By Sr. Laura Coughlin
Next week I will be examined on the quality of the theological synthesis I will bring to the world from my education at Boston College.
Next week I will be examined on the quality of the theological synthesis I will bring to the world from my education at Boston College.
One of the exam’s practice questions captured my attention
in the way it tied the theological virtue of hope with Christ’s Resurrection,
and asked how we would speak of such lofty concepts to a person whose loved one
had died by an act of injustice.
As we approach the MLK holiday, I’d like to apply the
practice question to the compelling example of injustice in the death of Emmett
Till. For those who don’t recall, Till was the black teen who was
tortured and murdered for “whistling at a white woman” in 1955.
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Hope is one of three theological virtues. Karl Rahner argues that hope flows directly
from the will of God, and unifies faith and love. All three virtues orient humankind toward an
ultimate future known already in the Resurrection of Christ. Anthropologically, hope is the acceptance of
an orientation toward God with which all men and women are made capable of
receiving Revelation. Rahner correlates
hope with courage suggesting that its expression willingly renounces what is “unnecessary
in the present” for what is promised in the absolute future by an “uncontrollable
and incalculable God."
How do we grasp such a renunciation when that which is
“unnecessary” is one’s own son? Clearly
Christ’s Resurrection indicates that human beings are not created to be
perishable, but to live a transfigured life eternally in union with God. What is “unnecessary”, therefore, is not the
person who dies, but the control we desire over how our lives will unfold in
relationship with others. Till’s person today
connects to millions of others who live an embodied existence, a fact easily
proved in any U.S. history class.
Through a concept developed by Louis-Marie Chauvet, his presence to us
now can be understood symbolically as the "presence of an absence." Somewhat controversially, Chauvet used this phrase
to explain how Christians throughout time experience the risen Christ.
Mamie Till’s choices illustrate both Rahner’s correlation of
hope with courage, and Chauvet’s symbolic “presence of an absence”. By allowing the press to make her son’s
wounds visible to all who read a newspaper, and by requiring that the coffin be
opened in spite of the stench of her son’s rotting flesh, Mamie Till mediated
the presence of her son’s absence in a powerful memory that continues to
mobilize Americans in favor of a better justice.
When she demanded that
Mississippi authorities deliver her son’s body to Chicago, Mamie Till could not
have experienced hope as the oft-confused sunny disposition of optimism. Like Mary, mother of Jesus, Mamie Till faced
suffering with the vision of faith, something which allowed her to perceive a
larger story than the one her own sorrow wanted to write. The alacrity of her hope allowed no room for
despair, nor did it presume that God would act without her cooperation.
As per Rahner, Mamie Till’s life reveals hope as an act of
courage which possesses the capacity to reform secular structures of
injustice. Such an act powerfully
demonstrates a “small hope” (secular justice) that lives within a “larger hope”
(vision of God in the eschaton). At some
point following her son’s death, Mamie Till had what she describes as a vision
which offered her the type of certainty for which Christians long:
“Emmett was not mine;
he (Emmett) belonged to him (God)…God had chosen him (Emmett) for this
mission.”
Such a vision implies that we are invited to receive and act
on the transcendent plan of God, even while God remains “incalculable and
uncontrollable”. The painful challenge of
Rahner’s hope-as-courage, as well as
of his image of God as uncontrollable
mystery, is evidenced by the fact that both killers (J.W. Milam and Roy
Bryant) were acquitted at the trial, and brazenly admitted to the murder afterward
when they were no longer in danger of being retried for the same crime. Their acquittal reveals the hard truth that Christian
hope is not primarily a state of mind (optimism), but a state of persistence through
suffering toward God’s end in mission.
Christian hope exerts itself for the coming of the Kingdom
of God, something which would be an impossibility without the Resurrection of
Christ. But the Resurrection itself is a
Trinitarian act, and indicates the importance God places on perfected relationships. Because Mamie Till believed that her own
relation to her son was held in the light of a larger relation to God, she knew
that the secular acquittal of injustice was not the last word. The first and last Word of God is raised in
the love of the Trinity, a love whose distinctions of divinity are nonetheless held
in absolute unity. This love affirms that
there is only one category of “race” that matters in the end. On this knowledge of God, Mamie Till placed
all her hope.
Sources
Rahner, Karl, On the
Theology of Hope, Theological Investigations, vol. 10, ch 13, 1968.
Chauvet, Louis-Marie, Symbol and Sacrament. 1995.
Chauvet, Louis-Marie, Symbol and Sacrament. 1995.
The Untold Story of
EMMETT LUIS TILL (Documentary 2005) by Keith Beauchamp, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvijYSJtkQk
