Happy New Year!

The first decade of the new millenium is over. What have I accomplished? Can I say I am closer to God? Have I helped my fellow man? How do I stand with my family and friends? What amends should I be making? Do I have hope in the future? Love in my heart? At a minimum I must ask for mercy and aim to do better. Let us begin each day anew, each decade anew, each moment anew!

What Makes Us Real

Meghan Daum in today's Tribune commented on the demise of Kirkus Review, noting that Kirkus paid for its reviews but that nowadays all one sees is free "customer" reviews on the web, from Amazon to Yelp. She thinks "the entire idea of what constitutes value -- has been turned on its ear. . . ." "No longer an intellectual or aesthetic or logical exercise drawing from objective facts (e.g., what's in the book), careful observations and real expertise (sometimes called connoisseurship), reviewing is more and more simply a vehicle for personal narrative." "Too often, the pretense of sharing advice devolves into oversharing the contours of one's navel."

The "democratization of value" means that anything goes and everyone is on display. I turned the radio to a pop station this morning on my way to work, and heard the radio "personalities" taking calls from and about "men who have lost the desire for sex, and why." A female caller talked about her own experience of getting engaged to one man, then finding herself "falling in love with another" and accepting an engagement ring from him too. "And just last night I started a bit of a fling" with another man. At least the radio hosts advised her to give both rings back. No comment on her lifestyle. But it's pretty clear she's lost the ability to "evaluate" value.

Who is the reviewer, the chronicler of our lives? Is it the person(s) we hope will see us on facebook or twitter etc.? The man we expect to entice, whose interest we want to spark? For if we live in the interest of another, aren't we really living?

To the contrary, if we live with "faces unveiled" to our God, we live in His loving, life-giving gaze. Then we don't have to preen and prance about, hoping for that other's notice. We dwell secure in in His gaze.

Does the "Sacred Text" Contain the Entire Truth?

From Sat. USA Today letter to editor in response to article by Dinesh D'Souza defending against claims that religion is to blame for terrorism: "The bottom line: No one group (atheists or religionists) has cornered the market on morality. There has never been any perfect text - religious or otherwise - to guide us through life. We have to guard against religious fanatics just as we must guard against atheistic fanatics. A belief that any religion, sacred text or ideology contains the entire truth is always fraught with danger. All good people must contend against this insistence on absolute moral certainty. - Norm Allen Jr. Buffalo" (emphasis added)

This from my Catholic Study Bible's readers guide to Micah (RG, 372):

"The true prophet here, as so often in the history of Israel, finds himself in opposition to the religious leaders, the priests, and the official prophets (3,11). On the surface of things, the priests appear to have great faith: no evil can come upon Israel because the Lord is in its midst. Such faith is no virtue for Micah. Rather virtue lies in the practice of justice and in facing reality honestly. He regarded the Temple on Mt. Zion, often the focal point of Jewish religion in antiquity, as a negative force. According to the Psalmist, Mt. Zion was 'the holdy dwelling of the Most High. God is in its midst; it shall not be disturbed' (Ps 46,6). If kings came to attack it, they would be seized with terror and put to flight (Ps 48,5f). Micah realized that the Assyrians would not panic at the sight of Jerusalem. The belief that Zion could not be destroyed was a source of complacency and illusion. So Micah uttered his radical prophecy that Zion would be plowed like a field. This prophecy is quoted in Jeremiah 16,18 as a precedent for the equally radical prophecy of Jeremiah. It was not fulfilled in Micah's time, but it was not forgotten either, and it was justified in time. Faith cannot be based on any religious institution, no matter how sacred. No temple is permanent, and no one is guaranteed the unconditional protection of God." (emphasis added)

Are they saying the same thing? Close, but not exactly. When the sacred text warns against the very attitude decried by the letter writer -- the attitude that pridefully assumes it is in the right -- the sacred text IS entirely truthful!

Who are the modern day prophets?

In Christ is our Hope this month, there is an article by Fr. John Welch, located here in Darien, IL. He writes of "The Languages of a Christian," noting the first language is one of thanksgiving. "No matter how difficult life may be . . . it is always appropriate to give thanks to God. For what? For the unmerited love of God that brought us into this world and sustains us throughout life."

The second language is that of prophesy. "Having given thanks to God, we look around our world to see who cannot participate fully in the love God offers us. Who, for whatever reason, cannot take his or her place at the table of life prepared for all by God? Who, for reasons of economics, politics, gender, religion, sexual orientation, cannot participate in the banquet of life? Our prophetic language says, 'This situation should not last; it must come to an end.' The language of the prophets in Scripture has been called 'an articulated grief' because it announces the end of a dominant consciousness, which is at odds with God's will."

In my opinion, Fr. Welch's words about prophecy sound nice, but are too ambiguous to be helpful. Who, for example, for reasons of "sexual orientation" "cannot participate in the banquet of life?" Gays who cannot marry because of Maine's vote against gay marriage? Or those whose gay lifestyle contravenes God's law? (see earlier post) Fr. Welch does not say.

Who, for reasons of gender, cannot participate in the banquet of life? The woman needing an abortion? Or a Chinese women discriminated against for having more than one child? Again, Fr. Welch does not say.

The prophet IS called to announce the end of the "dominant consciousness," which is at odds with God's will. But who represents the dominant consciousness? The oppressive majority? The dominant minority? No answers are given.

Fr. Welch's platitudes aren't at issue. At issue in prophecy is WHO is being denounced and WHAT FOR. In my opinion, one group of the powerful and "dominant" against who the prophets should rail are those who are able to enact legislation contrary to accepted norms through power politics, i.e., through judicial fiat.

I agree with Phillip Rieff who said the primary test of a prophet is whether he (or she) preaches fresh renunciations of instinct. Jesus was one -- the greatest -- of these. (See last post.) A prophet never preaches fresh satisfactions of instinct. He (or she) calls people back to obedience to God's immutable law, his covenant of "shall nots." The prophet's mission is not, as so many today believe, to loosen the compass of God's law, so as to show compassion.

Fr. Welch's article on the surface sounds nice, but what is left unsaid makes it unhelpful and therefore unsatisfactory.

Do you "care enough"?

This, from Robert Gagnon, in connection with Maine's electoral vote to repeal the gay marriage law, and Sr. Donna Quinn's "outing" as a deathscort in Hinsdale:

"When Jesus rescued the woman caught in adultery from being stoned, he did so with a view to
encouraging her repentance. Put simply, dead people don’t repent. Jesus wanted to give the woman every last opportunity to repent so that she might inherit the kingdom of God. So he warned her: “Go and from now on no longer be sinning” (John 8:11). A similar statement is made by Jesus in John 5:14, where it is followed up with the remark: “lest something worse happen to you.”

That something worse is loss of eternal life through an unrepentant life. Whereas the Pharisees didn’t care if sexual sinners and persons who exploited the poor for material gain (first-century tax collectors) went to hell, Jesus cared enough to make them a focus of his ministry so that he might, through a proclamation of love and repentance, call them back to God’s kingdom (hence Mark’s summary of Jesus’ ministry: “The kingdom of God has drawn near; repent and believe the good news” [1:15]).

When the church calls to repentance those who engage in homosexual acts and does so lovingly, with a desire to reclaim lives for the kingdom of God, it carries out the work of its Lord."

Oh, So Reasonable

Idolatry to an idolator seems oh, so reasonable. I am thinking of the worship of Baal by the Hebrews on the verge of entering Caanan. See Numbers 25 and Hosea 9, 10. To a wandering people about to become sedentary and agrarian, the fertility rites of Caanan seemed "just the thing." Primitive peoples were in awe at the "coming together" of water and soil to produce new crops, and they believed Baal, the rain god who accomplished this, needed their help in his divine work of sowing life in otherwise barren soil. Hence Hebrew men's visits to the cult prostitutes and ritual orgies. And it seemed reasonable to think of god as a bull, the most virile of the animal kingdom. See Moses, by Martin Buber in Chapter on Baal.

But Moses, who witnessed this, was aghast. He knew that Yahweh was beyond sexuality, complete, not partial like human males and females. He knew too that the Baalist cult was drawing the people away from a pure and unadulterated worship of the one God who carried them "on eagle's wings" from slavery in Egypt, in effect a disaster that could lead only to death.

Today we snigger at this "idolatry." But aren't we too living in a Baalist cult, with the temptation to make sex our god, as ostensibly the only provider of solace in an otherwise meaningless world? Our faith teaches us otherwise. So let us turn away from the sexual cues, the learing invitations of the temple prostitutes of secular culture whose lust purveys death, and kneel in humble prayer toward our transcendent God who shows us the salvation and life of his son Jesus' love.

If we don't, Hosea's dire prophesies will continue to come to pass in our land too: the brokenness of families through divorce, abortion, pornography, homosexuality, and technology's unchecked hubris in creating life for death.

