his children and his many possessions. Through all of this, Job remains steadfast in his conviction that God 'gave him all he had and then took it away. He lies with his face in the dust, as though prostrate before God, and blesses God. A second meeting between God and the Accuser results in God's allowing Job to be physically afflicted, short of death. Tormented from head to toe with boils, Job still refuses to curse God and maintains that, just as he has accepted good fortune from God, he must now accept bad fortune. This time Job sits in the dust. It soon comes to light that Job may better be described as a good, innocent, and "god-fearing" man who is unaware of his false conception of God. [277 68.3 2009 Maskulak ¯ Job's Difficult Tran~Cormation 278 The contrast between submission and surrender is important for Mitchell. The Job of the prologue "submits" to his plight, to the superior force of God. Mitchell suggests that one might agree with Job's wife who says: "How long will you go on clinging to your innocence? Curse God, and die" (pp. viii, 8). Mitchell does not develop this thought further, but it suggests two ideas to me. First, Job's wife has been suffering along with Job in "their" pain and loss. She knows that their experience of pain, sorrow, frustration, anger, and despair wants to cry out in fury. Life experience has also shown her that people who curse God do not automati-cally "die." On one level, Job's wife is challenging him to be a human being and to express his anguish and outrage. It is only by acknowledging one's true thoughts and feelings that one can appropriate them and grow. Mitchell recognizes this: "For any transformation to occur, Job has to be willing to let his hidden anxieties become manifest. He must enter the whirlwind of his own psychic chaos before he can hear the Voice" (p. ix). Second, Job's wife chailenges him by asking how long he is going to cling to his innocence. Here, perhaps, is the crux of Job's problem, as well as that of his friends. Rather than clinging to God, Job i~ clinging to "his innocence" and "his notion" of what he deserves, or how God should act because of his innocence. Job is authentically innocent, but even good qualities or prac-tices can become idolatry when they and one's own self become the focus instead of God. When Job finally cries out against God, his friends cling to this same notion that God must act in a pre-dictably benevolent way if one is truly innocent. It is as though being "innocent," being "good enough," requires God to act in cert~ain ways. This can be a disguised or Review for Religious subde way of trying to control or manipulate God. Even in the midst of his crying out, when his submissive self is left behind, Job "clings" to his innocence: "I will hold tight to my innocence; my mind will never submit" (p. 64). Ultimately God does not address Job's innocence at all. It is Job's truthfulness that God commends in the epilogue. According to Mitchell, Job's motive for goodness is, at first, fear of punishment and, after being stricken, fear of even worse consequences. Agreeing with Jung's assessment that the god of the prologue is morally infe-rior to Job, Mitchell concludes that the legend must not be taken too seriously: the god of the prologue and the Accuser are soon left behind (pp. ix-xii). Mitchell does not question why the author included the legend rather than omitting it altogether. One rea-son would be that the familiar story was a means for contrasting the poem's insights. I would suggest that the god of the prologue describes Job's god. This god, appearing as the cavalier business-god sitting at the top of the corporate ladder, is a good match for the Job whom Mitchell calls the "perfect moral business-man" (p. ix). I would also submit that this was the god of many of the author's audience as well. And since, as Mitchell points out, the patient Job of the legend rather than the desperately impatient Job of the poem became proverbial in Western culture (p. viii), it seems Even good qualities or ¯. ,practi~es can become idolatry ~, wh~en they :and one s own self ~ ~ bec~ome t~hefocus instead of God. 68.3 2009 Maskulak ¯ ~ob'~ Difficult Transformation that this god has remained alive and well over the cen-turies. This god of the prologue bears no resemblance to the God of creation, the God of the burning bush, the God of deliverance from Egypt, and certainly not the God of the whirlwind to be revealed. Job's wife is right. This god needs to be cursed, and that part of Job which believed in this god must surely die. Job's companions, who have appeared briefly but silently in the prologue, do not agree with Job's wife. They never abandon the god of the prologue, and so, when they do speak, they provide crucial stimulus to Job's transformation. In Mitchell's view, Job's friends are supporting actors repeating the same arguments over and over. Because Job's questioning challenges their view of God and the world, they actually speak to their own fears rather than to Job. Mitchell believes that, while defending God's justice, they show that their god is a harsh judge executing their own harsh judgments. Mitchell makes an excellent point when he states, "Any idea about God, when pursued to its extreme, becomes insanity" (pp. xiv-xv). I