Beauty and the Little Stories of Holiness: What Alejandro García-Rivera Taught Me

Abstract

Beauty and the Little Stories of Holiness: What Alejandro García-Rivera Taught Me Peter J. Casarella (bio) I found out about the passing of Alejandro García-Rivera through an email I received from Roberto Goizueta while undertaking a pilgrimage from a conference I was attending in Oxford (United Kingdom) to the village of Littlemore. Besides the shock of grief, I felt immediately at a loss and needed to make sense of the place in which I found myself. As a result, my memories of this trip are sharply etched. Littlemore was a small retreat house on the outskirts of Oxford that the theologian and convert, John Henry Newman, used as a refuge for himself and other members of the Oxford Movement as they prayed, read the Church Fathers, and contemplated entering into communion with the Church of Rome. I discovered on this bus ride that Littlemore stands in the vicinity of a community that is almost entirely Muslim. Newman’s retreat in 1842 from the din of Oxford to the quiet country parish is today a journey from the Victorian classicism of the Christ Church (the college of young Newman) to an exurb of fully globalized hybridity. At Littlemore, I prayed for Alex in a baroque interior chapel where the young John Henry Newman had also prayed. The room had the size and feel of a photographer’s darkroom. In 1863, a sensitive young Englishman with an interest in the classics visited Newman’s chapel at Littlemore, describing afterward with great pleasure, in a letter to his mother, the “exquisite” nature of its “altar and reredos.”1 That year, this man—the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins—entered Oxford to nurture his interest in literature. Three years later, he sought out an elderly Fr. Newman (now at the Oratory in Birmingham) in order to ask to be received into communion with the Catholic Church. The mature theological aesthetics of this poet, particularly the finely tuned vision of the unity of difference in his remarkable poem “Pied Beauty,” lie at the very center of Alejandro García-Rivera’s work.2 We live through our collective memories, especially of the dead and of those whom we admire. These recollections help me to see more clearly something of Alejandro García-Rivera’s legacy for theologians today. He was no ordinary thinker. He would have taken delight in each one of the stories I narrated to myself. He would discern a mosaic from these fragmented vignettes, expandable to the size of a Sistine Chapel. My vision is probably less wholistic. The three protagonists dwell in communion in many ways. Like Newman and Hopkins, García-Rivera possessed a deep, humble, and personal sense of conversion/metanoia, and thought deeply about the existential significance of ecclesial belonging. Like them, he was a thinker who could move easily through complex philosophical and scientific discourses and focus on what needed to be said in order to articulate the sense of the faithful. His own Littlemore was, I suspect, more Californian—namely, that of the Camaldolese monks at Incarnation Monastery in Berkeley and at New Calmaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur (a huge improvement over British weather, I must say). His reverence for the contemplation of beauty and his deep sense of tradition were in this sense still very much in the spirit of the men who retreated from the individualistic, Anglo-Saxon culture of Oxford. Unlike his British counterparts from the nineteenth century, however, he was even better equipped to think about the problem of cultural difference in the world in which we find ourselves today. García-Rivera and I met in 1997 on the occasion of a conference that Raúl Gómez, S.D.S., and I organized at The Catholic University of America on the Hispanic Presence in the U.S. Catholic Church.3 We bonded out of a mutual admiration for Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and this bond led shortly afterwards to my being invited to serve as a reader of the dissertation of Michelle González at the Graduate Theological Union—a work that undertook a comparison of von Balthasar and Sor Juana Inés de...