Facts embedded in Faith = Truth

As I watched the surface of my coffee in its cup this morning, I rotated around first one way and then the other, watching the coffee rotate in the opposite direction each time. Of course, the coffee surface really remained motionless while its "world" moved.

What appears to us is influenced by context; what I experience is a "profile" against a larger background. To me it's a good example of the importance of our faith as that larger background, against which the "brute facts" of life take on meaning. Facts only become meaningful and true when profiled against the background of a faith. Living in the truth is experiencing life "betrothed" to our faith.

Join in the "Energy"

I'll have to admit that I was put off by Fr. Baron's statement that the Kingdom of God "is not something to be admired from the outside, but rather an energy in which to participate." p. 3. He says "the Gospels want us, not outside the energy of Christ, but in it. . ." Ibid. He says, "But when we surrender in trust to the bearing power of God, our souls become great, roomy, expansive. We realize that we are connected to all things and to the creative energy of the whole cosmos." Ibid. p. 5. "To have faith is to allow oneself to be overwhelmed by the power of God, to permit the divine energy to reign at all levels of one's being." Ibid. p. 7.

What's wrong with the use of the word energy? Here are some thoughts:

1. God is not inside the Cosmos, but radically transcends it. Energy, as in E=Mc2, is part of the Cosmos, so not part of God. Wait a minute, God is incarnated in the world in Jesus and yet still God. So His "energy" is in the world, accessible to us. But Christ is not incarnated as "energy," unless we use the term metaphorically for a non-cosmic and non-material power. "Creative energy of the whole cosmos" leads to thinking of the energy as part of the cosmos. I don't think that's correct.

2. Energy, as part of the cosmos, can be manipulated and controlled through technique, to gain power. In fact, energy is another word for power. But the true man of God is not a man of power. In Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic, there is a chapter called "Reich's Religion of Energy." In it Rieff says, Reich fancied love "as something like electricity, bouncing off the inside of metal-lined boxes and so to be captured by a technique, like other forms of energy." p. 187.
God's "energy" cannot be captured and used like magic out of a genie's bottle.

3. Energy is not personal. It's an impersonal component of the cosmos which humans can "tap into." This is a characteristic of New Age pantheism/gnosticism.

In Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life, the Vatican commented on the differences between Christian spirituality and New Age spirituality:

4. Christian mysticism and New Age Mysticism

For Christians, the spiritual life is a relationship with God which gradually through his grace becomes deeper, and in the process also sheds light on our relationship with our fellow men and women, and with the universe. Spirituality in New Age terms means experiencing states of consciousness dominated by a sense of harmony and fusion with the Whole. So “mysticism” refers not to meeting the transcendent God in the fullness of love, but to the experience engendered by turning in on oneself, an exhilarating sense of being at one with the universe, a sense of letting one's individuality sink into the great ocean of Being.

This fundamental distinction is evident at all levels of comparison between Christian mysticism and New Age mysticism. The New Age way of purification is based on awareness of unease or alienation, which is to be overcome by immersion into the Whole. In order to be converted, a person needs to make use of techniques which lead to the experience of illumination. This transforms a person's consciousness and opens him or her to contact with the divinity, which is understood as the deepest essence of reality.

The techniques and methods offered in this immanentist religious system, which has no concept of God as person, proceed 'from below'. Although they involve a descent into the depths of one's own heart or soul, they constitute an essentially human enterprise on the part of a person who seeks to rise towards divinity by his or her own efforts. It is often an “ascent” on the level of consciousness to what is understood to be a liberating awareness of “the god within”. Not everyone has access to these techniques, whose benefits are restricted to a privileged spiritual 'aristocracy'.

The essential element in Christian faith, however, is God's descent towards his creatures, particularly towards the humblest, those who are weakest and least gifted according to the values of the “world”. There are spiritual techniques which it is useful to learn, but God is able to by-pass them or do without them. A Christian's “method of getting closer to God is not based on any technique in the strict sense of the word. That would contradict the spirit of childhood called for by the Gospel. The heart of genuine Christian mysticism is not technique: it is always a gift of God; and the one who benefits from it knows himself to be unworthy.

For Christians, conversion is turning back to the Father, through the Son, in docility to the power of the Holy Spirit. The more people progress in their relationship with God – which is always and in every way a free gift – the more acute is the need to be converted from sin, spiritual myopia and self-infatuation, all of which obstruct a trusting self-abandonment to God and openness to other men and women.

All meditation techniques need to be purged of presumption and pretentiousness. Christian prayer is not an exercise in self-contemplation, stillness and self-emptying, but a dialogue of love, one which “implies an attitude of conversion, a flight from 'self' to the 'You' of God”.

(Emphasis added)

I don't claim Fr. Baron is a New Ager. But his use of New Age lingo is troubling. His emphasis on escaping "fear" (p.4) also seems to be an earmark of the New Age (see above). Rather, isn't the problem usually complacency rather than fear? And aren't we to experience God in "fear and trembling"?

The Vatican selection stresses that there is no cheap way to salvation, no "technique" to tap into "divine energy." Salvation is the way of the cross, and proceeds through humiliation, renunciation, continual self-examination, and re-dedication (i.e., ascetic work, practice, discipline), not a glass of wine on the patio. Self-awakening is initially shameful and only then joyful. Joy comes only by way of the cross.

Our Struggle To Know Ourselves as God Knows Us

At lunch my mom happened to say that she always felt that her fondest desire was to know herself the way God knows her. I've sometimes had a similar idea: I don't want to be a Pinnochio but a "real boy."

For Rieff, God knows each of us personally, in our uniqueness, in who we really are, in our "ideal." That "ideal" we ourselves can know through the "intense practice of faith, as free men - free to 'take the shape of Christ' (Galatians 4:19)."

In other words, we "live" to the extent we are given the grace to know our ideal, our godly, self. "To recognize such a person is to be indebted to him for his existence, for his presence in one's self. . ." and to recognize the one to whom we should more like. "Thus there can be no charisma of perception without guilt." Charisma, p. 36.

"But to make this ideal character takes relentless practice, through the charisms, and moreover, through each examining 'his own conduct for himself.' [Gal. 6:4] Ibid. at p.83.

Through this "intense practice of faith," this "relentless practice" through charisms and examination of conscience, we are inducted into the person God sees in us.

In this practice, we are guided to avoid "the kind of behavior that belongs to the lower nature," [Gal. 5:20]; but if we persevere, we garner "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control." Gal. 5:22. These are the goodly qualities of the godly person God knows in us.

Can there be an apter struggle in life? And isn't the outcome worth the extraordinary energies we put into it?

Pillars of Christian Spirituality

Mt 6 gives the three pillars of Christian spirituality, Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving. These are activities not only for Lent, but for all of Christian life. Indeed, these "keys to life" are also found in Islam and Judaism. In this way, spiritual life is worked out on the body, through the body.

A Wedding Toast by Richard Wilbur

My son Brian is getting married this Saturday, and I ran across a very nice wedding poem by Richard Wilbur, who was US Poet Laureate in 1987-88, which I share with you:

Wedding Toast

St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast,
The water-pots poured wine in such amount
That by his sober count
There were a hundred gallons at the least.

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.

Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That this world's fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you.

Now, if your loves will lend an ear to mine,
I toast you both, good son and dear new daughter.
May you not lack for water,
And may that water smack of Cana's wine.

St. Augustine

At our last meeting St. Augustine's "Confessions" popped up in our discussion. A version that I found extremely readable is a translation by F. J. Sheed, published by Hackett Publishing Co., latest revision, 1993. It still has the Thy's and the Thou's but still very easy to read. Most people object to Augustine's emphasis on man's corrupt nature and his portrayal of the degrees to which man can degrade himself, but, he also exhibits a worshipful and awe-filled love of the Lord that we would do well to imitate. I offer the following as an example (I translated the Thous and Thys).

What then is my God, what but the Lord God? For Who is Lord but the Lord, or who is God but our God? O You, the greatest and the best, mightiest, almighty, most merciful and most just, utterly hidden and utterly present, most beautiful and most strong, abiding yet mysterious, suffering no change and changing all things: never new, never old, making all things new, bringing age upon the proud and they know it not; ever in action, ever at rest, gathering all things to Yourself and needing none; sustaining and fulfilling and protecting, creating and norishing and making perfect; ever seeking though lacking nothing.
You love without subjection to passion, You are jealous but not with fear, You can know repentance but not sorrow, be angry yet unperturbed by anger.
You can change the works You have made but Your mind stands changeless. You find and receive back what You have never lost; are never in need but rejoice in Your gains, are not greedy but exact interest manifold. Men pay You more than is of obligation to win return from You, yet who has anything that is not already Yours? You owe nothing yet You pay as if in debt to Your creature, forget what is owed to You yet do not lose thereby. And with all this, what have I said,
my God, my Life and my sacred Delight?

