David Bentley Hart on Beauty

Some more in support of a bubble

From The "Beauty of the Infinite", by David Bentley Hart, paperback published by Eerdman's, 2003, pp. 20-21 

'Beauty crosses boundaries.  Among the transcendentals, beauty has always been the most restless upon its exalted perch; the idea of the beautiful -- which somehow requires the sensual to fulfill its "ideal" nature -- can never really be separated from the beauty that lies near at hand.  Beauty traverses being oblivious of the boundaries that divide ideal from real, transcendent from immanent, supernatural from natural, pleasing from profound -- even, perhaps, nature from grace....  Beauty defies our distinctions, calls them into question, and manifests which shows itself despite them: God's glory.  For Christian thought, beauty's indifference to the due order of far and near, great and small, absent and present, spiritual and material should indicate the continuity of divine and created glory, the way the glory of heaven and earth truly declares and belongs to the glory of the infinite God.....  There is, moreover, a marvelous naïveté in the response most immediately provoked by the beautiful....  Theology should ponder how beauty can compel morally by its eccess: it is in the delighted vision of what is other than oneself -- difference, created by the God who differentiates, pleasing in the eyes of the God who takes pleasure -- that one is moved to affirm that otherness, to cherish and respond to it...  Theology... should be not only untroubled by beauty's prodigality, its defiance of so many orderly demarcations, but heartened by it: the beautiful uniquely displays the dynamic involvement of the infinite and the finite, the unmasterable excess contained in the object of beauty, the infinite' s hospitality to the finite....  Beauty crosses every boundary, traverses every series, and so manifests that God who transcends every division -- including, again, that between the transcendent and the immanent.'

Keeping the bubble inflated

A good friend told me once that I live in a bubble. My wife wholeheartedly agrees. In a not so obvious association I was pondering the reasons why I go to daily Mass. The realization finally came that I use the Mass to keep the bubble inflated.

I can pray there and not be looked at askance. I can ponder things like:

Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

The wolf shall live with the lamb

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain

I can hear promises like:

Those who mourn will be comforted

The meek will inherit the earth

Mercy for the merciful

The sight of God for those who are pure of heart

I can ponder and believe in lofty ideals without the corroding effect of the world’s cynicism. I can do all this with people of a like mind who will be my shield when I take these ideals out into the world. I know I will not be chastised by my fellow worshipers who live in the bubble along with me.

I don’t believe them to be lofty ideals because they are difficult or impossible to attain although that may be true. They are lofty ideas because they elevate the mind above the day to day concerns of our lives. They offer us hope in the face of all the discomfiture we experience out in the “real” world.

So I go to Mass as often as I can to get pumped up, to keep my bubble inflated. May the Lord bless my bubble!

King of Our Hearts

On the cover of the daily Missal at the back of the church is a painting of the Nativity scene. It got me to thinking about those three wise men.

Presumably they were men of accomplishment, wise men, comfortable in their own land. In their country of Persia they were safer than anywhere else. They were more protected from their enemies. What were they thinking when they set out from their homeland? What possible motivation could they have to leave for foreign and possibly hostile lands? After all, they were carrying things of value, gold, frankincense and myrrh. Such possessions were sure to attract the unwanted attention of road thieves and vagabonds. Why subject themselves to such obvious dangers?

They were gentiles and learned as well for they quoted Hebrew Scripture. Being wise they were not lacking in the virtue of prudence. They saw a star. We can appreciate their sensitivity to unusual natural events. We of this modern age have to a large extent removed the dangers inherent in the forces of nature. This has, perhaps, resulted in a lack of awe for all but the most grandiose and catastrophic in nature. But, a brighter than normal, twinkling little star? How often do we city dwellers even bother to look at the stars? How many of us would pack our bags and leave home for a foreign land because we saw a brighter than normal, twinkling little star in the East? There must have been more that moved these wise men.

There must have been a tremendous longing in their hearts. The acquisition of wisdom had led them to believe that there was something missing in their lives. They left their land so they could go and worship a new king who had been born. They had their own king right at home. Somehow, though, they knew it was not an earthy king they sought. These wise men were not just in awe of the natural, but in awe of the supernatural as well. The longing for a supernatural king is what inspired them; the search for a king of the heart.

Can we find the same courage? Can we leave the safety and comfort of the familiar? Can we look past what we can touch and see the intangible? Can we apprehend what is needed to fill that tabernacle in our soul? If we are at all able to do that, the time is now. The Savior is coming; the King of our heart is near.

From a sermon by Saint Anselm, bishop

Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033 – 21 April 1109),  was a Benedictine monk, a philosopher, and a prelate of the church who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109.

The following Marian reflection is from one of his sermons.

Virgin Mary, all nature is blessed in you.

The universe rejoices with new and indefinable loveliness. Not only does it feel the unseen presence of God himself, its Creator, it sees him openly, working and making it holy. These great blessings spring from the blessed fruit of Mary’s womb.
Through the fullness of the grace that was given you, dead things rejoice in their freedom, and those in heaven are glad to be made new. Through the Son who was the glorious fruit of your virgin womb, just souls who died before his life-giving death rejoice as they are freed from captivity, and the angels are glad at the restoration of their shattered domain.
….
God, then, is the Father of the created world and Mary the mother of the re-created world. God is the Father by whom all things were given life, and Mary the mother through whom all things were given new life. For God begot the Son, through whom all things were made, and Mary gave birth to him as the Savior of the world. Without God’s Son, nothing could exist; without Mary’s Son, nothing could be redeemed.

Truly the Lord is with you, to whom the Lord granted that all nature should owe as much to you as to himself.

Another from Irene Zimmerman

"How Can This Be, Since I Am A Virgin?" (Luke 1:34)

Your world hung in the balance of her yes or no .
Yet, "She must feel absolutely free," You said,
and chose with gentle sesitivity not to go
Yourself - to send a messenger instead.

I like to think You listened in at that interview
with smiling admiration and surprise
to that humble child who -
though she didn't amount to much in Jewish eyes,
being merely virgin, not yet come to bloom -
in the presence of that other-wordly Power
crowding down the wall and ceiling of her room,
did not faint or cry or cower
and could not be coerced to enflesh Your covenant,
but asked her valid question first
before she gave her full and free consent.

I like to think You stood
to long applaud such womanhood.

A Poem for the Season

MARY SONG

(Luke 1:39:55)

I ran the road from Nazareth
to share my news, Elizabeth:

I could not bear alone the flame
(my spirit sings God’s sacred name!)

That sears my soul and sets God’s will
ablaze throughout the House of Israel.

The Holy One has come to bless
and fill my waiting emptiness!

Elizabeth, come sing with me.
Your cousin dances with divinity!
                               From Incarnation by Irene Zimmerman

To support one another

From a homily on the Gospel of John by Saint John Chrysostom, bishop

(Hom. 19, 1: PG 59, 120-121)

We have found the Messiah

After Andrew had stayed with Jesus and had learned much from him, he did not keep this treasure to himself, but hastened to share it with his brother. Notice what Andrew said to him: We have found the Messiah, that is to say, the Christ. Notice how his words reveal what he has learned in so short a time. They show the power of the master who has convinced them of this truth. They reveal the zeal and concern of men preoccupied with this question from the very beginning. Andrew’s words reveal a soul waiting with the utmost longing for the coming of the Messiah, looking forward to his appearing from heaven, rejoicing when he does appear, and hastening to announce so great an event to others. To support one another in the things of the spirit is the true sign of good will between brothers, of loving kinship and sincere affection.

The sentence in bold is my emphasis: "support for one another", for me, is the purpose of our group.

Truth Without Wisdom

While browsing through a book being considdered for our group, I came across this passage. Particularly for those of us whose Christian efforts have led us to know the truth of things, this passage is quite meaningful.


"Wisdom as a charism of the Holy Spirit is far more than knowledge or imformation, more even than truth; it is truth applied to the heart and the mind in such a living way that the person is transformed." from "Streams of Living Water" by Richard Foster

True Community

From Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together:

"Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God's grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves….

"He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

"God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious…."

*****

Rereading the opening of this text today, I was struck by how applicable it is to the faith communities of which I'm a part.

Evangelicals – I meet many people who claim to be Christians but don't go to church, for whatever the reason. They are the ultimate expression of Protestantism and evangelical "Me and Jesus"-ism, often using any excuse to avoid Christian community.

