Poetry and the Ecstasy of Friendship: Fratelli Tutti in a Secular Age

These remarks were originally given at the DialogueSpaceSG Interfaith Forum by the Catholic Archdiocese of Singapore on Pentecost 2021.

By Justin Tse

Dear new friend Dear still getting to know you friend Dear let’s talk all day long friend Dear I miss you friend: I hate the pangs of absence. Dear kite flying friend Dear kind of blue friend Dear handholding friend.

Dear silent friend Dear distant friend Dear we’ve lost touch friend. Dear friend I use to kiss: With you, I fell in love with everything. Dear confessional friend Dear drunk dial friend Dear friend who never picks up. Dear ex-friend Dear ex Dear X, It’s been a long time in no time at all, friend.

-Diana Fu, “letters never sent” (2018)

There are three words that I feel Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical letter Fratelli tutti inviting me to consider. They are poetry, friendship, and the secular.

Describing popular movements for social justice, Pope Francis calls participants in them “social poets” because they bring together “millions of actions, great and small, creatively intertwined like words in a poem” (FT 169). Francis writes metaphorically here about one form of what he calls “social friendship,” a “love capable of transcending borders” to create a genuine sense of “universal openness” (FT 99). Social friendship is the foundational concept of Fratelli tutti, the personal basis for building new cultures and institutions that encourage conversation instead of competition, structures that reward sharing instead of hoarding. Without friendship, you can’t build anything, Francis is saying.

This letter on social friendship, Francis clarifies, is of course “written…from the Christian convictions that inspire and sustain” him. But like his 2014 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium and 2015 encyclical Laudato si’, Fratelli tutti is not only addressed to Christians, or even the Roman Catholics under his pastoral jurisdiction. “I have sought to make this reflection an invitation to dialogue among all people of good will,” he says, and he makes good on that by framing it as coming out from his interreligious dialogue with the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, whom he met in 2019 in Abu Dhabi (FT 6). Social friendship, in other words, might have roots in Catholic social teaching, and in Christian traditions writ large. But it’s ultimately a secular concept Francis is proposing, one that pertains to a world outside the church, an arena where persons from many faith traditions and spiritual convictions (or lack thereof) are constantly interacting.

The secularity of social friendship as Francis conceives of it is why I feel no qualm with taking my epigraph from the San Francisco Bay Area scientist and poet Diana Fu. Fu is not a Catholic writer. She is, in full disclosure, a former student of mine. I am told that I am something of a minor Greek-Catholic celebrity on Reddit, but that has nothing to do with her. I taught her at a secular school called Northwestern University in Asian American studies courses that were not confessionally theological. To my knowledge, she is not religiously affiliated either, though like many artists in this secular age of ours, she has always seemed spiritually curious. “God is in the rain,” she writes in another piece, “Remembering Rain,” which is about climate change in the Bay Area. But the God she is referring to here is in the rains in California when she was a child. Before they dried up and the land began to burn with the droughts that California is known for now, it was like the rain had a divine energy. There was so much rain, she writes of her childhood, that she and her sister would have to carry the waters from the torrential downpour in buckets out away from her house. When the rains dried up and California began to burn, she writes that her connection to that place from which she moved away for a time also began to fray. It is like the friends she writes about in her poem “letters never sent.” The magical connections of which friendships are made do fray if you don’t write, don’t text, don’t call. And yet there is still some magic left in the memory. Was God in the friendships too? “Dear friend I used to kiss,” her speaker says. “With you I fell in love with everything.”

It is with secular writers and artists like Fu that I think the central themes of Fratelli tutti, a text that is itself born of interreligious dialogue, open up beyond what my research collaborator in Ukraine, Halyna Herasym, and I have been calling “Catholic talk” in our projects on what we call secular “social dreaming.” Pope Francis is not writing about Catholic friendships, or friendships between Catholics, or even just about making friends between people of different religious communities, as if everybody in our contemporary world has one to belong to. He is talking about how friendship works in the world, period, where someone like Diana Fu might still speak of the divine, but only as the energy that powers her dreams for a planet where the rains still pour and a society where the friends still write, text, and call.

In such a world, Francis to Fu is not a pastor, a pope, or even a moral authority. It is not just that he has no ecclesial jurisdiction over her. He might not even register on her intellectual radar screen. The question is not whether she might be interested in what he has to say. Even if she might be, is there any reason she should be?