Book One, IV, p.4

How Ambiguity Reveals Different "Senses" in the Bible

Last night, reading the Book of Revelation, we reviewed the "four senses" in which scripture is traditionally interpreted: the literal, and three "spiritual" senses, the allegorical (typological), tropological (moral), and anagogical (the future). This article quoted the Catechism (No. 118):

The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites a medieval couplet which summarizes these four senses: Lettera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia. (The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith; the Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.)

Robert Sokolowski has some interesting things to say about how different meanings can be discerned in ambiguity. In Eucharistic Presence (at p. 156-57), he says, of the literary trope of ambiguity:

"Ambiguity as a literary form does not mean inexactness in expression. . . Rather, ambiguity as a trope is the deliberate expression of two meanings in one phrase. It is the use of one set of words that can be taken in two senses. . ." Sokolowski uses as an example, some lines from T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton:

". . . as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."

Sokolowski says the word "still" is triply ambiguous: "'Still' can be taken as an adjective, an adverb, or a conjunction. The phrase could say that the Chinese jar is motionless (still) and yet moves; it could say that the ancient jar moves even now (still); and it could say that despite its stillness the jar nevertheless (still) moves. It is the interplay of all these meanings that gives the lines their force."

Sokolowski cites examples in the Gospel of John 5:24-26, in which the word "life" is used to mean not only the life that Jesus communicates to believers, but also the life that his Father shares with him:

Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to life.

25

Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.

26

For just as the Father has life in himself, so also he gave to his Son the possession of life in himself.

Jesus' mission from his Father is to share the life he possesses with us. "However, we can without straining read in the phrase another sense. We can hear an overtone to the dominant meaning. The second sense would refer to the eternal life that the Son has from the Father within the Holy Trinity. The obvious 'economic' sense of the statement is not without allusion to the 'immanent' trinitarian sense. "

Sokolowski goes on to say (p. 158) : "The literary ambiguities in the Fourth Gospel are possible because of the play of presentational dimensions that occurs in Christian belief. The simply worldly can be taken just as it is, but it can also be seen in an iconic way, as a manifestation of a dimension that transcends it. . . Such hints and ambiguities are not deficiencies but disclosures. . ."

In other words, the different senses in scripture's "ambiguities" make manifest to us not only the life that Jesus gives us, but also the eternal trinitarian life in which he participates. "The redemptive mission is profiled against the eternal procession. If the life Christ brings were not related to the life he has eternally from the father, the sense of our Redemption would be incompletely expressed." Ibid., p. 158.

Looking at it this way, we see that scriptural ambiguities "layer in" multiple truths and senses which must be unpacked for a fuller understanding of the God who created and loves us. The different senses do not lead us astray, and are not conflictual, but are part of scripture's richness and blessing.

Faithlessness and its Antidote

On the radio yesterday I listened to Ron Regan interview a researcher from Trinity College who recently issued a report finding that the number of "nones," those who report they belong to no religion, has increased by 10 percentage points since 1990.

Trinity sampled "more than fifty thousand Americans last year finding that seventy-six percent identified as Christians. That's a ten point decrease since 1990. The number claiming no religion has grown to fifteen percent of the population, behind only Catholics and Baptists." I heard on the radio that most "nones" are former Catholics. Not all become atheists, but all non-identify with the Catholic faith, the faith they grew up in or formerly espoused.

I think of lack of faith and despair as linked. Faith essentially believes in something "super" natural, i.e., that all does not end in natural death. Not to have faith is to believe that natural death ends everything, which is a form of despair (cutting off the air of hope).

Why this creeping fall of faith? I assume Rieff would have found it understandable given his view that a vanguard of nihilists are mounting a pressing attack on Judeo-Christian culture (the second culture he calls it), and its belief in a sacred self, "that identity which is to each his own, never having been before and never again to be. . ." Rieff (p. 102 of My Life Among the Deathworks). The sacred self has an identity only in relation to God (Not I/ I), for we are constituted in our identity (our "I") by our acceptance of responsibility to obey an Authority above us (a "Not I"), and by the guilt arising in the relation when we fail so to obey. Obedience to ourselves alone is untethered to Authority and takes us around in a circle of solipsism, going nowhere.

This attack on the sacred self has been proceeding apace for a century and more . and is becoming more vocal and trenchant. (Ron Regan is a confessed atheist himself and obviously wants to "spread the good news" about his anti-faith in discussing the growing faithlessness.)

How does one counter-attack? Interestingly enough, Rieff (p. 103 of My Life Among the Deathworks quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins (who faced the same "shatterings" of attacks in his lifetime, as the 20th Century loomed (1888)):

"Whatever the shatterings Hopkins felt threatened his and other sacred selves, perhaps precisely because of that threat, he composed the greatest passage on the God-relation of identity since Galatians 2:20. Despair shatters itself against the hard truth of Hopkins's sense of identity.

'I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This, Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.'" From Hopkins, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire.")

"Whatever the Jack, joke, mortal trash of our lives may be, our predicative relational identity, Not I/I supplies the resistant hardness of sacred self Hopkins blazons in every one's honor, each Not I/I an "immortal diamond." When I read Hopkins, as when I hear a Bach Mass, I am an honorary Christian."

As I read Rieff, and Hopkins, only Christ has broken the yoke of death, and so only Christ provides the antidote to the death rattle emitted by our cultural "betters." Only "in" Christ do we see in our matchwood and potsherd, the "immortal diamond" that "in truth" we are, the antidote to faithlessness and despair.

But who is voicing this loud and clear? Well, I know Rieff is, a Jew, and an honored "honorary Christian."

Putting His Arms Around a Child . . .

From yesterday's gospel reading:

"Taking a child, he placed it in the their midst,
and putting his arms around it, he said to them,
“Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me;
and whoever receives me,
receives not me but the One who sent me.”

I don't know if the Chicago Tribune follows the liturgical calendar,
but yesterday's front page story fit the gospel reading perfectly.

Christ's antidote to the general squabble for power and status was perfectly captured in this story of a family "surviving on faith" and yet opening their arms to children from Africa.
Keeping our eyes and ears open, we can find words of encouragement all around us, I believe!

What strikes me especially is Jesus' statement that in receiving a child, we receive Him. Is it possible that the powerlessness and total reliance a child has, and our embrace of the child in that light, is how we should embrace Christ? We think of Christ as the "Almighty" - why would he have any need of OUR assistance? It's the other way around. But isn't Jesus saying, "In embracing a child you embrace me, for I am powerless for you and rely on you." To me, this is a wholly new way of seeing Christ, i.e., as being in need of, or at least asking for, our embrace, our compassion and aid. But it makes sense if we are Christ's eyes and ears and hands on this earth. Our compassion for our neighbor bespeaks our compassion for Jesus, in his plight, until he comes in glory.

Molly Bloom Must Be a Saint!

I confess that my eyebrows went up when I read Fr. Barron's reference to Joyce in his Preface. The reason is that Philip Rieff, who I have been reading recently, cites Joyce as an artist of "deathworks," works of art that are the artist's vehicle to attack Judeo-Christian culture. (Oh, by the way, wasn't Ulysses the subject of a major obscenity trial?)

And so my question would be how to interpret Molly Bloom's "wonderfully rambling" stream of consciousness. It may be that Thomas Aquinas can say yes to all of his experience because he is a saint, and has closed down completely his "openness" to the possibility of personal evil. But as far as I am concerned the rest of us mere mortals are not in that exalted position. I wouldn't think Molly Bloom was either, but that I don't know.

For the unwashed masses, of which I count myself a member, I would suggest, on the authority of Rieff, that Bloom's (Joyce's?) attitude is exactly the opposite of what we should "embrace." Her attitude is a modern day heresy. Here's why (as I read Rieff).

In his book Charisma, Rieff claims that the path to spirituality is not a "Yes," but a "No," in fact, a string of nos extending throughout our lives. (Yeses are yesses to nos!) We are not Dionysians whose spirituality is the ecstacy of orgy -- an experience of all possibilities in sexual life and in life in general. For mere mortals like me, spirituality (and I would say Christian spirituality) is more an experience of purgatory, a succession of Nos (to instinct), the closing down of possibilities, the turning away from power (see my previous post). It cannot be a string of unconditional Yeses to "experience." (I remember in the 1960's and early 1970's friends saying they felt life had to be "experienced" -- mostly as a rationalization to smoke dope!)

Again, according to Rieff, modern heresy holds the opposite. At its extreme, it rejects not only the interdictory commands of the decalogue, but the very notion of commands, since the absolute commander, God, is either dead or has abandoned his post. Freedom is precisely found in saying Yes to instincts and desires (to the "life force!", the "energies"), since to say No on the basis of "guilt-producing rules" promulgated by some ancient and outmoded "god" is irrational, repressive and therefore positively unhealthy. There are many artists this day whose art advocates this view. (I think of "Madonna" for example.) These are artists we should avoid or expose for the damage they do to us mere mortals.