Catholics – for those stuck in the '70s and '80s, with the liturgical focus on 'the community' that produced all those awful, banal, and, frankly, heretical hymns singing our own praises, this book shows from where true community comes, something I've said numerous times before. Community is only formed by group focus on one thing. For the church, that is worship of God. Vertical, God-centered and Eucharistic-centered worship is the only way to produce the horizontal community these people long for. Collective navel gazing at 'community' only ends up turning community into an idol and, ultimately, destroying the very thing we are trying to gain. C.S. Lewis discusses this in Mere Christianity (I think) when he talks about putting first things first, right ordering of goods. One only gets lesser goods by keeping the ultimate good first. To place anything else first only leads one to lose that for which one grasps.

A Word Fitly Spoken . . .

Proverbs says, "Like apples of gold in frames of silver are words fitly spoken." A well-spoken word fits its context like an apple of gold in a frame of silver.

Abraham Lincoln used this proverb to point to the apples of gold in our own constitution: "Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these are not the cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something is the principle of "Liberty to all" -- the principle that clears the path for all -- gives hope to all -- and, by consequence, enterprise and industry to all. The expression of that principle, in our Declaration of Independence, was most happy, and fortunate . . . The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word "fitly spoken," which has proved an "apple of gold" to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the pictures of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple -- not the apple for the picture."

Self Mastery as Mastering Technology

Heidegger described the totalizing effects of modern technology as seeking "to order everything so as to achieve more and more flexibility and efficiency." Dreyfus, "Nihilism, art, technology, and politics," Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, p. 305. Man himself is drawn into this process. Dreyfus states:

"In this technological perspective, ultimate goals like serving God, society, our fellows, or even ourselves no longer make sense to us. Human beings, on this view, become a resource to be used - but more important, to be enhanced - like any other: 'Man, who no longer conceals his character of being the most important raw material, is also drawn into this process.'" Id. at p. 306.

One of Heidegger's recommendations for an antidote to this process is to participate in "local practices" -- marginal practices -- that resist technology's drive to efficiency. As Dreyfus says, "[W]e must learn to appreciate marginal practices -- what Heidegger calls the saving power of insignificant things -- practices such as friendship, backpacking in the wilderness, and drinking the local wine with friends."

This past weekend I went camping with my wife in Wisconsin at Blue Mound state park. We went hiking, attended mass at St. Ignatius in Mount Horeb, visited a local brewery, took the Cave of the Mounds tour, and visited Little Norway. There we learned that in every craft undertaken by these early pioneers to Wisconsin, they purposefully built in a fault, a slight imperfection to the pattern, in order to remind themselves that man is imperfect, and that humility is the proper attitude toward the world and all we do. I think this is also a good antidote to the technological attitude in which all, including us, become resources for a system of ever greater efficiency. This process, as Dreyfus, notes, results in nihilism, or the loss of human meaning. The idol of technology must be fought with humility. Then we will get ourselves back, we who are bodily and local. If we are "masters of all" we only succeed in enslaving ourselves.

Quote

We must speak to them with our hands before we try to speak to them with our lips. - St. Peter Claver

Terror and Holy Terror

I saw this from the Sunday Tribune's travel section: "Venezuela is facing a crime crisis of such proportions that its murder rate in 2009 was dramatically higher than Iraq's, a country with a similar size population (31 million to Venezuela's 27 million) and active war zones. More than 19,000 murders occurred in Venezuela, making it one of the world's most dangerous countries. Small gangs are responsible for much of the crime. Violent crime occurs throughout the country, with gangs often setting up roadblocks to look like police checkpoints and sometimes impersonating police officers. This type of crime often occurs on the main road to Caracas from the international airport."

At the same time I was reading this "commentary" from Philip Rieff: "Perhaps the best place to begin is with the suggestion that holiness is entirely interdictory. A moral absolute thus becomes the object of all. Holy terror is charismatic. . . Jacob swears by the fear of his father, Isaac (Genesis 31:53). What is this charismatic fear? What is holy terror? Is it a fear of a mere father; in a phantasmagoric enlargement, Freud's idea is silly. Holy terror is rather fear of oneself, fear of the evil in oneself and in the world. It is also fear of punishment. With this necessary fear, charisma is not possible. To live without this high fear is to be a terror oneself, a monster. And yet to be monstrous has become our ambition, for it is our ambition to live without fear. All holy terror is gone. The interdicts have no power. This is the real death of God and of our own humanity." Charisma, pp. 5-6.

Inner reality's outward manifestation.

Take Delight in the Lord

Today's Psalm 37:4 says: "Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart."

Don't we normally think that we get our desires only by keeping our nose to the grindstone? Getting the desires of our heart comes after hard work, not before. To take delight in the Lord in order to get our desires seems to be eating desert before the main course.

Carroll Stuhmueller's comments elaborate the meaning of the psalm: "The lines of this psalm do not need explanation so much as our prolonged, contemplative reflection. We need to memorize a poem like this one (one of the reasons for the alphabetical style) and then to allow its words and sentences to seep into many segments of our thought and conversation.

"Fortunately this type of contemplation does not wisk us off to the clouds. Typical of the sapiential movement, the whole realm of reward and punishment remains within the parameters of life on earth. Even such lines as Take delight in the Lord . . . seeks a joy that is delicate and dignified yet always of this earth: i.e., Isa 55:2, 'Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Hearken to me . . . and delight in rich fares.'"

Taking delight in the Lord and realizing the desires of our hearts can be seen as two sides of the same coin, two moments of the same experience. The desire of our heart is to live in joy. To live in joy -- joy in this beautiful day, joy in the people we meet, joy in the various "goods" we experience -- is to let life be, to experience it as gratuitous, as gift. The joy we experience points to God, the giver, the source of all being. So, enjoy life, and take delight in the Lord!

Metaxas on Bonhoeffer

Eric Metaxas on "Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy" from Socrates in the City on Vimeo.

Eric Metaxas' Bonhoeffer

I'm really enjoying his new Bonhoeffer biography by Eric Metaxas. He is a really good writer and the bio does read like a novel, as the jacket blurbs say. He's also got these amazing one-line flourishes that have me literally laughing out loud:

p. 348 – After Germany's invasion of Poland: "for two days the British engaged in a diplomatic back and forth, but at some point someone lent Chamberlain a vertebra, for against Hitler's calculations, on Sunday, Great Britain declared war."

p. 356 – "Behold, that unpredictable magus, Adolf Hitler, would now with a flourish produce from his hindquarters a withered olive branch and wave it before the goggling world."


One of the best features of the book, I think, is how it highlights the situation in Germany during these years. There was more activity in the German Resistance than we are taught in school, but it was like walking a tightrope. Many just could not fathom the depths of evil with which they were dealing, and Hitler and his Nazis were very good at deception and taking advantage of the old Prussian morality and honor. At Metaxas is able to describe the situation with remarkable prose:

p. 351-352:

"….What [Admiral] Canaris [head of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and a leader in the resistance] could not have known at that civilized meeting was that it would continue and would get much worse. It would not only destroy Germany, but would do so more completely than he had ever dared to fear. The German culture and civilization that he, Donanyi [Bonhoeffer's brother-in-law], and Bonhoeffer knew and loved would be obliterated from history. Future generations would be convinced that nothing good could ever have existed in a country that produced such evil. They would think only of these evils It would be as if these unleashed dark forces had grotesquely marched like devils on dead horses, backward through the gash in the present, and had destroyed the German past, too.

"Canaris and the others in the German military leadership thought that Hitler's bestial nature was unfortunate, but they had no idea it was something that he cultivated and celebrated, that it was part of an ideology that had been waiting for this opportunity to leap at the throats of every Jew and Pole, priest and aristocrat, and tear them to pieces. The German generals had not seen the dark river of blood bubbling beneath the surface of the new Germany, but suddenly here it was, gushing like a geyser. Despite all the hints and warnings, it was too gruesome to be believed.

