by Paul Elie
from 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.

At Special Olympics, Alabama Falls to Delaware’s Late Rally

Tim Shriver in his forthcoming memoir, Fully Alive, about his life’s work with the Special Olympics, tells a story about a Special Olympics athlete showing a dignitary – Bill Clinton, I think – how to turn a camera the other way around (looking back through the viewfinder) so as to see the world differently.

Our family went to the Special Olympics National Games in New Jersey one day last week, and I can say that yes, for a few hours we really did see the world differently.

Rain more or less emptied out the Special Olympics Town – a street fair of sorts for athletes and their families – but we got to Arm & Hammer Park just as the sky cleared.  A man on the street in Trenton told me that nobody calls it that; the park, GPS location One Thunder Road (as in the Springsteen song) is where the Trenton Thunder play – one of the Yankees’ minor-league affiliates, with long-mustachioed former Yankees relief ace Sparky Lyle as manager.

The bronze medal game between statewide teams from Alabama (in red uniforms) and Delaware (in yellow) was in the third inning.  It was striking to see how quickly you can find yourself pulling for one team (Alabama) rather than another; find yourself identifying the team’s personality (good pitching, strong fielding, intermittent hitting); find yourself settling on a favorite player – in my case, the bulky catcher who kept the pitcher in the strike zone through his mitt and his belly.  And it was striking to realize what I commensensically knew already, but that the surroundings (the stands, the hot dogs, the precisely gridded batter’s boxes, the umpire who called balls and strikes in a growl out of a song by Tom Waits) underlined: that baseball is baseball – hits and outs, dropped balls and diving catches, line drives in the gap – and these guys really knew how to play.

The surprise wasn’t so much that they ranged in age from eighteen to thirty (as was apparent from the big digital photographs on the electronic scoreboard).  The surprise was that as members of a statewide team these guys – as the first baseman’s father told me – had played together only half a dozen times before this game.

Who said anything about “intellectual disability” or “differently abled”?

The photograph shows a team from New Jersey at last year’s state games.