believe, however, that, even when not pressed to an extreme, all perceptions of God are limited. I think that Job's friends play a greater role in the poem than Mitchell assigns them. For example, they are probably articulating Job's own theology up to this point in his life. Job himself admits, "I too could say such things if you were in my position" (p. 44). Another example is that Eliphaz highlights the Jewish theme of "the victim" when he points out that Job brought relief to many others and now it is his turn to be the victim (p. 17). Reflection on this thought alone raises more ques-tions. Does Job really believe that all the many people he helped in their misery were being punished for their sins? Probably so. But will he continue to believe it? Review for Religious One's view of the suffering of others is never the same once one has to grapple with one's own suffering. Part of the transformation that takes place in Job is apparent in his focus on the suffering of human beings in gen-eral instead of on his own suffering. Does Job continue to believe that people are victims of God's wrath? Not after experiencing the God of the whirlwind. As long as Job remains silent, his friends appropri-ately and compassionately remain quiet also. But as soon as Job cries out they cry out in return. They are not able to extend their silence of the first seven days into silent compassionate listening. This calls into question the amount of true compassion in their original silence. Mitchell says they have never experienced God (p. xiii), but it may also be true that they have never experienced extreme suffering. Job does suffer severely, which leads him to question God. "His question, the harrowing question of some-one who has only heard of God, is 'Why me?'" (p. xv). Mitchell calls this the wrong question, but does not say why. I believe that the "Why me?" question is too self-centered. It places the self over and against God, rather than in relationship with God. It clings to that argument, which says, "If I am good, if I am innocent, this should not happen to me." Or more pointedly, "If I am good and innocent, you should not be doing this to me." Later Mitchell sheds light on what the "right" question would have been when he writes that a question is answered which Job "wouldn't have known how to ask. God will not hear Job, but Job will see God" (p. xviii). His "see-ing" of God might better be understood as his "experi-encing" of God. I suggest that the "right" response might be "Who are you, God? And who am I in relation to you?" Or, more simply, "Reveal yourself to me." 281 68.3 2009 Maskulak ¯ j~ob's Difficult Transformation Anger or hate can ,be indicative of an underlying love. 2821 Mitchell claims that Job's outrage could not be so intense if he did not truly love God. He does not say whether he thinks the "moral businessman" of the pro-logue loves God. Rather, he compares Job to Othello, whose honesty cannot deny betrayal and whose love cannot believe it. Job accuses God for the injustice in the world, yet he senses some kind of ultimate justice (p. xvii). I agree that Job loves God. If Job did not care about God, he would not go on and on crying out. As Elie Wiesel has pointed out, indif-ference is more dan-gerous than hatred or anger.2 In a rela-tionship, anger or hate can be indica-tive of an underlying love that a person wants to be restored. As he cries out to God, Job is far from being indifferent. But, more importantly, Job is beginning to trust in God's love for him. Once the Job of the poem starts speaking out, he realizes that God is not punishing him for his accusa-tions. This gives him courage to become even bolder and more authentic. Although .it is not articulated in the poem, I believe that Job's love for God and his growing understanding of God's love for him are a crucial part of his transformation. God's response to this developing love is not, as has sometimes been perceived, the demand of unques-tioning submission. Mitchell rejects the interpretation which summarizes God's response from the whirlwind as "How dare you question the creator of the world? Shut up now, and submit" (p. xviii). He contends that there are answers to human suffering beyond theological Review for Religious propositions, but that the questioner must let them in. For Mitchell, the only answers to the great questions of life and death are personal ones, because the whole being of the person is involved (pp. xviii-xix). This is similar to Viktor Franld's belief that each person must find his or her own meaning in life, and his or her own meaning in suffering too.3 God's questions from the whirlwind ultimately dissi-pate all that Job thought he knew. "In order to approach God, Job has to let go of all ideas about God" (p. fix). Mitchell further understands God's questions as provid-ing Job with a vision filled with primal energy. It is a God's-eye view of creation before [human beings], beyond good and evil, marked by the inno-cence of mind that has stepped outside the circle of human values . What the Voice means is that para-dise isn't situated in the past or future, and doesn't require a world tamed or edited by the moral sense. It is our world, when we perceive it clearly, without eat-ing from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is