"Hitler's hour had arrived, and on the first of September, a brutal new Darwinism broke over Europe: the Nietzschean triumph of the strong over the weak could at last begin. The weak who could be useful would be brutally enslaved, all others would be murdered. What seemed so offensive to the international community—that Hitler would take the territory of the Polish people by force—was nothing compared to what the Nazis were doing. Their racial ideologies demanded more than territory; Poland must become a giant slave labor camp. The Poles were to be treated as Untermenschen (subhumans). Their lands would not merely be occupied; they themselves would be terrorized and broken into utter docility, would be dealt with as beasts. The Germans would not tolerate the possibility of failure or the slightest manifestations of mercy. Brutality and mercilessness would be aggressively cultivated as virtues."

KN

Who is the Catholic Church?

Last week a justice of the appellate court in Illinois, Sheila O'Brien, opined in the Chicago Tribune that she wanted to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church, essentially because of the asserted corruption of its leaders, as evidenced by sexual scandals in Europe, the Vatican's asserted less than forthright response to them, and the Vatican's simultaneous announcement that those who ordained women as Catholic priests would be excommunicated.

Yesterday an appropriate response was filed as a letter to the editor by a Max Douglas Brown of River Forest, in which he said that he, as a convert, thinks mostly of parishioners as comprising the church.

He said he sits in the back of the church at St. Luke's in River Forest. "From this vantage point, I have a panoramic view of the church and as I look around, I behold such a variety of people -- all shapes, all types, all races, young and old. These people are the church that O'Brien would leave behind."

I can only say, "Well said, fellow Catholic!"

Civilizational values

… there are certain identifiable human values, not peculiarly Christian, which nevertheless flourish only in a Christian setting, and tend to wither away when Christian influences are withdrawn. With the removal of Christianity, men lose their religion, but also in a measure their humanity. We should be the last to exaggerate the value and importance of the civilizing aspects of Christianity, especially in comparison with its essential other-worldly significance. And we are satisfied that non-Christian civilizations have their own values, which are not to be depreciated. But when we consider the universal constant work of civilization, which is the defense of mankind against necessity, or fate, we remain convinced that civilization’s most reliable ally is Christianity, though the essential purpose of Christianity is something entirely different. -- Jean Danielou, S.J.

Prayer, Words and Silence

Deacon Dave said in his homily last week that there are four types of prayer: Petition, Contrition, Praise, and Thanksgiving. I wonder, is there a priority in these types? It seems the order I gave is the priority. We first ask for our needs, but upon deeper reflection confess our shortcomings. Our penance provokes praise for God's forgiveness, and thanksgiving for his love.

Another way to look at prayer is as a progress from using words to being present to God in silence. Someone asked Mother Teresa what she did when she prayed. She said, "I listen." They asked, what does God do? She replied, "He listens."

Turn the Other Cheek

It struck me recently what turning the other cheek means. It is to be pro-active in seeking to resolve conflicts and violence. It is not to be passive, to play the punching bag. It is rather to blunt the normal mimetic escalation of violence by lowering the fists, the sword, the gun, by quieting the angry words. This is not passive but extremely active and challenging. I am real good at escalation; not very good at all at deceleration.

Two Great Commandments

I read in Henri Nouen's Here and Now about his visit to Mother Theresa during a time of some spiritual tribulation for him.  After speaking to Mother Theresa about his spiritual problems for some minutes, she responded, "There are are only two things you need to do.  First, spend an hour each day in adoration of God.  Second, never do anything you know to be wrong.  Then you will be fine."

Sounds like a good paraphrase of the two great commandments, don't you think?

Charisma = Possession

Charisma, according to Philip Rieff, is "a possession -- more precisely, a particular condition of being possessed or compelled. Possession 'from above' raises the possibility of being possessed 'from below'." Charisma, p.86.

Therese of Lisieux is a good example of possession "from above." She had an irresistable charm -- a charisma -- arising from possession of -- a being possessed by -- in her own words: an extraordinary love of God. Where did this possession come from? A quirk of personality? An out of place gene? No, Therese allowed herself to be possessed completely by her "spouse," Christ.

Rieff remarks also that possession is a "particular condition of being compelled." Possession from above is compulsion to shut down our transgressive desires, the drives of our lower nature -- to lower our eyes, to quiet our tongues, to beat our breasts while giving God praise for His mercy over our transgressiveness. When God is in possession He can act through us. Those who have eyes to see notice the charisma.

Charisma anyone?

3D Glasses

Wearing 3D glasses in the movie Avatar reminded me that the world we see "in real life" is also (happily) multi-dimensional.  For the Christian, the super-natural is one of the dimensions. What we see before us we see "in the light of" faith, hope and charity.

This principle is important for our experience of the world, which is not ideal, to say the least. As von Balthasar puts it, Engagement With God (p. 85-86), an ideal world would be a resurrected world, which it is not.  In reality the world is resurrected only in spe, in the dimension of hope.  

This has an important implication for Christian action.  ". . . [T]o think that the Christian, by his efforts, is able so radically to change the structures [of the world] is mere chiliastic fantasy or the hope of an unrealistic enthusiast."  In other words, our 3D glasses of "faith, hope and charity" do not re-create the world into a utopian pipe-dream.  Rather, they help us see the world as it "is," that is, as it is, as it should be, as it could be, and as it eventually will be, in God's time and plan.

"This again does not mean that the Christian must simply resign himself to the world as it is now and ever shall be.  The Christian's task is so far as he is able to fill the structures of the world with the boundless spirit of love and reconciliation, despite the fact that he will always encounter opposition to his efforts toward this end."

Are you wearing your "3D" glasses?

"Voluntary" Celibacy

I read in the paper this morning that Pope Benedict reaffirmed priestly celibacy. He said, according to the paper, that celibacy would be a scandal only in "a world in which God is not there." The article said an Austrian bishop has urged the Vatican to drop the rule, in the wake of a widened European clerical sex scandal. The Austrian bishop said celibacy should be "voluntary."

A more precise word would be "optional." For the vow of celibacy is certainly voluntary. I don't have to become a priest, and I know the rule going in, so my vow of celibacy is voluntary. Likewise, if I get married, my vow of fidelity is voluntary. Once made, it is no longer "optional."

It is fashionable to hold the position that celibacy for priests should be optional. Maybe so. Celibacy has become controversial because a small number of non-celibate priests have preyed sexually on children. Some feel the celibacy rule attracts men with abnormal sexual drives, and turns away men who are sexually "normal."

Still, it seems to me that celibacy is a valuable "sign of contradiction" that is much needed in our sexually charged world. As the Pope stated, it is a sign that God asks us to transcend ourselves, and provides the grace to do so. . . if we ask for it. And, as Matt's earlier post points out, transcending ourselves allows us to be more present to others.

Is Love or Hate Most Powerful?

Hate is certainly a powerful emotion, but is it more powerful than love? If God is love, love must be more powerful, right? Yet, look at the newspaper and TV: stories of hate are everywhere. Hate always seems to get the upper hand. How can love prevail over hate's power? Love is upbuilding, hate destroys. Love frees, hate enslaves. Love "covers a multitude of sins," hate magnifies every imperfection. Love gives life, hate deals death. Love, like the Spring, is always beginning, hate ends all possibilities. In the end, hate destroys the hater, love lets live.

Still, how can the person in thrall to hatred get free? Love has no legions, it can't seem to unclench the hater's fist, unshackle his mind. For Christians, Christ's resurrection gives us hope that love ultimately will prevail. But until that time comes, it seems that love often can only watch helplessly . . . and hope and pray.

Singleness

From Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented in Today's Church by Christine A. Colón and Bonnie E. Field:

Page 208:

In her [Laura Smit] discussion of Paul's view of singleness in I Corinthians, she remarks,

"It does seem…that singleness must be the default choice for a Christian, given the clear preference for singleness expressed in this text and in Jesus' teachings. In other words, the burden of proof is on the decision to marry, not the decision to remain single. Christians should assume that they will be single unless and until they have a godly reason to marry. Christians should never marry out of insecurity, fear, a desire to escape the parental home, a need for affirmation, or a search for financial stability. Christians should only marry those who enhance their ability to live Christlike lives, those able to be true partners in Christian service, those who give them a vision of the image of God and the glory of Christ."