The real purpose of art (according to Rieff) is more than Fr. Barron's conveying "understanding;" it is to convey saving guilt. Think: "You must change your life." (Archaic Torso of Apollo, Rilke). True art, says Rieff, shows us our "true better," known by God, knowable by us, and when known by us, known as what we ought to be but are not. This knowledge is "true, oppositional, accusative, and personal." It is moral (not scientific) knowledge, and in its being known by us it prickles us with guilt, which is a sense of indebtedness to those whom we feel, deeply, we do not enough resemble (including our true, better, self).

"The great arts of a high culture are conveyances of this saving, renunciatory sense of what we are not but, stimulated by those arts, yet hope to be. All true works of art point out directions of renunciatory self-transformation." (Charisma, pp. 36-37). The purpose of true art is to "shut down possibilities," not open them up. Judging from this standard, many modern artists do not produce true art, despite all they may contribute to our "understanding" of the modern condition.

In this way of thinking, Molly Bloom's string of Yes's shows us the wrong "way" (cf.Ps.1). (Joyce may have left the message ambivalent, but isn't that too a defect in his art?) Thomas Aquinas might have been "unable to sin" -- and likewise Molly Bloom, confined to a sickbed -- but we surely aren't!

May I lastly suggest that too much spiritual reading, in striving to accommodate (and even celebrate) our Yeses, blunts Christ's crucial call, which is to "deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me." Seems to me, saying Yes to Christ's call starts with saying No.

At Saturday's Meeting

At our Saturday meeting we considered how James Joyce “has a distinctive take on things … which flow finally from Jesus of Nazareth” as contended by Fr. Barron in the opening paragraph. The book contains the following references to Joyce.

p. 20 “ … we turn to the artists of our time to understand the human condition … the multivalent and disquietingly off-centered inner monologues of Joyce’s characters ….

p. 76 “I can't help but see a link between this more classical Christian ideal of freedom and the wonderfully rambling monologue of Molly Bloom at the close of Joyce's Ulysses. The word that returns like a mantra in Molly's stream of consciousness, that echoes almost comically through the entire speech, and that brings the monologue and the novel as a whole to a close is "yes": “... and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so that he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." As she arranges imaginatively around the whole of her experience and affirms all of it, Molly, though physically confined to her bed, is supremely free, since she is able to say only "yes," drawing to her breast the whole of life. In this she is like the God of Thomas Aquinas who is "unable" to sin... consistently, almost compulsively, affirms, drawing to her breasts the energy of existence."

I’m not familiar with Joyce’s works and look to Mike Casey to explain to us how Fr. Barron's thesis might or might not be the case.

Deuteronomy Chapter 34:1-8

And Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And the LORD showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain, that is, the valley of Jericho the city of palm trees, as far as Zoar. And the LORD said to him, "This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, 'I will give it to your descendants.' I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there." So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD, and he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-pe’or; but no man knows the place of his burial to this day. Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated. And the people of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the days of weeping and mourning for Moses were ended.


“his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated”

I confessed one Saturday morning to my Cursillo group reunion that I was disturbed by a recent tendency that I had to become angry or upset, even discouraged, when confronted with the news of the day or certain people's behavior. I was upset that I was assuming an attitude of anger at the world as opposed to maintaining a sense of awe of the world.

My world was in a turmoil. An economic turmoil because markets had crashed, retirement fund values had shrunk, the cost of living was on its way up. Bombarded every day by stock market quotes every 10 minutes, the number of jobs lost last month, and a shrinking GDP, it was difficult to maintain a lighthearted attitude.

My world is in a political turmoil. I was constantly informed of the new proposed health-care reform, being told the horror stories about “death panels”, about losing the ability to choose my own doctor, of not being able to obtain the latest, cutting edge treatments. I heard stories about people requiring medical treatments they couldn't afford and had no insurance coverage to pay for them.

My world is in an emotional turmoil. Every day I wake up and a different body part is malfunctioning. I'd like to reduce the amount of time that I work at my job, but, we're in an economic recession and my employer is making increasing demands on my time in an effort to reduce costs and keep the company afloat.

So with all these concerns swirling around in my head I found myself sitting on August 12 at a Wednesday morning Mass listening to those words from Deuteronomy. "His eye was not dim nor his natural forces abated." At age 120. What was his secret? How was his world brightened? How did he maintain an enthusiastic and awe filled spirit?

After all, he did his people the favor of freeing them from slavery, he led them to a new land, it took him 40 years. All the while his people grumbled and complained about how hard life was. They did nothing but worry about where their next meal was coming from. They gave up on God and created their own idols to worship. Only once did he exhibit a lack of faith and for this he was forbidden to enter the promised land. How much more could have been heaped upon Moses? Yet when he died his eye was not dim and his vigor unabated.

Of course, we all know that it was easier for Moses. He had direct access to God, saw him face to face. We don't have that resource to keep our spirit alive and invigorated. But we do have hope. We can keep our eye, not on our political, economic, emotional turmoil's, but on the Lord. Our faith tells us that we can rely on him to provide the light to keep the eye of our heart bright. We can rely on his Spirit to enlighten us and provide our bodies with the energy needed to maintain our vigor.

So with these goals in mind, to take the focus off our turmoil, to keep our eye on the Lord, we begin another year of exploring our Christian spirituality. Our meetings may be a distraction from the very important tasks that we need to carry out on a Saturday morning, but, it is a way to look toward the light.

How do you know you are "Spiritual"?

From Philip Rieff's Charisma (at p. 21):

Spirituality, as Kierkegaard knew, is a way of opting out of the fight to be a man of power. It is to "live as though dead," i.e., without power. But spirituality so threatens ordinary men, who want their fill of things, to conquer and digest, that they demand "the death of the man of spirit," or rush upon him "to put him to death." This is how it came about, concluded Kierkegaard, that Christ was crucified. There are two kinds of death-dealing: God's and man's. When the spirit strikes, it kills the assertion of the body, self-assertions. When the body strikes, it kills the assertion of the spirit, God's assertion.

So spirituality is a turning away from possibility, not "going for it," not grasping, thrusting, wresting, seizing, overpowering, possessing, controlling, taking, using, wanting. Since "power corrupts" one finds the spiritual man in the act of running the other way. I run alot, but usually in the wrong direction.

Spiritual Guides

I was in love with St. Augustine for a while. After years on my bookshelf, I finally managed to read his Confessions. Why did his writting appeal to me? It was introspective and personal. Pope Benedict in his prior role as Cardinal put it this way, "With Augustine ... the passionate, suffering, questioning man is always right there, and you can identify with him."

My current love affair is with Hans Urs von Balthasar. He was a prolific thinker and writter as well. Why did I fall in love with him? It was Richard Neuhaus' fault. I read the following commentary by Fr. Neuhaus on his writtings in an issue of First Things.

"He went in for heavy-duty intellection that is sometimes ponderous and exhaustingly discursive, but always adorned with dazzling erudition and rewarding one's effort with scintillating insights of a frequently counterintuitive nature. One spends pleasurable hours reading Balthasar not so much in an analytical mode as in surrendering oneself to the beauty of how his mind works and its adventurous probings of theological imagination. Reading Balthasar is in large part a meditative exercise bordering on the contemplative."

In the opening pages of volume one of Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics he observes that if man is to live in his original form “one must possess a spiritual eye capable of perceiving the forms of existence with awe. … a life-form which is determined … to bestow nobility upon a person’s everyday life itself.”

So began my desire to develop an eye capable of perceiving with awe the ordinary life I live and to believe it to be a noble endeavor.

I fall in love easily. The thing about love though, is that it is infinitely distensible.

Flannery O'Connor's "Yahwist" Fundamentalism

After reading Phillip Rieff (and his idea of personality arising only from a humble relationship with the absolute), I found what Robert Brinkmeyer said in The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor most interesting (at p. 29):

"Herbert N. Schneidau, in Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition, argues that a profoundly skeptical and self-critical approach to reality characterizes the vision of the Bible and its prophets. Scheidau terms this vision Yahwist and says its central tenet is that an absolute gulf separates humanity from an all-powerful God. Quoting from Henri Frankfort, "Every finite reality is shriveled to nothingness before the absolute value which was God."

According to Brinkmeyer, O'Connor's vision of Christ is essentially Yahwist, "the Son of God characteristically arriving not with outstretched hand but with swinging sword." Only God's violence, according to O'Connor, can penetrate the hubris and blindness of the modern soul. This is the only surgery that can heal us.

We started reading Revelation with Matt Pozen last week, and the first chapters do depict Christ with a sword in his mouth (though also later as a "lamb"). Matt offered a good interpretation of the double-nature of the sword: Christ worries the complacent and comforts the worried.

Life presents its banes and benefices. But we need to "worry ourselves" more than we often do in order to lay ourselves open to divine action, which is creative and healing.

