by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Tim Shriver, Unconditionally
Tim Shriver is probably the only person I’ve ever met who can explain Bernard Lonergan’s thought in a way I fully understand.
Tim was at Georgetown last night to discuss his memoir Fully Alive in a conversation at Riggs Library (I was his conversation partner); and he floored the audience by declaring in unshowy dead earnest that he has read a certain chapter of Lonergan’s Method in Theology a hundred times.
Fully Alive is the story of how Tim as an adult came more fully to life through an encounter with the Special Olympics; but it’s also the story of how he came more fully to life through a complex and circuitous personal search. That search led him to go far down the ladders and stairways of Catholic spirituality – to centering prayer, to Bernard of Clairvaux, to The Cloud of Unknowing, and to Lonergan, the Canadian Jesuit philosophical theologian who followed the long and abstruse and exacting volume Insight with the even longer and more abstruse and more exacting Method in Theology. Lonergan’s thought baffled my roommate and me at Fordham in the eighties – but on stage at Georgetown, as in his book, Tim made Lonergan’s thought seem the most convincing solution to what first-year students study as the problem of God. For Lonergan, the key to reality is found in epistemology, the science of knowing; and the limitless, unconditional dynamism of our knowing expresses our disposition for the unconditional – and for Lonergan the unconditional is what we call God. And how do we most fully dispose ourselves to the unconditional? By “being-in-love,” which must begin with falling in love. In his memoir, Tim spells it out:
Here, in Lonergan’s otherwise dense philosophical theology, was a framing of the code that I hadn’t understood: the search for God that I felt in myself and sensed in others could be satisfied by falling in love – not by talking about it or teaching about it, but by falling into it. Believing in God is not thinking God. It’s believing that we are happy and true to ourselves only when we give ourselves away to another, to the whole of creation, to love. That’s what faith is all about: trusting that you must give yourself away and only then discover the self you were made to be.
Long story short, Tim – under Lonergan’s spell – fell in love with Linda Potter. That story is told in Fully Alive. Spoiler alert: it’s a story with a happy ending.