Page 215-216:

Developing this "larger capacity for love" is essential for today's evangelical church, which, too often, is so concerned with preserving its families that it ignores many who desperately long for the Christian community that the church has the potential to provide. In her discussion of this issue, Laura Smit equates today's Protestant church with an example she draws from Langdon Gilkey's book Shantung Compound in which the author records his experiences in an internment camp during the Japanese occupation of China. She states,

"Most of the missionaries were detained with their families, and their care for their families trumped their sense of obligation to the rest of the community. No one had enough space to live with much privacy, but some families who had arrived earlier than others had two small rooms for their family of four or five people, whereas the later arrivals had only one. Gilkey was in charge of housing assignments, but when he tried to get some of the missionaries who had two rooms to rearrange themselves to make the space allocation more fair, he met complete resistance. No family was willing to sacrifice anything for the good of the community, and several parents appealed to their moral duty to look out for the good of their families as a defense for such selfishness."

What stands out to Gilkey and to Smit is that in contrast to the Protestant missionaries who separated themselves into distinct family units and placed their families above everything else, the Catholic priests who, as Gilkey records, "mixed…made friends with anyone in camp, helped out, played cards, smoked, and joked with them…were a means of grace to the whole community." Without family ties, the priests had the freedom to express their love beyond family boundaries to include everyone within this newly formed community.

A Prayer

http://www.ccel.org/ is a website that e-publishes classic Christian texts. The following prayer was sent along on their June
e-Newsletter.

Praying With Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-c.394)


You truly, O Lord, are the pure and eternal fount of goodness; ... who did curse, and did bless; you did banish us from Paradise, and did recall us; you did strip off the fig-tree leaves ... and put upon us a costly garment; you did open the prison and did release the condemned; you did sprinkle us with clean water, and cleanse us from our filthiness. No longer shall ... the flaming sword encircle Paradise around, and make the entrance inaccessible to those that draw near; but all is turned to joy for us that were the heirs of sin; Paradise, yea, heaven itself may be trodden by man, and the creation, in the world and above the world, that once was at variance with itself, is knit together in friendship: and we ... are made to join in the angels' song, offering the worship of their praise.

- from "On the Baptism of Christ"

Read more by this author at the CCEL.

Love and Truth

In his book Man Against Mass Society, written (in 1952) in the shadow of the horrors of the Nazi and Soviet death camps, Gabriel Marcel describes a degraded "mass" man, passive, un-free, susceptible to fanatacism through manipulation by propaganda and demagoguery, the kind of degraded human that supported and furthered the horrors mentioned.

The antitdote? According to Marcel, it is the "universal," and "the light," which he describes as mind, or spirit, and "the identity at their upper limit of Love and Truth" (p. 262) "[W]e should have to add that a truth which lies below that limit is a pseudo-truth and conversely that a love without truth is in some respects a mere delirium." He identifies this with the "light" in the first chapter of John.

Benedict XVI his encyclical likewise links truth and love. In par 2, he says, "Truth, in fact is logos, which creats dia-logos, and hence communication and communion." Without truth, relationship, love, degrades into "using", sullenness and, ultimately, hatred. Without love, truth likewise degrades to a "pseudo-truth" that harms rather than helps man. This is both Marcel's and Benedict's core message.

We tend to think of truth as standing "out there," objectively, on its own. In point of fact, it is only "truth" to the extent that we are bound to it (be"troth"ed to it), that is, to the extent we exist in a relation of respect and obedience to it and to each other through it. Relationships, including those of "love," without truth, are degraded, degrading the "lovers".

This is a most important truth for our day and age in which truth divorced from love leads to the horrors, among others, of abortion, the mass killing of family members, gang violence, terrorism, and many other forms of lesser violence that no less degrade and demean us.

Charity in Truth 2

"The sharing of goods and resources, from which authentic development proceeds, is not guaranteed by merely technical progress and relationships of utility, but by the potential love that overcomes evil with good...." (Paragraph 9)
"The Christian vocation to this development therefore applies to both the natural plane and the supernatural plane...." (Paragraph 18)

"... we observe with concern the developments and perspectives of the succession of crises that afflict the world today.... [There is] reason to be concerned about the capacity of a purely technological society to set realistic goals and to make good use of the instruments at its disposal. Profit is useful if it serves as a means toward an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty. ... It is true that grow has taken place, and it continues to be a positive factor that has lifted billions of people out of misery.... Yet it must be acknowledged that this same economic growth has been and continues to be weighed down by malfunctions and dramatic problems.... The technical forces in play, the global interrelations, the damaging effects on the real economy of badly managed and largely speculative financial dealings, large scale migration of peoples, often provoked by some particular circumstance and then given insufficient attention, the unregulated exploitation of the earth's resources: all this leads us today to reflect on the measures that would be necessary to provide a solution to problems that are ... of decisive impact upon the present and future good of humanity." (Paragraph 21)

But our Pope does not leave us hopeless.

"The crisis thus becomes an opportunity for discernment, in which to shape a new vision for the future. In this spirit, with confidence rather than resignation, it is appropriate to address the difficulties of the present time." (Paragraph 21)

We need only spend an hour or two watching the evening news to verify this assessment of our current problems. And we need only a short reflection on our human capacity to solve these problems to realize that without Christ we are unable to do so.

Charity in Truth 1

The following quotation is taken from paragraph number seven in Pope Benedict's encyclical letter charity in truth


"Another important consideration is the common good. To love someone is to desire that person’s good and to take effective steps to secure it. Besides the good of the individual, there is a good that is linked to living in society: the common good.... To desire the common good and strive toward it is a requirement of justice and charity. To take a stand for the common good is on the one hand to be solicitous for, and on the other hand to avail oneself of, that complex of institutions that give structure to the life of society.... The more we strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbors, the more effectively we love them. Every Christian is called to practice this charity, in a manner corresponding to his vocation and according to the degree of influence he wields in the polis."

When one thinks of Christian spirituality what comes to mind almost automatically are acts of piety, traditional forms of prayer and worship, mostly we consider as spiritual those things that relate to our relationship with God, that vertical dimension of our faith. But as Pope Benedict reiterates in this encyclical is that the Christian spirit is called as well to acts of charity toward our neighbor. The Christian spirit is responsible for actions to promote the common good that makes full use of the talents and the opportunities that our Creator has given us.

Thérèse and Luther

One would have to be blind not to see that Thérèse's [of Lisieux] doctrine of the little way answers point by point the program outlined by the Reformers and that she presents the Church's bold, irrefutable answer to Protestant spirituality. One can find innumerable points of contact between Thérèse and the Reformers: the rejection of Old Testament justification by works; the demolition of one's own ideal of perfection to leave room for God's perfection in man; the transcendent note in the act of faith, the center of which remains in God; the existential fulfillment of the act of faith, which means more than a mere intellectual assent to the content of faith and involves utter personal fidelity toward the personal truth of God; and, finally, disregard for one's own failings—even for that joy over them that says felix culpa. But the contrasts between Thérèse and the Reformers are equally striking. Thérèse's little way is a way to perfection, a way for those who have courageously resolved to love and do nothing else but love. And the faults of which she speaks are not the sins that Luther had in mind; they are "faults that do not offend God". What divides Thérèse from Luther is that the drama of sin never entwines itself round her soul. She recognizes the drama of God's descending into the nothingness of the creature and the flame of love with which the Absolute, God, unites himself to his creature's nothingness….It is Luther's error to have profaned mystical truths, which presuppose an intimate exchange of love between God and man, by treating them as general formulae for the sinner's relation to God. – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit

Love and Life

"It seems to me that love can substitute for a long life. Jesus takes no account of time, since there is none in heaven. He must take account only of love." - St. Terese of Lisieux, in Two Sisters in the Spirit by Hans Urs von Balthasar


Thinking of the brevity of some of the lives of the saints (Terese only lived to be 24), I got to thinking, maybe some people burn so brightly with love for God that they burn out the wick of their lives early, while others of us sputter along. God's grace gives us long lives so we can at least return some of his love to him, however meager. Not a hard and fast rule, I know, but there have been so many holy people (canonized and not), that died young (Pier Giorgio, virgin martyrs, and others whose stories I know but names I can't remember), but there have been so many that you just wonder if maybe they just "burned out", in a very good, heavenly way.