an experience of Sabbath vision: looking at reality, the world of starving children and nuclear menace, and recognizing that it is very good (pp. xx-xxi). Upon my initial reading, this last statement par-ticularly came as a shock. My reaction was "No, the world of starving children and nuclear menace is not good!" I want to compartmentalize and say that the world as God made it is good, but children's starvation and nuclear menace in themselves are not good. Only by God's grace can they become the occasion for good. Mitchell seems to agree somewhat when he later writes that someone "who hungers and thirsts after justice is not satisfied with a menu. It is not enough for him to hope or believe or know that there is absolute justice in the universe: he must taste and see it. It is not enough 283 68.3 2009 Maskulak * ~ob's Difficult TransJbrmation 284 that there may be justice someday in the golden haze of the future: it must be now; must always have been now" (p. xxviii). Between his paragraph above and the sentence just above, Mitchell says there are no accidents and no vic-tims. He believes that, rather than being cruel, his state-ment reflects that, when one surrenders one's personal will and thus can see that all that God created is good, the past and future disappear (p. xxvii). This surrender to God is a surrender into mystery. He gives no other answer for why the innocent suffer. I can understand that from his chosen vantage point he can "see" that reality as a timeless whole is good--even with all its violence, starvation, nuclear menace, and so forth. But I still maintain that violence, the starvation of children, and nuclear menace are not good. Mitchell is bold and precise in his paraphrasing of questions about good and evil posed by God's voice in the whirlwind: "Do you really want this moral sense of yours projected onto the universe? it asks, in effect. Do you want a god who is only a larger version of a righteous judge, rewarding those who don't realize that virtue is its own reward and throwing the wicked into a physical hell? If that's the kind of justice you're look-ing for, you'll have to create it yourself. Because that is not my justice" (p. xxiii). These words make it clear that Mitchell believes that limited or narrow human concepts of morals and justice are not to be placed on God. An example that comes to mind is the parable of the vineyard workers, in which all receive the same wage regardless of how long they worked (Mt 20:1-16). Human "justice" might overlook the broader plight of those left in the marketplace all day with no work (perhaps because they appeared to be the least capable Reviev for Religious workers), who nevertheless needed to provide for them-selves and their families. In other words, human "jus-tice" often lacks compassion and a wider perspective. Mitchell states that the Beast and the Serpent in the final section of the poem are presented as God's playthings and that they challenge those who do not acknowledge God's destructive side (pp. xxiii-xxiv). This calls to mind the passage: "All you beasts, wild and tame, bless the Lord; praise and exalt him above all forever" . (Dn 3:81 NAB). Creation praises God by simply being what it is, and some of creation can be quite violent or devastating. What are the effects of Job's experience of God in the whirlwind? Does he repent? Does he submit? Mitchell disagrees with (mis-)translations of Job's final speech which have him say he "abhors" himself and "repents" in dust and ashes. He maintains that the idea conveyed is that Job "rejects" everything he said, and is "comforted by" his mortality. (pp. xxv, xxxii). Having received his answer, Job is "awe-stricken in the face of overwhelming beauty and dread" (p. xxvi). Rather than "submission," Mitchell stresses that Job's words rise from "surrender"--"a wholehearted giving-up of one-self" (p. xxvii). Surrendering oneself to God is indeed a strong act of one's free will. In the prose epilogue, Mitchell notes that Job's chil-dren appear to be the same children as in the prologue, as though they have sprung back to life (p. xxix). In Creation praises God by simply being what it is, and some of creation can be quite violent or devastating. 68.3 2009 Maskulak ¯ ~ob's Difficult Transformation 28_61 my reflection on the epilogue, a similar thought came to me via a line from Viktor Frankh "What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.''4 During times of suffering, human beings tend to focus entirely on their pain, loss, and so forth. This is not to deny the very real need for people to grieve their losses and attend to their pain. But at some point, in order to "move on," there needs to be a shift in the focus. I believe that, despite actual loss, whatever good some-one "had" he or she somehow still "has." One's experi-ences of good people and good things remain part of one's being, part of who one "is." Job's fulfillment does not depend on the actual reappearance of his children. He has seen and understood the "bigger picture" of life. One might challenge this view by saying that it then follows that the bad or evil of a person's life also still remains part of who he or she is. I would argue, from the philosophical axiom that bad or evil itself is a "lack," that a person never "had" something