We know, after all, that Francis cares about people like Fu. By addressing “all people of good will,” he offers himself as a dialogue partner to persons like her (FT 6). But as the philosopher of education Sam Rocha reminds his readers in his book Folk Phenomenology, an offer is not the same as a gift. The difference is that a gift implies an acknowledgement of receipt, but an offer can be rejected by the prospective receiver. Francis wants to talk to someone like Fu. Should she respond?

This question, I think, speaks to the concerns of the modern Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor when he writes of the history of modernity as the emergence of what he calls a “secular age.” When Taylor uses the word “secular,” he cautions his readers not to think of it in its conventional sense, that what “secularity” means is that religion has been somehow “subtracted” from society. Instead, secularization refers to the process that has shaped how we approach spiritual questions.

A secular age has a history, then, and for Taylor, the Roman Catholic Church – indeed, the papacy – has everything to do with it. The argument that he makes – and many contemporary scholars of secularization agree with him on this point – is that around the tenth century, there were attempts to centralize church authority in the Bishop of Rome and in the Roman bureaucracy he ran. What they wanted to do was to standardize spiritual practices, Taylor says. But standardization meant that they were also trying to educate ordinary Catholic Christians into taking responsibility for their own faith, that what it meant to be a real Christian was to live their beliefs at a certain intensity.

The arc of Taylor’s book A Secular Age shows the unintended global consequences of such standardized spiritual education. If you and I are taking so much responsibility for our spiritualities, why should we listen to an authority tell us what the spiritual world is all about? That’s what Taylor means by the “secular.” It’s a condition in which every individual believes that they can live their own spiritual truth on their own terms without anyone telling them what to do, and it is formed by what he calls the “disciplinary” work of standardization that led to individuals taking more responsibility for their spiritual education in the first place. Whether or not Francis might register on Fu’s radar screen doesn’t matter, then. The only reason she can say something like God is in the rain and not actually mean “God” in any theological sense is because the secular conditions in which she says it now were created through a history that traces itself back to the Catholic Church, to the very idea of the papacy itself and its unintended consequences.

Of course, another unintended consequence of secularization is that as spiritualities became increasingly individualized, church institutions, faced with the possibility of their own irrelevance, also decided that they needed to assert their own authority, sometimes over secular developments they’re still trying to catch up on. Much as Francis seems to try not to do that, you can still see some of that baggage playing out in Fratelli tutti.

Francis, for example, certainly has things to say about what he thinks of the secular context in which Fu withholds her letters. He might think that such withholding is a symptom of a world moving at an overly frenetic pace, abetted by the internet. With the full force of a papal encyclical, Francis explains that an information age with its “virtual networks” creates a “virtual circle” that isolates “us from the real world in which we are living” and denies us an “encounter with reality” where “true wisdom” lies (FT 47). That has implications for friendship, he continues. “As silence and careful listening disappear,” he writes, “replaced by a frenzy of texting, this basic structure of sage human communication is at risk” (FT 49). While acknowledging later on in the letter that “the media” and the “internet, in particular” can offer avenues for “generous encounter with others” (FT 205), the Bishop of Rome has also come down on a diagnosis of our social malaise in this online age of ours. It’s that it’s a text-based culture, he wants to say, and a frenetically texting one at that, that does not offer the face-to-face encounter that persons need to get to know each other deeply.

I won’t speak for Fu, but even I, a Greek-Catholic in full communion with Rome, had to think about what the pope says here about texting. It reads like an octogenarian saying things he doesn’t understand about my millennial addiction to my smartphone. I also thought about all the people, including Fu, whose texts not only got me through the loneliness of pandemic quarantine in the last year, but also deepened our friendships precisely through texting. Weren’t we doing, I reflected, what the Chinese literary critic Hu Ying says was the way that friends throughout the long history of Chinese literary traditions used to share their hearts with each other? They wrote poetry to each other, Hu writes in her very moving book Burying Autumn, a text recommended to me by my dear friend, the postsecular Sinophone scholar Guo Ting, over social media during the pandemic. One friend might start a line at a visitation, or at a party, or even over a letter. The other would have to respond with another line. You knew from that response, Hu says, how well you were known. It’s the same thing you might feel from a text. If but a word will suffice, am I not known? And if I have to spell everything out on Telegram just because a misunderstanding might happen, then surely it is the friendship that is not yet deep enough to withstand the multiple registers a word might mean. Our texting may be frenetic. But it requires a considered listening too.