Our Weakness Calls For God's Strength

My son sent me an interesting article by Michael Buckley on the need for priests (all of us have a priestly call) to value the experience of weakness as an entry into the priestly ministry of compassion. Buckley quoted St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10: "I will all the more gladly boast of my weakness that the power of God may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong." Of Christ, Paul said, "He is not weak in dealing with you, but powerful in you. For he was crucified in weakness; but lives by the power of God." 2 Cor. 13:3-4.

Buckley says, "Weakness relates us profoundly with other people. It allows us to feel with them the human condition, the human struggle and darkness and anguish that call out for salvation."

I am reminded of Terese of Lisieux who practiced humility and accepted denigration as gifts of suffering with the suffering Christ.

It seems that I can't enter into the suffering of others (suffer with them) if I can't accept my own suffering, my own limited circumstances of life. But it's pretty difficult not to opt for a grand life (that BMW!), or a life walled off from inconvenience and pain. (After all, what am I working for??) Problem is, how then can I answer the call of my vocation to enter into the suffering of others, to be com-passionate as Christ was (is)? The distance I maintain from my own suffering separates me just as much from others'. If vocation is a call to be for others, then it can't be about my own self-realization, how I hope to prove myself in the face of the crowd. Essentially, my "performance" is only before my God who made me, my sole director and critic!

Right Understanding as a Springboard to Action

In an interesting review, Stanley Fish described the modern state as holding itself "aloof" from any and all worldviews, and therefore having "no basis for judging [their] outcomes. . ." It therefore "cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost 'its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole'. . .".

This reminds me of Kierkegaard's criticism of modern rationality as endlessly commenting, and never committing. He argues for a type of understanding that promotes, not obstructs, action. In Training For Christianity, he writes (at p. 158): "in relation to action the right understanding is like the spring-board from which the jumper makes his leap. The clearer, the more exact, the more passionate (in a good sense) one's understanding of a matter is, by just so much does it lighten one's weight for action, or just so much easier is it for one who has to act to render himself light for action."

It's a good image: Jumping on a springboard lifts you into the air, lessens your weight, and makes it easier to adopt the form of the dive (the leap). The springboard is right understanding. Working towards right understanding is the key to right action. But the conscious decision of the modern state NOT to make a decision about world views, which most of us mimic, prevents us from reaching the right understanding needed for taking the action we must in order to be "saved." It's like the frog that perishes because the water it's in increases in temperature only degree by degree. Kierkegaard's response is to try to inflame fear at our inaction and the perdition we flirt with.

Stanley Rosen doesn't think Reason "gets it," i.e., knows what it's missing. According to Kierkegaard, only as individuals can we take action in the face of a culture that endlessly "discusses."

A Third World Close Moment

I had a "close moment" with students at Duke University whom I accompanied last month on a service project to Guatemala. Mitch, the student leader, sent me a post-trip reflection he wrote in which he mentioned a remark made by a fellow student who said, "It's nice that, here, our presence is enough." Mitch continues, "She said that at Duke, we are required to be intelligent, to present ourselves well, to be organized, to be extremely busy but not quite so busy that we can't handle it, and to be good at everything we do. In Lagunita Salvador, we did not need to be any of those things. Simply being present and showing our love meant everything. . ."

I got to thinking, and replied to Mitch, "I read your reflection, which was touching. I very much agree that being "present" is what counts. Learning that early is good, because being present to others helps us to be present to ourselves too, i.e. to appreciate that we can be ourselves and don't have to be somebody else. The third world dislodges us from our normal stance at the center of our own world, and helps us be happier (less pressured to be at the center) and more available to God's plan. There's the game of life in a nutshell, I would say!"

I was happy to be a part of their experience of growth, and Mitch's reflection was a welcome reminder to me of I need to go on these trips. It also reminded me of Guadium et Spes 24 (see below), which says that we discover ourselves by going out of ourselves to others.

(24. God, Who has fatherly concern for everyone, has willed that all men should constitute one family and treat one another in a spirit of brotherhood. For having been created in the image of God, Who "from one man has created the whole human race and made them live all over the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26), all men are called to one and the same goal, namely God Himself.

For this reason, love for God and neighbor is the first and greatest commandment. Sacred Scripture, however, teaches us that the love of God cannot be separated from love of neighbor: "If there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.... Love therefore is the fulfillment of the Law" (Rom. 13:9-10; cf. 1 John 4:20). To men growing daily more dependent on one another, and to a world becoming more unified every day, this truth proves to be of paramount importance.

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))"

Solving the Faith-Works Question

Soren Kierkegaard, not a Catholic, stresses the importance of works ("works are required of a human being"), but not as a means of "earning heaven." ("Good works in the sense of meritoriousness are naturally an abomination to God.")

Kierkegaard then draws a very apt analogy: we should think of good works "as when a child gives his parents a present procured, however, with what the child has received from his parents; all the pretentiousness which otherwise resides in giving a gift disappears when the child has received from his parents the gift which he gives to the parents." Quoted in Works of Love (Harper Perennial), p. 378.

Sounds like a good solution to the Faith-Works question, doesn't it?

Wright Thoughts: Jesus

This year's Theology Conference at Wheaton is called "Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright", a kind of festschrift honoring and interacting with Wright's work. Wright is the Bishop of Durham, England in the Church of England, prominent in the conservative evangelical wing of the CoE.

I had always heard Wright was a great theologian, and had written a definitive book on the historicity of the resurrection, which was on my 'want list' of books to check out. I was first prompted to pick up one of his books (one of his newest, Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision when I heard he was part of the "new perspective" on Paul. I first got interested in the new perspective when I heard a somewhat glib summary of its thesis: the Protestant reformers read Paul wrong. As a former Protestant, now Catholic, I was intrigued.

Now I'll admit to not knowing too much about the new perspective (theology being more my avocation than what I was trained in, and being unable to find a good summary), so my only real basis is the one book of Wright's that I read, but Justification was very good, so I was very interested in this year's conference. The setup of the conference is focused on Wright's work on the historical Jesus on Friday and his work on Paul on Saturday (call it the "Search for the Historical Paul", perhaps).

Now, the so-called search for the historical Jesus has some serious criticisms that can be leveled against it (Jesus Seminar: Marbles? Seriously?), but Wright's is one of the most orthodox reconstructions of Jesus. I'm going to try and hit some of the things in each talk that stuck out to me.


Richard Hays: "Knowing Jesus: Story, History, and the Question of Truth" dealing with Wright's book Jesus and the Victory of God (JVG).

Hays is a good friend of Wrights and studied under him. He's currently at Duke University. He went over Wright's methodology. Some highlights:

*Hypothesis and verification – Wright differs from most historical Jesus scholars, rejecting their reductionist approaches. He takes the whole of the canonical evidence and formulates a hypothesis that will include the maximum amount of data. A 'hermeneutic of trust', if you will.

*Double similarity vs. double dissimilarity – Jesus Seminar (and others) tend to say the more Christ looks like his Jewish background or early Christian conceptions of Jesus, the less likely he is to be authentic. Wright flips this around.

*Skepticism of form and redaction criticism

*Extensive use of Second Temple Judaism material – this was fascinating to me, the way he firmly grounds a Jewish Jesus in his Jewish context.

Hays raised some concerns with Wright's methodology, however:

*Exclusion of the Gospel of John – Wright responded that this was a necessary self-limitation to even get the book a hearing, given the a priori assumptions of the academy to the historicity of John. It's essentially fighting them on their own ground.

*The relation of Wright's reconstruction of Jesus to the Church's confessional tradition. – Wright tends to avoid Christian creedal/confessional conceptions of Jesus, keeping them at arm's length from his historical assessment. Wright did make a good point in response, however, in that the confessions, written to defend the divinity and humanity of Christ in Hellenistic thought-forms, tend to screen out/obscure the kingdom-preaching, messianic-thinking, Jewish Jesus of history, as well as the political repercussions of Jesus.


Marianne Meye Thompson (Fuller Theological Seminary) – "The Gospel of John Meets Jesus and the Victory of God"

Thompson deals with the lacuna of the John in Wright's book and I thought she had some valuable insights. Essentially she says that Wright's synoptic-only reconstruction of Jesus is essentially Johannine. Wright tended to agree, again stating why he felt he couldn't use John more. Thompson made some good comments about Jesus as the Temple from the Gospel of John.

Interesting take away on the story of "doubting Thomas": Thomas' mistake lay not in his empiricist refusal to believe what he could not see but in his historicist refusal to believe the apostolic witness.


