| The fundamental thing is God's gift of His love. And the heart has reasons that reason doesn't know.
—Bernard Lonergan
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Bernard Lonergan was a Jesuit priest and philosopher-theologian of the twentieth century who studied the process of understanding. He identified a methodology that we have suggested as a way toward integrity. The process involves the following:
> attend to the data (your experience)
> understand the data by imagining what it
can possibly mean
> reflect upon this meaning: does it match the facts? are there alternatives?
> decide the implications the resulting knowledge for
one's life and action, and
> be in Love transformed
This process of knowing is not linear. That is, these are not steps in a sequence, but rather parts of a process. You might begin by imagining the meaning of an experience and then return to attending to your experience to see if you might remember additional details. And the process never ends. We never arrive at a complete understanding, but are forever collecting new experiences and bringing those experiences to a process of re-evaluating our understanding. We continually work at them.
The fifth imperative "be in Love" means being open to the love that God pours into our hearts. It means taking a posture of offering ourselves to the Mystery of God. Being in love calls us back to experience God and creation ever more deeply. Through this process of opening ourselves to God and deeper knowledge we open ourselves to new life in Christ. We open ourselves to continual conversion, a continual turning toward, God.
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Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable
There
is a basic human drive to collect data with our sense of sight, sound, touch, feel, and smell and notice thoughts and feelings. Try to spend 30 seconds not noticing. Pretty difficult. We don't notice everything; what we notice is conditioned by our abilities and experiences. Through
years of practice, some of our senses are more heightened than others. Experience has taught us to arrange the data into meaningful patterns. As fast-pattern creators, however, we may miss noticing some things.
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| Look at the image on the left. What do you notice? What does the image portray? Might the image portray something entirely different? Consider asking a friend what he or she sees and compare your conclusions. With this simple exercise you have been (1) attentive, (2) intelligent, and (3) reasonable. You have been attentive by taking note of the image. You have been intelligent by using what you know to imagine the meaning of the image. And you have been reasonable by considering alternative meanings.
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We form our conceptions of God from many media—Sunday School teachers when we were young, movies, sermons, paintings, and poetry. And those conceptions inform the meanings we gather from new experiences of God. This simple exercise suggests that it may challenging to be open to new revelations and new insights about God, ourselves, and our neighbor. Being mindful of how we create meaning from experiences may help us to receive God and one another in a new way.
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Be responsible and be in Love
You will explore these second two imperatives through the media of this website and the book. Being responsible is how we respond to the meaning of our experiences. It answers the question, "So what?" What does your new understanding call you to do differently or recommit to? This is a response to the second great commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:39).
Being in love is in all things living in God's love.
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| We invite
you to share your responses to be posted on the "Conversations" page.
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Additional resources online
Bernard Lonergan at Concordia University explores the works of Lonergan.
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