A first report from the workshop. After five Sundays: what comes of having the texts assigned, where I nearly smoothed a hard one over, and what two readers found that I had missed.
Since the end of June I have been reading four old texts each week with a single question in mind: what do they say about how people get along with one another. I do not choose the texts. They are the readings that are read aloud in Catholic churches on that particular Sunday.
For anyone unfamiliar with this, a word about the procedure. In a Catholic service, the preacher does not read out whatever he finds suitable. There is a lectionary that assigns four texts to every Sunday, and they come in the first part of the Mass, before the sermon: a reading from the Old Testament, a psalm, a reading from the letters of the New Testament, and a gospel. Three of them are matched to each other. The psalm answers the first reading, and the first reading is usually chosen with the gospel in view. The letters run on independently, week by week, which is why the epistle often does not fit the rest.
The church year begins in Advent, and there are three years of readings, A, B and C. Each puts a different gospel in the foreground, Matthew, Mark, Luke, while John is spread across all three. After three years the cycle starts again. The order in its present form dates from the years after the Second Vatican Council, and it applies worldwide: in Munich and in Manila the same four texts lie on the lectern on the same Sunday. We are in Year A, until Advent.
What this brings is first of all a restriction. The texts are allotted to me, fixed years in advance, with no regard for what happens to be on my mind. On 19 July it was the story of the weeds among the wheat, which ends with the harvesters burning the weeds. I would not have chosen this text. Of all five Sundays it gave me the most, because I had to deal with an ending I would otherwise have passed over.
Why I impose this restriction on myself has to do with my own work. I have long been occupied with Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology and am trying to think it forward into the present. In work of that kind one runs the risk of finding confirmation everywhere. You know your own concepts, you recognise them again, and after a while you have a large collection of cases that all show the same thing. So I wanted an order I had not made myself, one against which it can be tested whether my concepts are worth anything. The lectionary is useful for this because it knows nothing of my project. Sometimes a concept holds, sometimes I get nowhere with it, and now and again the texts bring out something I had not thought of.
Some of this is written down. I keep a handbook of the basic concepts I work with. It is unpublished and will stay that way until it is good enough. The Sundays have become the most frequent occasion for opening one of the entries again. A text produces a case that does not fit the version I had, and then something is revised, sometimes a sentence, sometimes half the article. Two of the concepts only came into being at a reading in the past month.
How I read the texts: as records of how people ordered their life together and what they argued about while doing it. Much of it is very old, written down by people living under quite different conditions, and yet they get stuck in the same places we do. Who takes in whom. Who owes what to whom. Who belongs and who does not. I do not read the texts as testimony of faith, and I do not explain them away either. When one of them contradicts my reading, I write the contradiction down.
How I read Adler: Individual Psychology does not mean the psychology of the isolated individual. For Adler the individual is the indivisible one, the whole person, who cannot be taken apart into layers and agencies. He is understood from his relationships. Behaviour has a goal, even when the person acting does not know it, and the question is always what someone is doing something for, not where it comes from. Part of this is an attitude Adler calls encouragement, which goes beyond reassurance: trusting someone with a thing and then actually leaving it to them.
That is how I read Adler himself, and those who have gone on working after him. I listen to what comes across to me and answer it. With them too some things sit awkwardly, and I leave them standing.
Those are the glasses I read with. It is not a list I work through, but there are places where I listen more closely. One question shaped the first weeks, because the texts wanted it that way: is someone here being trusted with something, or is he being managed and administered. That is one of several angles. A second has already come up in the same weeks, the question of belonging and its price. Beside the woman who prepares a room for the wanderer stands a sentence about the precedence that leaves your own people behind; with the weeds among the wheat it is the sorting of people into two kinds. Other questions will come. Which angles there are altogether is set out on the page Worauf wir schauen.
Three things about all this give me trouble, and all three have to do with me and not with the texts.
The first is the tendency to soften hard passages. With the weeds Sunday it took two attempts before the ending was allowed to stand. In the first draft a conciliatory sentence followed it, something about repentance and open doors. The sentence was not wrong. It stood in a place where the text is silent, and it cleared away the discomfort the text intends. A week earlier a verse stood halved in the draft, because its second half was in the way of the reading.
The second is that the format confirms too easily. Four texts a week is a great deal of material. Anyone arriving with a few concepts will almost always find a passage that fits. By now a Sunday that comes out smoothly makes me suspicious. Usually I have overlooked something.
The third is a contradiction built into the procedure, and it explains the other two. I say that I read what is laid before me and listen to what comes from there. At the same time I arrive with concepts I have brought along. Both are true. Anyone reading without presuppositions would not be reading, he would be spelling out letters. But the presuppositions are at work even when I do not consult them, and they work in one direction: they turn the text into a witness for what I already know. I have no method against this, only a habit. When a text does not play along, I write that down, and I would rather change the concept than the text. It does not work every week.
That leaves the question of what all this is good for. The readers have answered it for me. There are six of them. Six subscribers after a month, and all six open every issue. With six readers you cannot do arithmetic, but you can talk to them, and that happened twice this month.
On 5 July the subject was two kinds of help. A manager can pull a project that has gone wrong towards himself and say: I will take this over. He can also leave it where it is and say: we will rebuild it, but it stays yours. I had described the second sentence as the better help, because it trusts the other person with something instead of taking it away.
The letter described the same case from the other side. A woman comes back from parental leave; in her absence the project has been rebuilt, and it is still on her desk. Formally it remains hers. Nobody asked her. She can now say yes or no to something others have decided, and neither is a good choice. So my sentence stops too early. What matters is not only who does the work afterwards, but also who decides beforehand how much work it will be. Since then, when I hear that "we", I ask first who was in the room when the rebuilding was decided.
Another reader asked about texts on sustainability. I had not planned for that, and on looking I found that it arrives by itself in the autumn. The lectionary then lays out several texts about soil, about vineyards and about tenancy, and the question of what condition you hand it all on in is already in them.