Wright then gave the chapel address from Ephesians. One of the things I like about Wright is his refusal to bracket out Ephesians, Colossians and other books as being deuteron-Pauline. He believes the books attributed to Paul are by Paul.


Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat (University of Toronto) – kind of fell asleep during this one. Been up since midnight. Led off with a Phil Ochs song (I enjoyed that). Didn't so much like their style of presenting in dialogue with each other. Not too sure how it related to Wright. It was trying to pull out some social ethical implications of his work but focused mostly on criticizing the financial market economy crash. Eh.


Nicholas Perrin – "Jesus Eschatology and Kingdom Ethics: Ever the Twain Shall Meet"

Perrin is a professor at Wheaton and a good friend/student of Wright and helped get him here/organize the conference. Didn't take too much away from this, though. He was a bit rushed to me and it was a bit over my head. He laid out some themes in Wright's work that I'm really interested in:

*Jesus as Israel – Jesus embodies the whole historical trajectory of Israel

*Continuing exile – Jews of Jesus' day viewed themselves as still in exile and Jesus saw himself as bringing them back.

*Integrative biblical theology – bridges OT and NT – Israel and Jesus-as-Israel

*Synthesis of soteriology and ecclesiology. Salvation is corporate and personal (complimentary and mutually strengthening, as opposed to collectivist and individualist, which are opposed) – basically, bringing an emphasis on the community back into soteriology.

*Wright eschews ahistorical positivism and historical skepticism – countering a docetic tendency in Protestantism

*Wright extends Jesus' mission to the historical-political sphere.

I did take this clever little bit away:

Western Protestantism often reduces the church to Jesus' Facebook friends.

:D

(And just for fun: Scott Hahn is attending the conference! I said hi and shook his hand.)


Will probably have more later. Right now I need to get to the evening keynote address by Wright about Jesus.

On Being Small

The last chapter of St. Therese's “Story of a Soul” is one continuous prayer. The two following paragraphs come from the very end of her autobiography.


"I know that for You the Saints have also been foolish. Because they were eagles they have done great deeds. I am too small to do anything great, and so my folly is to hope that Your love will accept me as its victim; my folly is to rely on the angels and the saints so that I may fly to You, my adored Eagle, with Your own wings. For as long as You wish, I will stay with my eyes on You. I want to be fascinated by Your gaze. I want to be the prey of Your love. I hope that one day You will swoop down on me, carry me off to the furnace of love, and plunge me into its burning depths so that I can be its ecstatic victim for all eternity.

O Jesus, if only I could tell all little souls of your immeasurable condescension. I feel that if You found a soul feebler than mine -- though that's impossible -- You would delight in heaping even greater favors on it if it abandoned itself with supreme confidence to Your infinite mercy."

This passion appeals to my emotional Italian temperment. I fear, however, that I lack the sense of smallness that St. Therese possessed.

The Vatican and the Beatles

It was nice to see the Vatican recognize the quality of the Beatles' "beautiful melodies, which changed forever pop music and . . . live on like precious jewels." Tribune, April 3, 2010. The stodgy old Vatican praising the Beatles? That's news! Still, it's nice to have an authority as weighty as the Vatican confirm the judgment of so many of us over the years. And that it took 40 years to come is also not so bad -- a "considered" opinion is always best . . . Try to see it my way!

A Discriminating Vitner

If, as Pascal says (see Noli me Tangere post earlier), the right "distance" is needed in moral life, the question arises how we find that proper perspective in our relationships with others. If love entails unity, how do we find the unity commensurate with the charity we share with others? I recently read an article by Gilbert Ryle entitled "Jane Austen and the Moralists." (Chapter 20 in his Collected Papers). In it, Ryle says that Austen's characters depict differences in a specific quality she is interested in. For example, in Emma she is interested in asking how far one can go in influencing another's life. Where is the line between Meddling and Helping? All the characters are described "in terms of their different kinds or degrees of concernment or unconcernment with the lives of others." I won't go into where each character falls in the continuum drawn by Austen in this novel, I simply wish to say that, according to Ryle, Austen's novels may be viewed as an effort to give the reader, via a look at many characters in small English town, examples as to how such a calibration of perspective, of the proper distance in relationships, can be managed, and mis-managed.

Austen's answer is not "one thing or the other," but usually "both and." For example, in Sense and Sensibility the moral theme is "the relations between Head and Heart, Thought and Feeling, Judgment and Emotion . . ." Austen felt that Head and Heart need not be antagonists. "The best Heart and the best Head are combined in the best person." So perspective involves combining rather than dividing, and finding a balance among different qualities. Through balance we avoid extremes, which block out flavors in our personality which, if balanced in expression, we can experience positively in our lives and share beneficially with others.

Ryle described Austen as a vitner or wine taster who effectively displays the nuances of human character in her novels. In my opinion, it is a good description of a person with discrimination in the good sense of the term: a person who sees the world in proper perspective and who can thereupon calibrate his behavior with others to the good and in charity.

Michelangelo the poet

TO THE SUPREME BEING


by: Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)

THE prayers I make will then be sweet indeed,
If Thou the spirit give by which I pray:
My unassisted heart is barren clay,
Which of its native self can nothing feed:
Of good and pious works Thou art the seed,
Which quickens only where Thou say'st it may;
Unless Thou show to us Thine own true way,
No man can find it: Father! Thou must lead.
Do Thou, then, breathe those thoughts into my mind
By which such virtue may in me be bred
That in Thy holy footsteps I may tread;
The fetters of my tongue do Thou unbind,
That I may have the power to sing of Thee,
And sound Thy praises everlastingly.

This poem was translated into English by William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

My Latest Readings of Balthasar

From “The Glory of the Lord: Vol. 5. pp. 270-271

Balthasar discusses the aspects of eros made manifest through the beauty of creation and especially the human form and the passions it arouses. Yet, such eroticism fails to meet the demands of the human spirit for union with the creator and proves to be only a spiraling circle of longing and heartache followed by disappointment and an increasingly persistent pursuit of that which fails to satisfy. He uses Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a poetic expression of the failings of mortal love to satisfy.


129

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action: and till action, lust

Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;

…

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.



142

Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate,

Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving:

….



146

My love is as a fever longing still,

For that which longer nurseth the disease;

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

The uncertain sickly appetite to please.

…

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.



Balthasar goes on to say “If we had the versed confessions of Botticelli, Tintoretto and so many others, who created the inconceivably beautiful, who knows whether they would not sound the same, and with what melancholy the glories were purchased that should bear witness to the powers of bodies to utter the eternal and to shelter the divine!”

Noli me tangere

I agree with Matt's comment that we need a certain formality in our relationship with our God. Only in that way do we recognize "our place." This is also true of our relationships with others. I have heard it said that love can get too empathetic and smarmy, on one hand, or become too distant and detached, on the other. One needs an appropriate distance. Noli me tangere! (which means don't touch me, or better, don't cling to me) is good advice about how to re-spect others (in their presence and their absence), as Titian's masterpiece depicts.

Pascal pointed at the same idea in his Pensee's:

"So with pictures seen from too far or too near; there is but one exact point which is the true place wherefrom to look at them: the rest are too near, too far, too high or too low. Perspective determines that point in the art of painting. But who shall determine it in truth and morality?"

In Battling To The End, Rene Girard's latest book about our age's apocalyptic tendencies (the "trend to extremes" in violence and human interactions), Girard and his conversation partner Benoit Chantre cite this Pensee and conclude that the point Pascal is referring to (the "one true place") is "nothing other than charity." (p.134). According to Girard, only our imitation of Christ will help us escape the "order of bodies"-- a description of the entanglements of hyper-closeness or resentment and anger that we are prone to as mimetic creatures -- into the "order of charity," where I can relate respectfully and helpfully with others without being too close or too distant. "To imitate Christ by keeping the other at the right distance is to escape the mimetic whirlpool: no longer imitate in order to no longer be imitated." To put on Christ not only helps us to escape the mimetic whirlpool, it helps others do the same by withdrawing ourselves from the imitation gallery. As an unrecognized one, I disappear into Christ so as to let Christ appear in me. Then, any model I offer is a positive one, not me but Christ in me. This strikes me as a good description of the Christian vocation: to allow God's call to resound, to echo in my life, I am giving God's call a true hearing -- and becoming a saint!