In this regard I note that von Balthesar in TheoDrama (vol III at p. 208) quotes Revelation in connection with the possibility of becoming a person, i.e., the possibility of a "conscious subject to rise above his natural level to that of the ("super-natural") person." Balthasar says,

"In positive terms, this presupposes that the created spirit, man, can be an image (imago) of God; negatively, it implies that he is deficient and needs to be perfected and given a "likeness" (similitudo) to God; such a likeness can only be imparted by God, in Christ. This deepening or elevation of the conscious subject does not alienate the latter from himself but enables him to "come to himself", a view consistently put forward by the Fathers. . . . When a man comes to God, he truly comes to himself for the first time. Held by God, the prime Person, man becomes genuinely personal. The truth of human nature is the divine truth. Person is the "new name" by which God addresses me (Rev 2:17) and which comes from "the beginning of God's creation" (Rev 3:14); it always implies a task, namely to be "a pillar in the temple of my God." (Rev. 3:12).

Why the reference to Revelation? This book's "prophetic" attitude of skepticism toward one's merits, and a consequent beating of one's breast, shows the only workable attitude toward the Almighty, Christ included. Only an attitude of humble consciousness of our sinfulness can lay ourselves open to be raised up by Christ to personhood. This seems to be one of Revelation's messages.

So, it seems to me that we become persons in fear and trembling, not through the "I'm OK, you're OK" of high self-esteem. We're not OK! Unless we are in "the way" toward Heaven, i.e., toward becoming a person, we are on a path to perdition, to dissolution and death.

Sounds like good, orthodox fundamentalism to me!

Indvidualism and Personalism

I always wondered at the source for this central passage in Gaudium et Spez (24):

"Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may be one. . . as we are one" (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.(2)" (emphasis added)

Here is what Emmanuel Mounier said in his Personalism (at pp 18-19):

"Other persons do not limit [the person], they enable it to be and to grow. The person only exists thus towards others, it only knows itself in knowing others, only finds itself in being known by them. The thou, which implies the we, is prior to the I-- or at least accompanies it. . . . But the person is only growing in so far as he is continually purifying himself from the individual within him. He cannot do this by force of self-attention, but on the contrary by making himself available (Gabriel Marcel) and thereby more transparent both to himself and others. Things then happen as though the person, no longer 'occupied with himself' or 'full of himself', were becoming able -- then and thus only -- to be someone else and to enter into grace." (emphasis added)

Mounier did battle against what he called Individualism. Here is what he said about it:

"Individualism is a system of morals, feelings, ideas and institutions in which individuals can be organized by their mutual isolation and defence. This was the ideology and the prevailing structure of Western bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries. Man in the abstract, unattached to any natural community, the sovereign lord of a liberty unlimited and udirected; turning towards others with a primary mistrust, calculation and self-vindication; institutions restricted to the assurance that these egoism should not encroach upon one another, or to theri betterment as a purely profitmaking association -- such is the rule of civilization now breaking up before our eyes, one of the poorest history has known. It is the very antithesis of personalism and its dearest enemy."

Mounier said that the impetus for his Personalist Manifesto was the world stock market crash and a world lurching from war to war. His work was echoed in many respects by Gabriel Marcel. These thinkers sowed the seeds which blossomed in Vatican II, and are flowering even now.

Sin and Chaos in Dostoyevsky

In reading Crime and Punishment I was struck by the disorientation experienced by Raskolnikov following the murders. Here is how the last part of Part I of the book (Chapter VII) ends as Raskolnikov returns to his room after the murder:

"When he was in his room, he flung himself on the sofa just as he was— he did not sleep, but sank into blank forgetfulness. If anyone had come into his room then, he would have jumped up at once and screamed. Scraps and shreds of thoughts were simply swarming in his brain, but he could not catch at one, he could not rest on one, in spite of all his efforts…"

Raskonikov's mind and spirit have seemingly disintegrated into chaos. Dostoyevsky seems to be making the point that sin breaks down the created world into chaos and disorder, ultimately destroying the sinner, unless he repents and again submits to God's law. The suffering caused in this "fall" into chaos is excruciating, as is the struggle for repentance, but this is the only path upward to salvation. This is also the outline of the Christian story, with Christ as the salve who can lead us to salvation, just as he did, in the character of Sonia, for Raskolnikov. Only love heals and brings together what sin has driven apart and destroyed.

The "New Freedom"

Reading that the Lutherans have okayed ordination of non-celibate homosexuals led me to think of the fundamental distinction drawn between Catholic and Protestant attitudes by Sister Rose Mary Gertrude, in her Renouncement in Dante:

"The mark that Catholics have put upon their poetry without deliberation, while children of the Reformation have unconsciously or deliberately omitted it, is the imprint of renouncement: the Sign of the Cross. Not otherwise may the reader distinguish the Catholic from the non-Catholic poet. The Jew and the Pagan have retained the old idea of sacrifice; and their poetry like that of the Catholic reflects the spirit of renouncement.

"The Reformation, from the first moment of its inception, substituted for the idea of personal sacrifice the belief that the death of the Redeemer was all-sufficing for those who trust and love Him. Altars were removed from churches, soon divorces were granted, the commandments of the old Church with their restrictions, were rejected as Pope-imposed shackles and there went abroad the idea that Faith alone was sufficient. A new Freedom was born, a freedom which meant absence of restraint to desire.

"Freedom to the old school of poets had meant absence of obstacles to the will. The domination of that will over every opposing force, even over personal inclination, was their notion of absolute human freedom. It is the Catholic definition of freedom today."

How to Gain Self-Esteem?

I saw a review of "NutureShock", a new book on child development. It basically says that a lot of "accepted" thinking is poppycock. "A striking example is the latest research on self-esteem. As [the authors] remind us, the psychologist Nathaniel Brandon published a path-breaking paper in 1969 called "The Psychology of Self-Esteem" in which he argued that feelings of self-worth were a key to success in life. The theory became a big hit in the nation's schools; in the mid-1980s, the California Legislature even established a self-esteem task force. By now, there are 15,000 scholarly articles on the subject.

"And what do they show? That high self-esteem doesn't improve grades, reduce anti-social behavior, deter alcohol drinking or do much of anything good for kids. In fact, telling kids how smart they are can be counterproductive. Many children who are convinced that they are little geniuses tend not to put much effort into their work. Others are troubled by the latent anxiety of adults who feel it necessary to praise them constantly."

Another "guru" dethroned. (Brandon was a notorious cohort of Ayn Rand, by the way.)

So where does individuality and self-confidence come from? Here from Phillip Rieff:

"It is important to note that, in the development of Western culture, the meaning of discipline cannot be separated from its credal animus. [read: Judeo Christian heritage]. The conformity of action in mass organization is anti-credal. Deep individuality cannot exist except in relation to the highest authority. No inner discipline can operate without a charismatic institution, nor can such an institution survive without that supreme authority from a relation to whom self-confidence derives. Without an authority deeply installed, there is no foundation for individuality. Self-confidence thus expresses submission to supreme authority."

Rather "counter-cultural" thinking, don't you think? ONLY through adherence to our creed can we develop -- in our deep humility and guilt -- self-confidence and individuality.

(If you want a good example of charismatic authority personified, watch Monsieur Vincent, a 1947 movie which you can get at the public library. Then start to watch for them [I think we used to call them saints!].)

The Personal Practice of Renunciation

I've learned something very important from Phillip Rieff, namely, that I recognize who I am only by "saying no" to instinct. This I do in the guilty knowledge (of what I know I am capable of) against the light of God's absolute moral authority.

"Knowledge derived from the authority of charisma is no intellectual acceptance of renunciations; rather, ordinary everyday charisma, the practical personal knowledge of all, is the personal practice of renunciation. We learn on our bodies." Charisma, p 40.

The opposite is therapy, the renunciation of all renunciations. The world we (are invited to) live in more and more offers therapy, urging us to give up giving up. But only in renunciation can we live into our ideal selves in the loving, awful moral gaze of the Almighty.

There is a poem by Caroline Giltinan ("Achievement") which captures this, I think:

"The biggest thing I ever did
Was all inside of me;
There was a battle hardly won
With only God to see."

Before we move on to other things

Fr. John Neuhaus in his book "American Babylon" has a chapter on whether or not an athiest can be a good citizen.

He offers the following quote from Pope Benedict XVI in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved in Hope).

"The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is-in its origins and aims--a type of moralism. It is a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested."

Neuhaus offers another quote.

Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the papal household, takes our question from a different angle:

The world of today knows a new category of people: the atheists in good faith, those who live painfully the situ­ation of the silence of God, who do not believe in God but do not boast about it; rather they experience the ex­istential anguish and the lack of meaning of everything: They too, in their own way, live in the dark night of the spirit. Albert Camus called them "the saints without God." The mystics exist above all for them; they are their travel and table companions. Like Jesus, they "sat down at the table of sinners and ate with them" (see Luke 15:2). This explains the passion with which cer­tain atheists, once converted, pore over the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, the two Maritains, L. Bloy, the writer J. K. Huysmans and so many others over the writings of Angela of Foligno; T. S. Eliot over those of Julian of Norwich. There they find again the same scenery that they had left, but this time illumi­nated by the sun.... The word "atheist" can have an ac­tive and a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also one who-at least so it seems to him-is rejected by God. In the first case, it is a blameworthy atheism (when it is not in good faith), in the second an atheism of sorrow or of expiation.

