Why the Commons Needs To Be Catholic

Why the commons needs to be catholic, a contribution from Joel Dietz:

As students of the old creeds know, the word "catholic" means universal. In its early usage it referred to integral unity of a body of people, distributed across the known world yet united in a single purpose, the purpose of building community dedicated to principles higher than mere profit, dedicated to a pure service that accepted no national boundaries or other claims to special privilege due to birth as the member of a special tribe or lineage.

This universal goal has been tried and abandoned many times in the intervening centuries. One of the more poignant modern examples coming from Martin Luther King Jr., who wished that people would be judged by "content of their character," not membership to some national or ethnic tribe. Many people prayed and worked hard to make that dream a reality, a reality that is still unfolding in the world before us, incompletely realized yet not entirely forgotten.

Standing in the way of these are not only legions of inquisitors from would be police-states, there is our own inability to believe in the substance of a dream not yet realized, our own inability to work day and night for a dream, for an unfolding reality rather than a materially present one.

For thousands of years human beings have looked to the stars for guidance and inspiration, finding the pattern of things not yet seen in the material world. One of the most famous examples of this is the traveling sorcerers of the East, who saw the momentous even that was about to happen in a backwater area of a remote country (the word "magi" comes from "magus" which is the same root of the word magician). This was the birth of the Christ child.

Tradition tells us that three sorcerer-kings were led by the stars to attend the birth of the one that was to be called the Messiah, and, later, the king of the Jews. Strange things have happened, but stranger still is the catalyzing force to be played by this little babe, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and yet seemingly dancing in the music of distant galaxies, a music that would play not only at his birth, in which angelic hosts descended proclaiming "peace on earth," but also at his death, as the skies grew dark in mourning.

If not all of these stories I am telling you reflect historical reality as we now know it, does it matter? So often the inspiration that we need in dark times does not come from the material that we can see and measure, it comes from the dreams of something better and more magnificent than we cannot see, that we encounter in story and song rather than in the brute force of balance sheets and written texts.

The catholic vision is the vision of a humanity no longer torn by hatred, but united in love. It is the hopes and dreams of thousands of warriors and saints who have shed their tears and blood for humanity. It is universal not only at a particular point in time, it is universal because it unites humanity together in a place beyond space and time.

It is time that the commons gives up on words, gives up on actions, gives up on writing, and gives up on time itself. The commons needs a commonality not limited to the intransigent materiality of a particular historical moment. It needs commonality that picks up the greater burden of humanity stretched throughout time and space, a vision that, as Gandhi said of Jesus, offers us the "highest example."

Are we ready to truly be catholic? Perhaps when our minds are exhausted by too many unrealized plans, our hearts can begin to feel the answer."