Are You Serious???

My son was home for Easter weekend, and he told me he is taking a course about vocations. Kids today, and indeed folks of all ages -- including me! -- need to think about and listen for our "calling." What gets in the way, it seems to me, is all that background noise! The call is there, like the whisper that Elijah heard, but we just can't seem to hear it.

I happened to come across an interesting article by Hubert Dreyfus that describes the condition of lots of us, a condition that was already well-described by Kierkegaard in the mid 1800's. I highly recommend it. You can find it here. Essentially, Kierkegaard says in his review essay "The Present Age," that the modern world "levels," making all things accessible but ultimately banal. We become part of an anonymous "public" who pass around opinions we pick up, and endlessly "comment," but can't seem to latch on to anything or "do" something unconditionally. Dreyfus applies this insight to our current "public" participation in the internet. (I'll let you decide how a propos his description is of our own "blog experience"!)

Kierkegaard says that such a person "recognizes no power over itself; therefore in the final instance it lacks seriousness. . . ." (Sickness unto Death, 100). It's interesting that he relates seriousness to power. I looked up "serious" and found its etymological root is "wer" meaning "to bind," and to "hang on a scale." We see the root in "swear." I am serious when I am bound to something, when I recognize its power over me, when I am being weighed on a scale, evaluated, responsible. The opposite of seriousness is frivolity (from the Latin frivos "broken, crumbled," from friare "break, rub away, crumble."), which describes an uncommitted, dissipated life, disconnected and ultimately broken. ("Ps. 1: "The wicked are not so, but are like chaff, which the wind drives away.") Until we are bound, i.e., have a master, or in Kierkegaard's words, "unconditionally committed," we live frivolously. And we may not even know it!

Where does the binding come from? From our spiritual relationship of obedience to our "ground" of authority, God. Kierkegaard said that all of his work boils down to preaching obedience. Obedience is the recognition and acceptance of the divine law (of love), as we see it embodied in Jesus Christ. To repent and obey makes us serious. It keeps us from being blown about by the winds of frivolity, and allows us to hear, and follow, God's call, our vocation. For Kierkegaard groups have no existence vis a vis the absolute; each man will be judged by God as an individual. So to hear and follow our call is crucial.

Good Friday

Good Friday cannot be confined to Holy Week. It is not simply the dismal but necessary prelude to the joy of Easter, although I'm afraid many Christians think of it that way. Every day of the year is a good day to think more deeply about Good Friday, for Good Friday is the drama of the love by which our every day is sustained. – Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

Some thoughts on Holy Thursday

1. Washing of Feet

I now it's an act of humility for the priest to wash feet, but tonight I was struck by how humbling it is to allow the priest to wash your feet. I suppose my first inkling of this was discovering how difficult it actually is to get people to volunteer for the foot washing, but tonight I was particularly struck by it. I'm probably too "friendly" with Fr. Don to get the full impact, but I thought maybe for a moment I understood what Peter felt when he protested Christ washing his feet.

In our culture, we don't really have a sense of "hierarchical" friendship (my term), a friendship with a recognition of superiority of rank or kind. We're way too easily "buddy-buddy" with Jesus to the point where we forget he is Lord! He's God! We don't really understand what that means, since we don't normally have 'lords' anymore.

Yes, Christ calls us "friend" rather than "servant" (John 15:15), and that is very important for our conception of God (compare with the master-slave dynamic of Islam). I know a youth leader who likes to ask the teens if Jesus was there before you, would you hug him or bow to the ground? A bit tongue in cheek, I always said that the only person in Scripture that ever hugged Jesus was Judas! I think there is a lot of truth in that, though. Even Mary Magdalene, when she tried to embrace Christ after the resurrection, was told, "Don't touch me."

I think the gospel of Holy Thursday shows that important dynamic. The disciples were Jesus' friends, but they still maintained a respectful distance and recognized his position as rabbi, enough that they were troubled by his washing their feet like a slave. They were wrong in this particular instance because Jesus was trying to teach them something, but I don't think one can fault them for their respect and honor.

2. The Roman Canon! And it was sung!

This is my absolute favorite Eucharistic Prayer. I love the list of saints and martyrs; it connects us back to the earlier believers. We don't hear it hardly at all now since Fr. John left; it was the only one he ever prayed. It is arguably the only really "legitimate" Eucharistic Prayer. The others may be allowed by the Church, but Eucharistic Prayer 1 (the Roman Canon) is the only prayer that goes back to the earliest centuries of the Church. Eucharistic Prayer 2, which seems to be the favorite of many priests because it is the shortest, also has ancient origins (Hippolytus), but it is arguably not actually a full Eucharistic Prayer because with its length it was likely more of a summary guide, a kind of "highlights" manual for priests of what needed to be prayed as the priest made up the Eucharistic Prayer (since they weren't originally written down). Other of the Eucharistic Prayers were essentially made up whole cloth, I believe.

Judas

From Magnificat's meditation for Spy Wednesday this week:

Judas, one of the chosen twelve, one of those to whom Jesus said, "I have not called you servants, but friends": he it is who is to betray his Master – for thirty pieces of silver. And Jesus knew it. For three years, he kept him there among his intimates, treating him like the rest, calling him to the same destiny, and surrounding him with the same delicate attentions. Nothing ever aroused a suspicion – except perhaps in John, where the intuition of love seems to have divined the traitor – a suspicion that he knew whom he had chosen, as he would say.

He even gave Judas a mark of special trust: he was the one who carried the purse belonging to the little band of Apostles. Already he had given evidence of being avaricious; and John had been keen enough to observe it.

As for Jesus, he closed his eyes to it and allowed time and grace to take their course. Before that heart, which was gradually closing itself against him, he opened up the treasures of his forbearance; he was prodigal of his forgiveness, that rare and precious gift which most men are nearly always reluctant to bestow.

What mystery there is in this attitude of Jesus confronted by the traitor. Perhaps nothing enables us to penetrate deeper into that heart than an analysis of what he must have felt then, at every contact.

He was willing to experience at length and in silence that royal sorrow of betrayal – of betrayal by an intimate, by on who has been showered with kindnesses. He had poured them forth upon Judas, knowing all the while that he would show himself a monster. He spoke to him with consideration, with the vision of his crime before him. He washed his feet on that Thursday evening, conscious that he had already been sold.

And in the garden of Gethsemane, when the miserable man had destroyed the last barrier that still held back the torrent of hatred, of iniquity, and of torture with his infamous kiss, the only revenge of Jesus was the gentle query: "My poor friend, what have you come here to do?" Once more he gave Judas the title of friend, which he had perhaps not applied to him at supper. He wanted him to know he had a right to it, as the final effort put forth by the patience of God.

--Father Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges, O.P.

Legalism

I think this expresses what I often imperfectly try to get across to people (even Catholics!) about Catholicism, and one of the things that attracted me to it:

In Principles for a Catholic Morality Timothy O'Connell is speaking on the characteristics of Old Testament law:

"All this leads to a last characteristic of Old Testament law: It generated a strangely beautiful and compelling sort of legalism. This term, reserved as it usually is for empty and fear-motivated ritualism, is generally conceived negatively.... But we ought to acknowledge nonetheless that a different sort of legalism exists. There is a posture that primarily evaluates actions not in terms of their objective and immediate significance, but rather in terms of their potential as symbols of love, that sees behavior less as a tool for the accomplishment of tasks and more as a word speaking the language of love. For one who adopts this posture, even the most apparently empty of actions is full of devotional potential. Such a person is a legalist, but a legalist of a tremendously rich, poetic, and saintly sort. For the best of the Jewish tradition, this is precisely the significance that the law always had."

Rushing Easter

Maybe this happens every year and I'm only just noticing it. Just like Christmas, people seem to rush Easter and ignoring the special character of Holy Week. No one wishes to get in the middle of the heightening controversy between Jesus and the Jewish authorities; no one wants to dwell on the ways in which we betray Christ with Judas; no one wishes to sit with Christ at the Last Supper; no one wishes to stay awake with Christ in the agony in the garden, or to dwell in the pain of scourging and crucifixion. I’ve noticed this especially with the Evangelicals I’m around. Yes, we are Easter people, but there is no Easter without Good Friday. Dwell there, live it this week. There’s a whole fifty days after Easter that you can celebrate being Easter people! Can we not watch with Jesus for one week?