which was itself a "lack." Finally, Mitchell notes the prominence of Job's daughters in the epilogue, suggesting a shift from the righteousness and control of the male world to the beauty and peace of the feminine. Interestingly enough, he believes that the feminine, which had been denigrated in the prologue's reference to Job's wife, is now acknowledged and honored in the epilogue (p. xxx). This brings me back to my suggestion that there may be more to the advice given by Job's wife than first meets the eye. Upon reading the prologue one might ask, "Who needs a wife like that?" It seems that the answer may be "Everybody." Why? To challenge us to leave the narrow confines of our comfortable, even if good, perceptions of ourselves, others, life, and God, in Review for Religious order to grow and to be transformed into the fullness of being to which God calls us. The story of Job is a story of transformation--a story of surrender, a story of letting go. Job has to let go of people and possessions very dear to him, he has to let go of his own health, and, perhaps most difficult for a good and innocent person who loves God, he has to let go of his image and understanding of God. Each of these movements entails a considerable amount of suffering. Job's transformation unfolds through his suffering, his interaction with his wife and friends, and his honest acknowledgment of his own convictions and feelings in relation to God. The culmination is his unexpected face-to- face encounter with God. This encounter causes Job to surrender to God and to reject his notions that suffer-ing is punishment for sin or victimization by a wrathful god. The reader senses that Job leaves his encounter with God as a changed person, and full of peace. Yet one still wants to ask, "So what is the reason for innocent suffering?" Job is content, but why aren't we? Could it be that the answer is revealed only to one who, like Job, has truly grappled with suffering and with God? Would it have been enough for Job to discover that human suppositions regarding innocent suffering are incorrect? Would it be enough for anyone? What is the "pull," the fascination, of this "wrong question" when the answer seems to lie instead in a vivid encoun-ter with God that leads to complete surrender? God's speech began with: "Who is this whose igno-rant words smear my design with darkness?" (p. 79). In another context dealing with relationship, Antoine de Saint-Exup~ry writes, "Words are the source of mis-understandings.'' 5 There is more to life and suffering than words can explain. The "more" involves a personal 287 68.3 2009 Maskulak ¯ Job's Difficult Transformation encounter with God in which all other considerations become secondary. God invites us into that personal encounter by way of transformation and surrender. God is. We need not fear. God knows the why of suffering. For God all things, all times, all places, are. In that mys-tery, all of God's creation is very good. Notes I Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992). 2 Elie Wiesel, "The Perils of Indifference," 12 April 1999, The Official Site of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. ~ Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984): see pp. 121,131. 4 Frankl, p. 104; see also p. 175. s Antoine de Saint-Exup~ry, The Little Prince (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1971), p. 70. Questions for Personal and Group Reflection 1. Give myself the project of reading the Book of Job. 2. Do you find Maskulak's way of understanding Job a help in you own relationship with God? Review for Religious JAMES W. KINN The Central Paradox of John of the Cross ;all of John of the Cross's works, one unique para-raph is critical for our understanding of his entire teaching about the beginning of contemplation. This one paragraph, containing three paradoxes, gives us an insight into his central teaching on contemplation and will act as an outline for this article: Even though this happy night [of contemplation] dark-ens the spirit, it does so only to impart light. ; and even though it humbles a person and reveals his mis-eries, it does so only to exalt him; and even though it impoverishes and empties him of all., natural affec-tions, it does so only that he may reach out divinely to the enjoyment of all earthly and heavenly things.I John is teaching here about the passive dark night of the spirit or contemplation. The three paradoxes are: darkness leads to light, lowliness leads to rising up, and emptiness leads to fullness. He wants us to know that James W. Kinn, still an actively retired priest, writes again about John. His address remains 6318 243rd Court; Salem, Wisconsin 53168. 