Neuhaus offers evidence of the fact that our country's founding priciples rely on a certain belief that there is a God whose divine hand must be reflected in the way we govern ourselves.

His answer to the question of whether or not an athiest can be a good citizen is offered in the following quote from the last pages of this chapter.

"In such a nation, an atheist can be a citizen, but he cannot be a good citizen. A good citizen does more than abide by the laws. A good citizen is able to give an ac­count, a morally compelling account, of the regime of which he is part-and to do so in continuity with the constituting moment and subsequent history of that regime. He is able to justify its defense against its ene­mies, and to convincingly recommend its virtues to citi­zens of the next generation so that they, in turn, can transmit the order of government to citizens yet unborn. This regime of liberal democracy, of republican self­governance, is not self-evidently good and just. An ac­count must be given. Reasons must be given. They must be reasons that draw authority from that which is higher than ourselves, from that which transcends us, from that to which we are precedently, ultimately, obliged."

Reflection While Showering

I was showering early in the afternoon on one of those rare weekdays that I was off from work. The hot water felt so wonderful trickling down my body creating a sense of warmth and comfort. [Warning; please do not try to envision this scene as it may be detrimental in producing the intended effect of this reflection.]

This is not the first time that the following thoughts have occurred to me. Quite often it occurs to me, while showering, that I have been particularly blessed by God with the ability to perform such an everyday function. A function which is not readily available to many people in this world.

And so my thoughts go from the blessings of the shower to a consideration of the many other blessings, small and large, that have been heaped upon me by the good Lord. And my mind naturally turns toward gratitude. It is not that I feel that I don't express gratitude for these blessings, rather I ask myself the question, "Do I show enough gratitude?" Of course, I'm asking myself this question in the comfort of a nice home in a nice suburb, living a life in which I have wanted for very little. Most of my time is spent tending to the small everyday tasks that I find necessary. Do I spend enough of my time, talent, and treasure in gratitude to the Lord for all he has given me? I don't know and it's probably a question I'll be asking myself when I am asked to meet Him.

Whenever I express this idea to others they often respond that I might be just a little guilty of scrupulosity. Perhaps I am. Who of us is able, though, to go through life without considering such a question? Do I give enough? I'll never know the answer in this life. I do think however that regardless of what the answer to that question might be at any point in time I should strive all the time to be more like St. Francis who was willing to give it all away or more like St. Therese who was willing to spend her entire life praying and serving others.

Lord help me to be equal to the task. Amen

Actions, Not Intentions, Make Us Who We Are

Joseph Brodsky, 1987 Literature Nobel Prize winner, wrote a poem each Christmas for many years, all of which are collected in his book, Nativity Poems. In an interview at the end of the book, the interviewer asks Brodsky what kind of believer he is. Brodsky comments he is not firmly convicted, but believes "Calvinist." In explanation he says, "Why I say Calvinist -- not particularly seriously -- is because according to Calvinist doctrine man answers to himself for everything. That is, he is his own Judgment Day, to some extent. I don't have the strength to forgive myself. And, on the other hand, I don't feel any particular attraction or respect for anyone who could forgive me. When I was younger, I tried to figure this all out for myself. But at some point I realized that I am the sum of all my actions, my acts, and not the sum of my intentions."

I agree with his attitude: Our actions build us and render us unto judgment.

The connection between our actions and self-possession is explicitly recognized by the author of James (1:22-25):

"Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the owrd and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his own face in a mirror. He sees himself, then goes off and promptly forgets what he looked like. But the one who peers into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres, and is not a hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, such a one shall be blessed in what he does."

Teilhard at Vespers

It has been a while snce I've posted anything to the blog. In doing this post I discovered that many of you had not been invited to participate. An oversight I hope that I've corrected.
The following editorial was published in the August 17-24, 2009 issue of America the Jesuit magazine. It is lengthy but good stuff.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Teilhard at Vespers
The church seems forever to be embracing those she once held in suspicion. Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer, is the most famous among them. But there are others, too, like Thomas Aquinas, Joan of Arc and Ignatius Loyola. The most recent candidate for rehabilitation is the Jesuit paleontologist, evolutionary philosopher and spiritual writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vatican watchers have taken note of Pope Benedict XVI's appeal to Teilhard during an evening prayer service he celebrated July 24 in Aosta, Italy, as a sign of re­appraisal of the priest and his thought. Citing Teilhard's `great vision;' Pope Benedict urged that "we consecrate the world, so it may become a living host;' a phrase reminiscent of the French Jesuit's eucharistic theology, in which all cre­ation becomes an offering to God.
Teilhard articulated his vision during an expedition to the Ordos Desert of Inner Mongolia in 1923. Lacking the elements of unleavened bread and wine to celebrate Mass, he composed a poetic prayer, "Mass on the World" (pub­lished in Hymn of the Universe; Harper, 1961), offering the whole of creation in its evolutionary history as a host to God. Pope Benedict has previously praised the sense of cos­mic liturgy in the Eastern church. His appeal to Teilhard adds the distinctive resonances of the Frenchman's vision: a cosmos evolved over time and increasingly known by scien­tific investigation; a spiritual process that comes to con­sciousness in humanity, a humanity whose spirituality is found in activity as well as passivity; and a humanity called not only to live in the world but also to transform it.
The pope's prayer in fact puts emphasis on our obliga­tion to "transform the world:" In adopting this theme, his thinking seems to have developed along the same trajectory as that of Pope John Paul II. After the Second Vatican Council, both expressed dismay at the optimistic, Teilhardian tone of the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World;' with its focus on the cosmic Christ and its affirmation of the transformative power of the resurrection in history. ....

The pope appears to acknowledge that the kind of sensibility Teilhard possessed belongs to the full flowering of our human nature. To an unexpected degree, he voices trust in the graced capacity of human beings to transform the world and in so doing make it a more fitting offering to God. ...

Like Teilhard, Pope Benedict reminds us that the world we transform by our labor, our learning and our inge­nuity contributes to Christ's great offering of the world to God. The pope has pointed to an array of problems await­ing solution and transformation: the protection of human life and the environment, the expansion of the "responsibil­ity to protect' to include provision of food and water for needy populations, and the creation of international struc­tures to regulate speculation in financial markets and gov­ern a global economy. Will American Catholics rise to the occasion, leading our fellow citizens to meet these chal­lenges by taking new initiatives on behalf of the human fam­ily? Or will we allow ourselves to fall back, enthralled by the idols of self-aggrandizement and self-amusement that so captivate our culture?Decline is our civilization's future if recovery from the global fiscal crisis returns to the consumerist pattern of the late 20th-century America. Consumption has its place in creating a floor of material well-being. But after a point it becomes debilitating to the soul and to society. The trans­formation of the world certainly involves the expansion of markets-not primarily among the affluent, however, but rather among the poor. Furthermore, human creativity needs to be directed by fuller aspirations than improvements in material welfare alone, because human beings are more and desire more: aesthetically, intellectually, athletically, eco­logically, religiously. In whatever field we endeavor to trans­form the world-science, engineering, communications, business, the arts-we must aim at promoting sustainable, fully human development at rising levels of well-being for all and for everyone. At the end, when this transformation has reached its fullness, as Teilhard wrote, "the presence of Christ, which has been silently accruing in things, will sud­denly be revealed-like a flash of light from pole to pole:"

From a review of de Jouvenal's book, On Power: It's Nature and the History of Its Growth, by Jude P. Dougherty:

"One of the pitfalls of democracy is its lack of accountability. The popular will is easily manipulated. It recognizes no authority outside itself that possesses the strength to limit its excesses."

"The kings of old, the personification of power, were possessed of personality, possessed of passions good and bad. More often than not, their sense of responsibility led them to will 'the good' for their people. Power within a democracy, by contrast, resides in a faceless and impersonal bureaucracy that claims to have no existence of its own and becomes the anonymous, impersonal, passionless instrument of what is presumed to be the general will."

"Writing in France when the Roosevelt administration was barely 10 years old, de Jouvenal feared the long range danger posed by the many regulatory commissions created by that administration. He saw that agencies possessing at once legislative, executive, and judicial control could operate largely outside of public control and become tyrannical."

I thought of this this when I read that the PBS Board of Directors recently decided that no new religioius programming would be allowed on the "public" airways. It grandfathered in existing religious programming, like Mass For Shut-ins in various locations, but will not allow new overtly religious programming in its outlets. Its justification is that when it comes to religion, there's no pleasing anyone.

For more, see Fr. Barron's recent column and his argument that since PBS allows overtly anti-religious programming, its new position is unfair.

This from the Wall Street Journal on June 26, 2009:

By Laurence Krauss, a cosmologist, is director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University. His most recent book is "Hiding in the Mirror" (Viking, 2005).