These critical reflections on Fratelli tutti are only possible, I am saying, if we treat Pope Francis more as a dialogue partner than as a pastoral authority. In doing so, we come perhaps to Taylor’s deepest insight about secularity. If our secular age emerged from a series of reactions against the centralization of religious authority, then someone like the pope is always going to feel like a symbolic figure that we must render irrelevant in order to lay claim to our own subjective truths. But personally owning one’s spiritual sensibilities need not be an act of rebellion against religious authority, whether consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, the point of A Secular Age is that the centralization of theological control didn’t work anyway; instead of standardizing the spiritual, it made it a lot messier.

What Francis is offering himself to be as a religious leader in a secular age seems to me close to what Hu Ying is talking about. In Fratelli tutti, he is opening the possibility that he might just be a person sharing his poetic truth to elicit ours. Truth, he reminds us, is not what an authority says it is. “Truth means telling families torn apart by pain what happened to their relatives,” he quotes himself saying at a reconciliation encounter in Colombia in 2017. “Truth means confessing what happened to minors recruited by cruel and violent people. Truth means recognizing the pain of women who are victims of violence and abuse” (FT 227). Truth, in other words, is about your experience and my experience of the world, what happens to us in it, and what that makes us feel. When the poets that Hu Ying writes about share their poetry, they are not just expressing themselves. They are telling the truth about their experience of the world with the best arrangement of words they can use to approximate everything true about it. They wait for the other friend to respond, to see if their truth has been heard. To share your heart is to offer what is true in it to another; when there is a response, a friendship emerges.

Here it is important to consider what poetry really is. When Francis writes about “social poets,” he is not writing about people just expressing themselves and their opinions. He is saying that they are building something together on the basis of poetic truth. Here, then, Francis is using the classical meaning of the Greek word poiesis, which refers to something that’s been built, crafted, put together. When St Paul writes to the Ephesians (2.10), for example, he calls them God’s poiema – God’s “handiwork,” as the English translations usually have it. A poem, then, is simply what words do together – or in the words of the Singapore poet Mok Zining (in full disclosure, another former student of mine) in her recently published book The Orchid Folios, “A word is a cutting / A sentence, a bouquet.” Every time you group words together in a sentence to tell the truth of your heart, you have made a poem, a work, an action. A movement, Francis is saying, is what happens when millions of actions come together in an act of building something. It is poetry because Francis is saying that movements and institutions, cultures and states, are the works – the handiwork, the craftsmanship, the artifacts – that such actions produce.

This poetic approach is, admittedly, a different way of thinking about the work of institutional building and cultural formation than what Taylor calls the “disciplinary” views that persist in secular arenas. There is something indulgent here, something that works against standardization. It has to do, I think, with Francis’s interpretation of the prevailing Catholic conception of what a person is. Quoting his predecessor John Paul II, Francis writes, “Since we were made for love, in each one of us ‘a law of ekstasis seems to operate: ‘the lover “goes outside” the self to find a fuller existence in another” (FT 90). This Greek word ekstasis, from which we get the English “ecstasy,” is, I think, probably Catholic theology’s most significant contribution to the individual spiritual quests of a secular age. A person has the urge to speak their poetic truth, the theory goes, because desire is always focused outward toward the world, calling out for a lover’s response.

For Francis, that ecstatic principle means that my life cannot be reduced to “relationships with a small group, even my own family; I cannot know myself apart from a broader network of relationships, including those that have preceded me and shaped my entire life” (FT 89). A person’s desire to love and to be loved, to know and to be known, to share a poetic truth in hopes of creating shared poetry, means that there is, in Francis’s words, “always the factor of ‘gratuitousness’: the ability to do some things simply because they are good in themselves, without concern for personal gain or recompense” (FT 139). By implying that what is good is to indulge your desires for ecstasy, it is as if Francis is saying something similar to the secular writer Jia Tolentino, who has been touted as one of the leading voices of the millennial generation. Writing about her process of growing up evangelical Christian in Houston and then losing her faith in adulthood, Tolentino concludes that the only times she ever writes about God as a secular person is when she is high on drugs like ecstasy. It’s only then, she suggests, that she has the openness to admit that ecstatic desire is what constitutes her personhood, that she can indulge the gratuitous nature of her being.