68.3 2009 Kinn ¯ Tbe Central Paradox of Jobn of tbe Cross 290 contemplation darkens, humbles, and empties our soul only to enlighten, to exalt, and to fill the soul. Once we grasp this one central teaching, we can understand the heart of John's teaching on the practice of contemplation. For Those at the Threshold of Contemplation John offers teaching for "proficients, at the begin-ning of their entry into . . . contemplation.''2 These "proficients" have been practicing discursive medi-tation, but now often find they are void of sensible images, imaginings, affections, and reasoning. He has just described his famous three signs for discontinuing discursive meditation: (1) one often or regularly can-not make discursive meditation, (2) one is disinclined to concentrate on sensible objects or ideas, (3) one is inclined to remain alone in loving attention on God even though the experience is dark and unsatisfying. Today that group of people would include many who are practicing simple prayer or the prayer of presence or centering prayer or praying with a sacred word or mantra. John gives a general description of what is some-times or often experienced by people who pray in these ways l At the beginning of this state the loving knowledge [of God] is almost unnoticeable. There are two rea-sons for this: first, the incipient loving knowledge is extremely subtle and delicate, and almost impercep-tible; second, a person who is habituated to the exer-cise of meditation, which is wholly sensible, hardly perceives or feels this new insensible, purely spiritual experience.3 Persons like this are at the very threshold of contempla-tion, or occasionally practice it. First, John assures them that this darkness leads to light: "As soon as natural Review for Religious things are driven out of the enamored soul, the divine are naturally and supernaturally infused, since there can be no void in nature.''4 Here John teaches that, as soon as natural thoughts and sensible images no longer occupy us in prayer, God will infuse his supernatural light into us. He assures us that, once a natural void is created, it will be filled with the action of God. This image of filling the void seems particularly forceful in our day. We are familiar with vacuum-packed coffee cans and know that as soon as we puncture the lid the outside atmosphere fills the void with a hiss. In a simi-lar way, once our prayer becomes dark or empty of all sensible images, God will fill the void with his infused grace--though the light may only be "extremely subtle and delicate" for a while. Second, John assures them that God humbles the soul only to exalt it: If a person will eliminate these impediments., void-ing himself of all forms and apprehensible images . ¯ . and [will] live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom . 5 That is, because the soul can no longer pray with the sensible images and insights of discursive meditation, it recognizes its own inability and poverty of spirit. But God will soon instruct it with his own wisdom in con-templation and so raise it up. Third, John assures them that emptiness leads to fullness: When the spiritual person cannot meditate, he should learn to remain in God's presence . . . even though he seems to himself to be idle. For little by litde and very soon the divine calm and peace with a wondrous, 68.3 2009 Kinn ¯ The Central Paradox of Jobn of the Cross sublime knowledge of God . . . will be infused into his soul . Learn to be empty of all things--inte-riorly and exteriorly--and you will behold that I am God.6 This dark and empty prayer is filled with promise, For John, emptiness of all sensible images, rational thoughts, and affections is required so that God may freely communicate himself to the soul. He promises that God will not fail to do his part and bring the soul to enjoy a new way of experiencing him. Note that all his counsel here deals with those who are at the threshold of con-templation. That is, they have reached the point where discursive medi-tation has become dark and empty. At times they may experience the beginning of contemplation, but it is usually slight and subde. What does all this mean for all of us who are in this stage of prayer? John wants us to know that this dark and empty prayer is filled with promise: ¯ He assures us that we can be content in such dark and unsatisfying prayer, for "there can be no void in nature." He means that the very darkness is the neces-sary condition for God's supernatural way of acting in our prayer. ¯ And we can be peaceful even though we can no lon-ger pray with the insights and affections we experienced in discursive meditation. Just because we are convinced of our "lowliness and misery" and find "no satisfaction in self," God esteems this lack of self-satisfaction and is ready to instruct us in his wisdom. ¯ And we can be confident even though we are empty Review for Religious and helpless, because such emptiness of sensible images, rational thoughts, and affections is required for God to communicate himself to us. "Learn to be empty of all things., and you will behold that I am God." For Those Beginning to Practice Contemplation In The Dark Night John explains why this dark night of contemplation must first darken, humble, and empty the soul before it can enlighten, exalt, and fill the soul. The affections, sentiments, and apprehensions [of contemplation] are of another sort and are so eminent and so different from [those experienced naturally in discursive meditation] that their . . . possession demands the annihilation and expulsion of the natural affections and apprehensions; for two contraries cannot coexist in one subject. Hence. this dark night of con-templation must necessarily annihilate [the soul] first and undo it in its lowly ways by putting it in dark-ness, dryness, conflict, and emptiness. For the light imparted to the soul . . . transcends all natural light