"Messrs. Harris and Dawkins are simply being honest when they point out the inconsistency of belief in an activist god with modern science.

"J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a "god, angel, or devil" will interfere with one's experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.

"Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.

"While such a leap may not be unimpeachable it is certainly rational, as Mr. McGinn pointed out at the World Science Festival. Though the scientific process may be compatible with the vague idea of some relaxed deity who merely established the universe and let it proceed from there, it is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world's organized religions. As Sam Harris recently wrote in a letter responding to the Nature editorial that called him an "atheist absolutist," a "reconciliation between science and Christianity would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions."

"When I confronted my two Catholic colleagues on the panel with the apparent miracle of the virgin birth and asked how they could reconcile this with basic biology, I was ultimately told that perhaps this biblical claim merely meant to emphasize what an important event the birth was. Neither came to the explicit defense of what is undeniably one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.

"Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Moreover, the true believers in each of these faiths are atheists regarding the specific sacred tenets of all other faiths. Christianity rejects the proposition that the Quran contains the infallible words of the creator of the universe. Muslims and Jews reject the divinity of Jesus.

"So while scientific rationality does not require atheism, it is by no means irrational to use it as the basis for arguing against the existence of God, and thus to conclude that claimed miracles like the virgin birth are incompatible with our scientific understanding of nature.

"Finally, it is worth pointing out that these issues are not purely academic. The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma.

"Perhaps the most important contribution an honest assessment of the incompatibility between science and religious doctrine can provide is to make it starkly clear that in human affairs -- as well as in the rest of the physical world -- reason is the better guide."

How does one respond to a position like this?

One response is that reason itself is a reflection of God's presence and guiding hand. Where could the "reasonable" come from?

Another is that science as a methodology is limited to evaluating material causes, and thus never gets to God because God is outside nature and his workings are utterly beyond our comprehension. Humility about human reason's ability to comprehend God seems eminently reasonable.

Yet another is that science is just one example of man's concerns, to which he applies his reason, if he can. Other, more important concerns about birth and death, right and wrong, justice and injustice, suffering and mercy, and all of the immensely important imponderables, are not amenable to determination by science, because they are not material. Perhaps they may not be penetrated by human reason at all. Yet these concerns are the most important we face as humans.

In this regard, I read this recently by Edwin O'Connor, a Catholic novelist, in The Edge of Sadness (p 128 - 129). (The narrator is a Catholic priest, and in this passage talks about the death of his father. The novel was published in 1961.)

"And so my father died. All through his illness I had said my Mass for him each morning; every day and every night I had prayed that he might be allowed either the miracle of recovery or the blessing of a happy death. These prayers were not answered. My father did not recover, and he died witless and in pain. Any why this should have been I have no idea at all. He was a very good man who had lived a very good life -- yet he died a very cruel death. This is the hardest sort of thing to accept; for some, it's impossible. Because here is the old, baffling problem which has always been with us and will be until the end of time: the problem of reconciling pain and suffering with an omnipotent and merciful God. There are all sorts of answers suggested to this problem, most of which are as old as the problem itself; some oare foolish, others are as reasonable as the mind of man could possibly devise. But here it seems to me we deal with something reason cannot reach, and with that part of man which reason does not touch, for when someone stands fixed and helpless before another's suffering -- especially in those cases when those who suffer are plainly innocent of any guilt -- then the cool like of reason may not be of much help. A syllogism does not support a mother who has seen her baby burned. And here, I think, faith comes in. I myself believe there is no such thing as purposeless pain or suffering, though I must confess that for much of it I can see no purpose at all. But the point is that if one accepts God, one accepts Him totally, accepts what He does and what He permits. One accepts it, but one does not necessarily understand it. Surely it's a question of vision, for as we are, we can see, but only to the corner; we cannot begin to see the whole design. . . "

Kraus' view of science seems imperialistic in that he places science in the driver's seat and places "faith" in the realm of darkness and superstition. It sounds like scientism, which holds that science is the only way that reality can be grasped rationally. But we know that science can build bombs but not keep them from being used. Only a different kind of wisdom can solve the human dilemmas we face.

I also find no basis for Kraus' claim that all "religious dogma" is essentially the same, and that Christian beliefs are essentially no different than the extreme Islamic beliefs of the Iranian state's mullahs. It should be obvious to all except the most prejudiced that religious beliefs are not identical. We may think our beliefs are right, but reason also tells us that opposing views cannot both be right. Both can be wrong, and one can be right.

If it only were so easy as Kraus suggests.

"84 Charing Cross Road"

This 1987 film depicts the post-WWII correspondence between a Jewish NY script writer interested in British literature and a London bookseller operating from the address that is the title of the movie. It shows how two unlikely aficionados of antiquarian books strike up a warm-hearted correspondence and the inner and outer life they share as a result. I heartily recommend the movie, which you can get at the library.

One scene in the film shows Joan Bancroft, who plays the Jewish scriptwriter, carefully cradling and caressing a leather bound volume, with pages trimmed in gold, as she ponders its heft, its richness and beauty, and its history and contents.

This is how beauty is to be appreciated, as I read recently in an article about Iris Murdoch's views on art, which reflected Simone Weil's views as well. The article states, "learning to appreciate beauty is a matter of learning to attend properly to beautiful things, which means learning to contemplate both their integrity or unity, their independent reality, and often learning to contemplate the aspects of reality to which they direct us by their truthful representation of the world."

The author of the article goes on to say, "[t]he thought of Simone Weil behind this . . . is that to recognise an object as beautiful is to refrain from consuming it, to want it not to change; the experience of the beautiful thus places a check on the ego's desire to ingest reality, to project its own fantasies and desires upon the world in which it finds itself. It works to disrupt the self's addiction to illusion and its refusal to accept reality as it truly is, and thereby purifies our consciousness."

The author states that this "orientation to the truth" requires the discipline of truthfulness, a transcending of egotism, "a deepening capacity to place the self properly in the world, which can only be done by recognising the reality and value of that which is not the self." This, says Murdoch, is a "spiritual pilgrimmage (transformation-renewal-salvation)."

This transformation, the author says, is at the "centre and essence of morality." "The essentially egoistic energies that permeate and generate the texture of the self's everyday inner life . . . can be transformed only by transforming their orientation; they must be re-directed, away from the ego and its interests and toward that which is not the ego. The broadest characterization of the various techniques by which this transformation can be effected is that of attending to particulars: we must either attune our consciousness to its objects, or (if we fail) those objects will be attuned to one's consciousness, to its fantasies and distortions, for on Murdoch's account, the reality of our world is determined, the facts are set up as such, by the morally inflected discriminations of our consciousness. In this sense, every subject has the objects it deserves."

In other words, the subjective willingness to let things (and persons) be what they are, an attitude called truthfulness (and respect), is what permits the world (and persons) to be experienced as they truly are. The enjoyment of beauty is the fruit of that attitude since goodness and beauty are garmets of the true. Responsibility for truthfulness is at the core of human morality, and requires self-mastery and renunciation. Says the author, truthfulness "often feels like deprivation, since it demands that we deprive ourselves of consoling pictures of reality in favor of ones less gratifying to our egos."

A religious dimension in the discipline of truthfulness isn't hard to detect. Conversion is the same process of turning away from (ego-induced) falsehood to the truth. The pain suffered from this conversion ushers us into the temple of truth, with its sacred beauty and goodness, experienced in joy, together with the silent, transcendental Being that is its inhabitant, source and foundation. Thus appropos is another comment of Simone Weil: "All art of the highest order is religious in essence."

Stephen Mulhall, "Misplacing freedom, displacing the imagination," p. 258-260 in Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, Ed. Anthony O'Hear (Cambridge University, 2000). The references to Simone Weil are to Gravity and Grace, pp. 137.

Therese of Lisieux, Theology and Love

I read a review on the First Things website of a new biography of St. Therese that, while the reviewer was appreciative of the author's fleshing out of the setting of 19th century French Catholicism, he was a bit critical of the author's approach to Therese's spirituality. The last three paragraphs of the review are what struck me:

The proper images for understanding Little Thérèse are not those of modern theology, which tends to promote unfortunate and untenable dichotomies between official church teachings and a living faith, or, as Nevin put it, between “the historical complex of creeds, council statements, theologies, and decrees,” which he suggests “fade before a radical intimacy with Jesus.”

Instead, if we attend to her writings, we see that Thérèse suggests an illuminative rather than critical method. Thérèse takes church teaching about heaven and hell, sin and grace, Christology and ecclesiology and puts them into strikingly fresh forms. She is not critiquing the male priesthood when she imagines her priestly vocation; she is helping us see the universal priesthood of all believers. She is not denying the existence of hell; she is testifying to the omnipotent power of divine love. The truths of the faith are servant truths—they serve the Truth of Christ. They do not fade or fall away. Instead, when used properly, they become ever more luminous with the light of Christ.

