On Sycamore Trees and the Redemption of Culture

An Essay by Jordan Haddad, Ph.D.

Francis Cardinal George, the former Archbishop of Chicago, once shared that, during a meeting with Pope John Paul II, the late Roman pontiff, after listening patiently to his status report on the Archdiocese of Chicago, asked him just one question: "How are you influencing the culture?" 

While John Paul II could have asked any number of questions about improving priestly formation, supporting Catholic families, and strengthening Catholic schools, he instead asked about the cardinal’s efforts to influence, and ultimately redeem, the culture of Chicago and the surrounding towns and neighborhoods. Why is this, and what are we, as Catholics, to do when there is a conflict between our Catholic culture and the American culture in which we all live?

As I’ve written previously, a culture is a community’s common expression of the ideas and values that characterize their shared life together and embody its understanding of the meaning of life, God, and the world. It is through culture that a family, a local community, and a society are capable of giving expression and life to their most fundamental ideas and values, their own “story,” which would otherwise remain hidden or, worse still, dead.

Although politics and economics can influence the life of a culture, culture is “upstream” from the many political and economic problems that plague our society. If we were to peer below the surface of the countless disagreements in our country between progressives, conservatives, and liberals, what we would actually discover is a clash of cultures that manifests itself as a heated conflict over this or that political issue. And, even within each ideological grouping, there is a struggle being waged between what John Paul II called the “Culture of Life,” which pertains to the City of God, and the “Culture of Death,” which is of the fallen City of Man.

We Catholics, of course, seek to live and give rise to the Culture of Life, which respects the dignity of every person from “womb to tomb” and at every moment in between. We know that we are not a perfect Church, but, at our best, we live the belief that the ultimate foundation of reality is life and love, that every human life is sacred, that this created order is fundamentally good, that there exists such a thing as ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ and that love and mercy are stronger than sin, suffering, and death. We oppose the Culture of Death, which consists of the mentality that people are to be used rather than loved, that the ends always justify the means, that things are more important than people, and that life is, ultimately, meaningless.

Just like St. Augustine’s “Two Cities,” these two cultures do not exist side-by-side, one ‘here’ and the other ‘over there.’ Rather, each is intermingled and intermixed throughout both our communities and our own individual hearts. When Christ comes again, he will separate the ‘sheep’ from the ‘goats,’ but in this life the situation is more complicated.

What, then, are we Catholics, who exist as a true “society” and have our own cultural life, to do with such a complicated situation? We know from the “Great Commission” of Matthew 28 that we are called to make disciples of all nations, but how ought we to relate to an American culture that seems more and more hostile by the day?

If we follow the lead of St. Basil the Great (330-379 AD), one of the other great early Church Fathers of the East, then we should recognize that every culture is a combination of both truth and error, good and bad customs, and, so, we should latch on to what is good and correct what is evil in order to save the culture from itself. One’s own culture, says Basil, can be likened to a sycamore tree, whose bountiful fruit remains bland and flavorless unless it receives the painful assistance of the sharpened edge of a knife, of correction from the higher truth of the Gospel, so that it might bear the fruit that it seeks to generate by nature but cannot when left to its own devices and strength. In Basil’s own words in his Commentary on Isaiah 9:10:

“The sycamore is a tree that bears very plentiful fruit. But it is tasteless unless one carefully slits it and allows its sap to run out, whereby it becomes flavorful. That is why, we believe, the sycamore is a symbol for the pagan world: it offers a surplus, yet at the same time it is insipid. This comes from living according to pagan customs. When one manages to slit them by means of the logos [Jesus Christ], it [the pagan world] is transformed, becomes tasty and useful.”

For Basil, every non-Christian culture, which includes our own, is in need of saving by Jesus Christ because, apart from him, we build our house on shifting, unstable sands (Matt 7:24-27). However, this saving can be painful, for it requires conversion and correction, not from one who simply condemns it from afar but from one who knows and loves it so deeply that he seeks to save it from itself, even if it means assuming the posture of St. John the Baptist or Jesus of Nazareth. This, naturally, will entail its own dimension of suffering as well. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, comments in On the Way to Jesus Christ

“[T]he gospel is a slit, a purification that becomes maturation and healing. It is a cut that demands patient involvement and understanding, so that it occurs at the right time, in the right place, and in the right way; a cut, then, that requires sympathy and understanding of the culture from within, an appreciation for its dangers and its hidden or evident potential.”

To save our American and South Louisianan cultures, we can neither completely abandon them nor simply accept them as they are. Instead, we must first love all that is good and true and beautiful in them as a fruit of the providential working of God, and then we, as collective Church and as individual Catholics, must “slit” them, that is, lovingly correct their errors with the truth and goodness of Jesus Christ by proposing a better way, so that their inner truth, goodness, and beauty may ripen and emerge. In this way, the Culture of Life, our Catholic culture, which overflows from the fullness that is Jesus Christ, can redeem the de facto culture in which we all currently live and save the soul of our nation and region while we’re at it.

Jordan Haddad, Ph.D., is a Professor of Dogmatic Theology at Notre Dame Seminary and President of The St. Louis IX Art Society