and does not belong naturally to the intellect.7 His argument is straightforward: "two contraries can-not exist in one subject" at the same time. Therefore, "this dark night of contemplation must necessarily. undo [the soul] in its lowly ways by putting it in darkness ¯ . . and emptiness. For the [divine] light transcends all natural light." That is, the normal way for our intellect to operate is by means of sensible objects, but in con-templation God affects the soul directly, without sen-sible images¯ A few chapters later John describes his first paradox: this darkness leads to light: When you see your., faculties incapacitated for any interior exercise, do not be afflicted; think of this as a grace, since God is freeing you from yourself [so that now] God takes you by the hand and guides you in [ 293 68.3 2009 Kinn * The Central Paradox of yobn of the Cross 294 darkness, as though you were blind, along a way and to a place you do not know.s He immediately adds that you will succeed "in reach-ing this place," where the light "transcends all natural light." The second paradox is that God humbles the soul in order to exalt it. John insists that this humility and pov-erty of spirit leads to exaltation by God: The soul must first be set in emptiness and poverty of spirit . Thus empty, it is truly poor . . . and thereby able to live that new and blessed life which is the state of union with God, attained by means of this night.9 That is, humility and "poverty of spirit" will lead to the union with God that is our exaltation. The third paradox is that emptiness leads to fullness. The best quote for this is in The Living Flame:~° When the soul frees itself of all things and attains to emptiness., concerning them, which is equivalent to what it can do of itself, it is impossible that God fail to do his part by communicating himself to it, at least secretly and silendy.~ Here John guarantees that, as long as the soul is empty and passive, God will do his part soon and without fail. So, though the soul is passive and empty, it can be con-fident that the emptiness will result in God's presence and light. What does all this mean for us as we begin to prac-tice contemplation? John's answer is found in the cen-tral quote we are focused on: Even though this happy night darkens the spirit, it does so only to impart light. ; and even though it humbles a person and reveals his miseries, it does so only to exalt him; and even though it impoverishes Re-view for Religious and empties him of all., natural affection, it does so only that he may reach out divinely to the enjoyment of all earthly and heavenly things.12 Above, when John was speaking about those on the threshold of contemplation who simply could no lon-ger pray with discursive meditation, he assured them that even then this natural stage of prayer is filled with promise, for such dark and empty prayer is the neces-sary condition for God's supernatural way of acting in our prayer. He wanted them to know, even then, that as soon as they create this natural void God will soon fill that void with his presence. But now John's counsel is for those who are actually beginning to practice contemplation. His counsel clearly parallels his advice regarding that earlier stage of prayer. But here the darkness and emptiness are not just natural effects of ordinary prayer. Rather, for those beginning to practice contemplation, the very nature of contempla-tion is such that it increases the darkness and emptiness in three ways: (1) this dark night "darkens the spirit" so that no sensible objects ,. or thoughts can occupy the --~ mind or distract it; (2) it "humbles the person" with a sense of his own incapacity and poverty of spirit; (3) it "empties him of all natural affections" for material things. That is why the darker the night, the more receptive we are to God's light, and the more we know our poverty, the more open we are to God's power, and the more empty we are, the more we can passively await God's fullness. .i The .darker the night, ithe more receptive we are God's light. 68.t 2009 Kdnn ¯ The Central Paradox of John of the Cross 296 The second part of these three counsels is entirely positive and filled with promise. John assures us that the darkness is only to impart light, the sense of lowliness is only to exalt us, and the emptiness is only to fill us with God's presence. Summing up: , ¯ The purpose of the darkness of contemplation is so that God can take us by the hand and impart a light that "transcends all natural light." ¯ The purpose of the poverty of spirit is so that God can raise us up to a new union with him. ¯ The purpose of the emptiness we feel regarding all we can do by our ordinary prayer is so that God may do his part "by communicating himself to [us], at least secretly and silently." Such is the genius of John of the Cross's counsel for us at the beginning of contemplation. This triple para-dox permits us to be content in the darkness, because that is the necessary condition for God's supernatural light; we can be peaceful in our poverty of spirit, for "there can be no void in nature," no vacuum in super-nature; we can be confident in our emptiness for "it is impossible that God fail to do his part by communicat-ing himself to [us], at least secretly and silently." Notes