There is something repressive, then, about the secular that Francis wants to open up, but it is not a simple repression, one not simply explained by technological developments in modernity. Here we might consider again the frayed friendships in Fu’s poem “letters never sent.” The point of the poem is that all of these addresses to persons who have grown distant, who might even have become an “ex-friend,” never actually happened. The speaker has denied herself the indulgence of ecstasy; there is even the “friend I used to kiss” and the “drunk dial friend” that she has not indulged in contact for a while. The explanation for these lost friendships, though, is not that the speaker is living in an internet age. There is in fact no reason she hasn’t contacted anyone – not because of a texting-heavy internet age, not because she is afraid, not because of anything, really. All we know is what she misses. There is the “kite flying friend” who evokes the gratuitousness of Mary Poppins unleashing the inner child of bankers who have forgotten how to feel the world. There is the “kind of blue friend” who opens up from the sweet sharing of mutual melancholies to indulging in the sublime perfection of Miles Davis’s 1959 jazz classic. There is the “handholding friend” that presumes a long walk, maybe even one, with apologies to Mandy Moore, to remember. Coming out of oneself in the ecstasy of friendship requires indulgence, gratuitousness, time spent with the other doing nothing productive except for being with each other. Indeed, time is either passed in ecstasy, or it is simply passed. Before Fu knows it, then, whether or not she has contacted these friends, she finds that must write, “Dear X, / It’s been a long time / in no time at all, friend.”

This poem “letters never sent” can be found among the twenty-five pieces, including “Remembering Rain,” that make up Fu’s newly self-published chapbook In All Spaces Liminal, which she sells on her own Etsy store. I spoke with her recently about her decision to self-publish. She said it was a funny decision to make, having published before in literary journals. She honestly didn’t think anyone but her friends would buy the book. But that was also the point; this was a way of sharing her work on her own terms with the people who know her. The response that she has been getting, she tells me, has been surprising. Having put herself out there, her readers write back to her to tell her about poetry they have written. Her act of ecstasy – self-publishing, in this case, with all the gratuitousness of bypassing an institution that might lend her work the legitimacy of a publishing house – has yielded ecstatic encounter, the sharing of more unpublished poems by friends she didn’t know were writing them too. In All Spaces Liminal are the letters sent, the ecstatic indulgence that sparks new poetic friendships.

The surprise of Fratelli tutti in a secular age, then, is that Francis, in the papal office that once sought to standardize spirituality, is saying that we secularized folk have learned our lessons all too well. The institutions and cultures that we have created do not permit such indulgences; the person has come to be conceived of as disciplined, not ecstatic. And yet they must, Francis insists, because they are inescapably run by human persons. “Apart from their tireless activity,” Francis points out, “politicians are also men and women. They are called to practise love in their daily interpersonal relationships” (FT 193). He is challenging the disciplinary apparatus of austerity, the denial of gratuitous desire, here; repression is no way to be human. “Politics too must make room for a tender love of others,” he continues. He explains that “tenderness” means to lead with the heart, to be open to “the smallest, the weakest, and the poorest” to “touch our hearts” (FT 194). The institutional formations of a secular age are far too repressive, he is saying, and their pedagogy has closed our hearts. They need room for the ecstasy of social friendship, for the indulgence in poetry shared between friends.

There are many such tender moments in In All Spaces Liminal. Let me close with one. The first time I read it, I sped through its poetry, wanting to take it all in so that I could get back to my busy work as a secular academic. The poem “a visit at the coffeehouse” in the middle of the book stopped me:

Lover one coffee mug away: the afternoon light holds you in just the right way

even the bees are dizzy in love, land where your lips have been, and faint into your mug.

The speaker’s ecstatic vision cut through my secular discipline. I found myself unable to continue. I looked up and smiled at my wife sitting across the table from me. I waited for a minute, then showed the poem to her. She read it and smiled back. Then I closed the book, held it to my heart, and sank into a feeling of warmth I did not expect to feel

Justin Tse is Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture (Education) at Singapore Management University's College of Integrative Studies. He was lead editor of Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Palgrave, 2016) and has a book under contract with the University of Notre Dame Press titled The Secular as Sheets of Scattered Sand: Cantonese Protestants and Pacific Rim Secularities.