Blindspots, Integrity, and Orthopraxis

March 2, 2025 
8th Sunday in Ordinary Time

A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit…
 - Luke 6:43-44

 

I must confess that I’ve left the Music Director’s Corner unattended for the past three weeks. If you’re someone who checks this page for regular updates, my apologies for not having updated until now.

 

As it happens, this Sunday’s Gospel reading is one that hits very close to home for me, for two reasons: Firstly, I’m the type of person who has what I like to call “blindspot paranoia.” I always second-guess myself because I worry that there may be some factor I haven’t considered, some cognitive bias I’m unaware of, or, to borrow Jesus’ words, a beam in my eye that I’m just not seeing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself, “what if I’m only choosing this song for my own personal gratification and not really for the enhancement of the liturgy, the spiritual experience of the congregation, or the greater glory of God?” Ask my friends Kathy and Danielle, and they’ll tell you all about Carlo’s paralyzing fear of unchecked beams in his eyes!

 

The second reason has to do with the virtue of integrity, which I take to be the opposite of hypocrisy. I’ve heard two popular definitions of integrity: 1) doing the right thing even when no one’s looking, and 2) when your words, actions, and beliefs all match. It’s that second definition that piques my interest. Religious philosophers distinguish between orthodoxy (correct belief) and orthopraxis (correct conduct). For Christians, this distinction raises important questions about the relation between specific credal beliefs and carrying out good works—does one necessarily follow from the other? Is one more important than the other? Should we distinguish between “true Christians,” or “fake Christians,” or implicit Christians at heart (what Karl Rahner calls “anonymous Christians”)? What if someone is really kind but not a Christian? Or what if a Christian is so terribly despicable? These questions may apply in an interreligious sense, i.e. between Christians and non-Christians, or in an ecumenical sense, i.e. between Catholics and non-Catholic Christian denominations. There are of course widely diverging answers from very intelligent Christian thinkers. Consider these contrasting viewpoints:

 

Anonymous Christianity means that a person lives in the grace of God and attains salvation outside of explicitly constituted Christianity… Let us say, a Buddhist monk… who, because he follows his conscience, attains salvation and lives in the grace of God; of him I must say that he is an anonymous Christian; if not, I would have to presuppose that there is a genuine path to salvation that really attains that goal, but that simply has nothing to do with Jesus Christ. But I cannot do that. And so, if I hold if everyone depends upon Jesus Christ for salvation, and if at the same time I hold that many live in the world who have not expressly recognized Jesus Christ, then there remains in my opinion nothing else but to take up this postulate of an anonymous Christianity.

- Karl Rahner, Jesuit theologian

 

Now if once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as they might say ‘deepening’, the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word… In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served… When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, XII-XIII

 

Gandhi no doubt loved the way that Jesus related to the downtrodden and disadvantaged and assumed that he himself was a leper or Samaritan when he really was a Pharisee… Whatever the case, the Jesus he liked must have been a Jesus who would love and accept him just as he was and not a Jesus who declared that even a man as good as he was an enemy of God.
 - Rev. Tim Challies, Reformed Baptist Pastor

 

But on the question whether we ought to prefer a Catholic of the most abandoned character to a heretic in whose life, except that he is a heretic, men find nothing to blame, I do not venture to give a hasty judgment.

- St. Augustine, De Baptismo Contra Donatistas, Book IV, Ch. 20

 

I should note that term orthopraxis was coined in the 1960s by proponents of liberation theology—a social-justice-oriented theology that I first encountered in Jesuit college back home in the Philippines. And while I try my best to approach contrasting views as impartially as possible, if it appears to the reader that I tend to lean more closely to Jesuit thought, that may be the subconscious influence of my Ignatian upbringing. Did I mention I have a crippling fear of unchecked cognitive biases?

 

Having made that disclaimer, I’d like to share this beautiful analogy from a homily by Fr. Arnel Aquino, SJ, one of the Priests based in my former Jesuit college. Fr. Aquino compares two famous concert pianists, drawing the analogy between technical prowess without expression and orthodoxy without orthopraxis:

 

Yuja Wang from China & Khatia Buniátishvilli from Georgia are two of the world’s leading classical pianists today. Both are virtuosic, especially when playing bravado pieces. Agile and light, their fingers go at break-neck speed. Left hand nimble as right, their monstrous octaves leap seamlessly up and down the piano with no extraneous notes, no slips, no falls.

When Yuja plays a slow Chopin nocturne, you find yourself waiting for the passages where she’d showcase her phenomenal finger dexterity. That’s what she’s known for: technical superiority. But when Khatia plays the same piece, something different happens. Her playing calls up childhood memories, people’s faces, feelings. Oh, both pianists know “the way”—technique, accuracy, volume. They know “the truth”—principles of interpretation, composer’s biography, period/era of composition. But, while Yuja draws attention to the adroitness of her hands, thanks to her almost robotic virtuosity, Khatia blesses the piece with a beating heart, and makes it breathe and sigh, and gives it a voice so that it whispers to you, or yells at the world, or cries with you. One makes you think how far ahead of you she’s gone. The other holds your hand & assures you that you’re not alone.
 - Fr. Arnel Aquino, SJ, homily on the 5th Sunday of Easter, May 7, 2023

 

When you come to Mass this Sunday, we invite you to keep an ear out for the themes of integrity and orthopraxis in our music selections, and to reflect on these themes as we sing together in joyful worship.

With my peace,

Carlo Serrano, Music Director