As John Paul II observed when he announced Thérèse as a doctor of the church, her radical awareness of her spiritual childhood teaches a fundamental truth. The breath of Christ’s love fans even the smallest spark of desire for him in our hearts. It’s something we all need to hear. But Thérèse also has a lesson for theologians. We should beware the modern tendency to explain the dry limitations we so often feel in the official language of church teaching with easy dichotomies between spirit and letter. The problem is not in the obvious fact that a creed or a council decree is not the living Word of God. As Thérèse’s “little way” suggests, the dryness comes from the poverty of our love.

I thought this was an excellent reminder when we too often try to pit the Church and her teachings against "faith", or organized religion against spirituality.

Easter Hope

I went to the Confirmation Mass tonight. I went to see some of my kids confirmed; kids in the flock that I've had the good fortune to be able to share my faith with for the past two years. The following reading was given by one of the confirmandi, Katherine Janoski. I know Katherine, not very well, but, well enough to be assured that the passing on of our faith is in good hands.

The first reading, though, is one that has always imbued me with a profound sense of family. Of being part of a family lead by someone who loves me and wants me, someone who is willing to look past my transgressions and in spite of them hugs me and pulls me to his bosom.

From Ezekiel Chapter 36,

24 For I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26 A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. 28 You shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.

He has made us his own. Does not that invoke in you that feeling of safety and comfort you felt as a child when pulled into your mother's bosom, all insecurities vanished, the pain went away, and all fears receded to nothingness. What an awesome God we have. How greatly he elevates us despite our unworthiness.

What a great message for our confirmandi! Perhaps, as those who have been born into a loving family, as those who have always been approached as having an innate sense of self-worth, the message of Ezekiel does not hold much impact. But, for those of us who have accumulated experiences that show how alone we can be and how much our own destructive inclinations can pull us away from God, we can see and feel in these words a deeper meaning and a great comfort.

What an awesome God we have! I see it in his mercy and I see it in our children.

To "act" is to live!

One purpose of a retreat is to awaken us to the truth that the truth is to be lived, acted out, not only thought. Unless I live the truth I think, my truth is not incarnated. But thinking is needed too because our emotions and passions must be informed and trained by reason. And reason tells me that parts must be understood together with their wholes in order to be really understood, so they can really be lived.

In order to see a whole one must see "ends." An end is that for which a thing exists. As an example, the end of the art of medicine is the restoration and maintenance of the condition called health. I can have many "purposes" in practicing medicine -- to gain wealth, for prestige, to help people -- but unless I conform my art of medicine to its "end" -- securing health -- I am not respecting the nature of medicine, its true end, in my actions. The morality of our actions is determined by the ends of the material of our actions, not by our purposes. As Aristotle said in the Poetics, "all human happiness or misery takes the form of action." (Poetics 5.1450a17-19). In other words, our actions will make us miserable or happy, depending on whether we respect the ends inherent in our actions.

Another topical example of ends is sex. A "part" of sex, of course, is pleasure, but its "end" is the unity open to procreation (the birthing and rearing of children). To restrict our focus to pleasure, to use technology to eliminate the end, in effect, to make the part the whole, is to misunderstand the nature of the sexual, its proper end, and to warp it, by human purpose, away from what it is by nature. That is living a fiction, a similitude, a "sin."

Francis Slade* mentions the films of Quentin Tarentino (Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers) as depicting a world in which there are only the purposes of human beings, a "world without ends." Such a world is a world of purposes and cross purposes, a world of violence, "the definition of fiasco." "A world of fiasco is a world in which guilt is impossible, because guilt requires responsibility for actions, and there are actions only if purposes are measured by ends." In a world without proper actions, the world degenerates into a despairing meaninglessness. Another term is nihilism.

To restate, living requires reasoned actions, which in turn require an understanding of the "whole" of things, including things' proper "ends." Our calling is to act, to incarnate our "holistic" reason into action, respecting things' ends. That is to live!

*Francis Slade, "On the Ontological Priority of Ends And Its Relevance to the Narrative Arts."

This week's meeting

Bob's out of town, so I've been put in charge of the meeting for the week (Oh, boy!).

We'll try to finish up Screwtape this Saturday, so read to the end if you can. I'll try to remember to grab some donuts and coffee on the way.

Thanks!

Matthew Popkes

Recognizing Mystery

Gabriel Marcel in his The Mystery of Being is investigating into "the essence of spiritual reality" (p.1) -- including in the human person -- in a world of science and technique in which the human recedes into anonymity (p.6), and power, efficiency, technique, and bureaucracy assert their dominance. Marcel wrote in 1949, 1950 against the background of World War II, but the situation he describes is certainly recognizable today, I think.

In such a world where are mystery and presence to be found? Marcel offers as an example, a sleeping child:

"From the point of view of physical activity. . . the possible grasping of things, the sleeping child is completely unprotected and appears to be utterly in our power; from that point of view, it is permissible for us to do what we like with the child. But from the point of view of mystery, we might say that it is just because this being is completely unprotected, that it is utterly at our mercy, that it is also invulnerable or sacred. And there can be no doubt at all that the strongest and most irrefutable mark of sheer barbarism that we could imagine would consist in the refusal to recognize this mysterious invulnerability. This sacredness of the unprotected lies also at the roots of what we call a metaphysics of hospitality. In all civilizations of a certain type (not, of course, by any means merely in Christian civilizations), the guest has been regarded as all the more sacred, the more feeble and defenceless he is. In civilizations of a certain type, I say: not, I might have added, of the type dominated by the ideas of efficiency and output. The more, it might be said, the ideas of efficiency and output assert their supreme authority, the more this attitude of reverence towards the guest, towards the wounded, towards the sick, will appear at first incomprehensible, and later absurd; and in fact, in the world around us, we know that this assertion of the absurdity of forbearance and generosity is taking very practical shapes." pp.216-217.

What was true in 1949 is even truer today, don't you think?

Can't we conclude that it is precisely the vulnerable, and our care for the vulnerable, that keeps us human? When we euthanize the unfit and unwanted, be they born or unborn, haven't we turned ourselves into barbarians precisely because we can no longer sense the mystery inherent in the human being herself, living on this fragile earth, vulnerable and unprotected?

The Agony and the Ecstacy

Maybe it is not completely unreasonable to compare the suffering brought about by the economic recession with Christ's passion? To say in genuine anguish on a cross of sacrifice, "I have lost all," (and I do not mean simply my investments!) is to participate in some fashion in Christ's experience, is it not? Of course, the original denouement was not agony but the ecstacy of renewed life. And in Christ we hope for the same.

I was reading in Gabriel Marcel's The Mystery of Being, ch. 10 "Presence As A Mystery," that when the "important" is lost, the "essential" is revealed:

"At first glance, it seems that when I decide that something or other is important I am relating it to a certain purpose of mine or perhaps, more generally, to a way in which I organize my life. If I centre my life upon some predominant interest, say, for instance, the search for pleasure, power, or money, everything that seems likely to subserve this interest will strike me as having positive importance. Experience, however, shows us, and its lessons cannot be rejected or ignored, that our special ways of organizing our lives are always liable to collapse like houses of cards under our very eyes; leaving something else in their place, something which the original structures of lust, ambition or greed had merely masked from us. This something else, which we are not yet in a position to define, and of which we have not perhaps even a direct apprehension, is not the important, but the essential, the "one thing needful." It is obvious that the believer has a name for this 'something else': he will say that the one thing needful is salvation . . ."

So, we should remain hopeful that our experience of "being on the cross," though probably not ludicrous only in our own eyes, can lead to our discovery of the essential, the 'one thing needful,' and thereby be saved.

Screwtape - Eat Your Heart Out

At our last meeting, I attempted to explain why I felt that Screwtape's approach to human nature was not appealing to me. I have to apologize for my inability to express the ideas I was attempting to explain. So, back to my books I went. What follows are much more eloquent expressions of the ideas I was attempting to convey.

From the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World"

"In deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment... For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God... His conscience is man's most secret core and his sanctuary... There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths."

Commenting on this passage, Pope John Paul II wrote:

"Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a person, where we are alone with God. In the depths of our conscience, we detect a moral law, which does not impose itself on us, but which holds us to a higher obedience. This law is not an external human law, but the voice of God, calling us to free ourselves from the grip of the evil desires and sin, and stimulating us to seek what is good and true in life."

Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his book entitled "Prayer" complements these ideas.

"Man was created to be a hearer of the word, and it is in responding to the word that he attains his true dignity. His innermost constitution has been designed for dialogue. His reason is equipped with as much light of its own as it needs to apprehend the God speaking to it. His will is just that much superior to instinct and open to all that is good, that he is able without compulsion to follow the attraction of the most blessed good. Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself. He is built like a tabernacle around the most sacred mystery. When God's Word desires to live in him, man does not need first of all to take deliberate action to open up his innermost self. It is already there, its very nature is readiness, receptivity, the will to surrender to what is greater, to acknowledge the deeper truth, to cease hostilities in the face of the more constant love."

What more can I say?