Dark Night, 2.9.1. Ascent, 2.15, chapter tide and paragraph I. Ascent, 2.13.7. Ascent, 2.15.4. Ascent, 2.15.4. Ascent, 2.15.5. Dark Night, 2.9.2 (emphasis added). Dark Night, 2.16.7. Dark Night, 2.9.4. Review for Religious ~0 Living Flame, 3.30-62. Throughout this section, John of the Cross is instructing spiritual directors how to help those who are beginning to practice contemplation, when "God begins to wean the soul., and place it in the state of contemplation." '~ Living Flame, 3.46 ~2 Dark Night, 2.9.1. "kecharitom~ne" the word he spoke was redolent and to hear his voice was to be cut with scent knelt before my feet, his head was bent his speech and manner fragrant .for love he said he had been sent and this the promise immanent grace and joy are yours, but with lament his words like light caressed my ear it was as if my heart could smell and hear as if each sense were all and each was clear as if I were unclothed and my skin was sheer though in his presence I knew not shame nor fear what strength and sweetness was to me so near but in his eyes like stars there stood a tear far more than joy he said is yours to know and if all generations on your name bestow praise and honor in heaven high and earth below it is because your pierced heart will show the thoughts of many, both swift and slow, for from your flesh His bones shall grow and from your milk His blood will flow Sean Edward Kinsella [-297 68.t 2009 JOHN H. ZUPEZ Connecting through Prayer ~di~all find ourselves in the dumps at times, feeling connected from others. Perhaps this is our usual feeling when we wake up in the morning and have not yet consciously made any "connect" with God or with others. And there are specific incidents that leave us alienated, adrift in spirit: when we are misunder-stood or ignored by others, when we offend others and have no immediate opportunity to reconcile with them, when our selfish behavior alienates us from the Spirit within us. Morning prayer with the church has traditionally served as a connect for Christians. When it is celebrated in common, we experience the Christian communi-ty's support. Or, when said in a meditative manner, it becomes a connect with God, as it did for the early monks who lived in the desert, largely devoid of human 2981 John H. Zupez SJ wrote on petitionary prayer in our May-June 1992 issue. In recent years he has taught in seminaries in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. He was recently appointed pastor of Corpus Christi Church; 1005 N.E. 15th Street; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73117. Review f~ Religious contacts. But, said alone and quickly, it may not produce the intended effect of connecting us to what is most enduring and nourishing in our faith. Married people can find in their intimate relation-ship a deep connect. St. Paul used this relationship as a model for the connect between Christ and his "bride," the church. However, just as married love grows cold at times, so our relationship with the church does not always give us a sense of intimacy with Christ. Prayer That Connects At times of disconnect we may find prayer difficult, but it depends on how we pray. As our relationship with God matures, prayer becomes less a matter of running through prayers vocally or trying to influence God through petitions. It becomes more a reflection on how near God is to us. The words of most prayers do not mention explicidy our connectedness to God or to one another, but the connect is implicit. I suggest that we benefit by making it more explicit. We can pray in a way that makes conscious our connectedness to other people and to a world which we know in faith to be filled with divine meaning and purpose. Thus prayer becomes an antidote for the loneliness that assails us when we feel disconnected: cold, dry, alienated, "in the dumps." For instance, when saying the Our Father, we can pause to reflect on the richness of the word "our." In faith we know that every person is our brother or sis-ter since we are related through Jesus, our brother. We know, too, that all that God has made, everything around us, is for our use and enjoyment, a loving father's gifts to us personally. Then the next word, "Father," bespeaks the warmth of the Father's love revealed in the father of the Prodigal and also in Jesus himself, the 68.3 2009 Zupez * Conneaingthrough Prayer Good Shepherd, like us in all but sin, bearing lost sheep and all his crosses so that we may feel closer to him in times of difficulty. The rest of the Our Father elaborates on attitudes that follow from our being children of a loving God, attitudes that connect us to God's coming kingdom, to God's will for us, to God's beneficence in satisfying our needs, and to God's immediate presence to us in moments when we need forgiveness. The simple words "Our Father" become rich in connotation as we reflect on who this Father is and on how everything is ours in Jesus Christ, who came to restore all things to God. Similar reflection turns all of our prayer into a con-scious connect with God and with our neighbor. This connect is facilitated by the deeper insight that passes into our prayer from more relaxed reflection, as on days of recollection or during times of spiritual retreat. Morning Offering The more reflective approach to pr