Description of heaven and hell?

In the following quote from Nicolas of Cusa's writtings offered by Balthasar we see one possibility of what the states of heaven and hell might be like. According to Nicolas we are in a constant state of longing, a longing to know the essence of our being. He goes on to say:
"This indestructable streching-forth is either fulfilled by God, and then is eternal blessedness, in which the spirit is ever moved in a most blessed longing, so that it may attain that of whose gracious closeness it never has enough; or it is, if God does not fulfill it, eternal torture: to possess a rational nature and never to attain to reason."

Laws of Man and Laws of God

In our church history class we recently read Pope Leo XII's encyclical "Immortale Dei: On the Christian Constitution of States" (1885). I saw a connection with an incident in the heathcare debate.

Pope Leo in the encyclical decries the view holding that "since the people is declared to contain within itself the spring-head of all rights and of all power, it follows that the State does not consider itself bound by any kind of duty toward God." 25. Rather, the pope asserted, "rulers must ever bear in mind that God is the paramount ruler of the world, and must set Him before themselves as their exemplar and law in the administration of the State." 4.

In other words, human law looks to God's law as its source and formative principle. Legislators in Congress it seems to me acknowledge this in starting each legislative day with a prayer.

The connection with the health care debate? In Tuesday's Chgo Tribune, an article reported that the IL Catholic Prayer Breakfast disinvited Bart Stupak as its intended speaker because of his vote on health care. Here is what Michael Sullivan, president of the organization said, "No one is condemning Bart Stupak. His job in the public square is to stand up for his constituents and the principles that he purports to believe in. . . . He's really turned his back on those principles. Those principles issue from this person we think is God -- Jesus. If our first pope can deny him and be forgiven and be restored, then certainly Bart can as well. We're praying for him."

I'm sure Bart Stupak has a position on the question whether he was following the law of God as he understood it in his legislative vote. My point is that it is refreshing to see an overt reference to divine principles that should be guiding legislative activity. Do our legislators often articulate this dependence? (If they did wouldn't they be condemned by many who adhere to the "error" condemned by Pope Leo: that "the people" hold within themselves the "spring-head of all rights and of all power"?)

I hope our legislators earnestly pray for divine guidance, and that we continue to do the same for them.

Jacques Maritain on Poetry

Jacques Maritain defines poetry as the "divination of the spiritual in the sensible, which will itself express itself in the sensible." "Poetry and Religion," The New Criterion, V (1927), 15.

Nicolas of Cusa

I find myself with time now to begin reading Baltazar again. In volume 5 of the Glory of the Lord he describes some of Nicolas of Cusa's thoughts on the glory of the Lord. I thought them to be meaningful for me in this Lenten season.

"...The view from heaven to earth is one thing: this view sees only order, harmony and beauty .... To the view upwards from below ... the eternal love must make itself accessible by grace in order to be caught site of at all ....

The blessedness of God is grace ... only God's incarnate Word  and his Spirit breathed into our souls draws us into the kingdom of his inner glory. Thus Jesus Christ is the medium without which God's glory cannot be communicated .... Where we acknowledge that we are in need of the grace of redemption and implore it in all humility, there we give God the glory, as is fitting, and the more greatly, we acknowledge our depravity ....

Quoting Nicolas directly:
'He made me man to prove by means of me his great power, by raising me to fellowship with the Angels. He made me frail and weak to prove by means of me his power, by accomplishing his mighty works in me. He allowed  me to sin, to show by means of me the power of his mercifulness and grace, when I am converted to him. He let me go astray to show by means of me the power of his wisdom in which he can raise me up again to knowledge of the true ... life. He let all men sin, so that all might need grace, in order to prove the riches of his grace in Jesus Christ as Savior of all.' "     

The Christian Spirit

The Christian Spirit

St. Therese: On being all she can be

You cannot help but be impressed by the confidence expressed by St. Therese in the following quote from her autobiography. She is certain that despite her failures of charity the aid of the Lord is at her disposal.

'I am, I confess, far from practicing what I know I should, yet the mere desire I have to do so gives me peace.if it happens that I fall and commit a fault against charity, I rise again at once.  For some months I have no longer even had to struggle.  I can say with our Father St. John of the Cross: " My house is entirely at peace," and I attribute this deep peace to a certain battle which I won.  Ever since this victory the hosts of heaven have come to my aid, for they cannot bear to see me wounded after I fought so valiantly...'

Aphorisms

God's face like a countenance beaming forth from the darkness: in order to see it we throw everything we possess into the fire - the world, our joys, our hopes. The flame leaps forth, consumes it all, and in its glow the beloved Face lights up. But the flame dies down, and we feed it with what little remains to us: honor, success, our will, the intellect, our temperament, finally our very self: absume et suscipe - "take and receive". This is not simple self-giving, but, increasingly, the knowledge that I am being taken, that I must surrender. Grace is everything: the moment of God's appearing; grace also the every sacrifice the fire snatches from me.

from The Grain of Wheat - Aphorisms by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius Press

Having a Little More Hart

Indulging my current enthusiasm for the writings of David Bentley Hart, I'm beginning to read his book "The Beauty of the Infinite". In the introduction I read these following paragraphs and thought them worthy of being passed on.


"As Origen observed, the marvel of Christ is that, in a world where power, riches, and violence seduce hearts and compel assent, he persuades and prevails not as a tyrant, an armed assailant, or a man of wealth, but simply as a teacher of God and his love.... Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire, and the whole force of the Gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also piece: that the desire of awakened by the shape of Christ and his Church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. Christian rhetoric, then, is already a question to itself; for if theology cannot concede the intrinsic violence of rhetoric as such, neither can it avoid the task of framing an account of how its own rhetoric may be conceived as the peaceful offer of a peaceful evangel, and not as... a practice of persuasion for persuasion's sake, violence, coercion and its most enchanting. Such an account must inevitably make an appeal to beauty.

What Christian thought offers the world is not a set of "rational" arguments that... force ascent from others by leaving them ... at a loss for words; rather, it stands before the world principally with the story it tells concerning God and creation, the form of Christ, the loveliness of the practice of Christian charity -- and the rhetorical richness of its idiom. Making its appeal first to the eye and heart, as the only way it may "command" assent, the Church cannot separate truth from rhetoric, or from beauty." (pp. 4)

Tell the story, display the form of Christ, exhibit the lovliness of Christian charity. How lofty the goal. How attainable!

A Little More Hart

This is another quote from David Bentley Hart's book, "In The Aftermath". The quote is from an artilcle (later to become a book, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?) on the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. It gave me a different view of all the bad stuff that happens to the helpless.

"CHRISTIANS OFTEN find it hard to adopt the spiritual idiom of the New Testament - to think in terms, that is, of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, of Christ's triumph over the principalities of this world, of the overthrow of hell. All Christians know, of course, that it is through God's self-outpouring upon the cross that they are saved, and that they are made able by grace to participate in Christ's suffering; but this should never be allowed to obscure what is revealed at Easter: that the incarnate God enters "this cosmos" not simply to disclose its immanent rationality, but to break the boundaries of fallen nature asunder, and to refashion creation after its ancient beauty - wherein neither sin nor death had any place. Christian thought has traditionally, of necessity, defined evil as a privation of the good, possessing no essence or nature of its own, a purely parasitic corruption of reality; hence it can have no positive role to play in God's determination of himself or purpose for his creatures (even if by economy God can bring good from evil); it can in no way supply any imagined deficiency in God's or creation's goodness. Being infinitely sufficient in himself, God had no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest his glory in his creatures or to join them perfectly to himself. This is why it is misleading even to say, as did the scholar mentioned above, that the drama of fall and redemption will make the final state of things more glorious than it might otherwise have been. No less metaphysically incoherent - though immeasurably more vile - is the suggestion of that Calvinist that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes (capricious cruelty, perhaps? injustice? a depraved sense of humor?); it is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God's true nature.


There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of what Aquinas calls secondary causality - in nature or history - is governed not only by a transcendent providence, but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of - but entirely by way of - every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines (and so on). It seems a strange thing to find peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome. Better, it seems to me, the view of the ancient Gnostics: however ludicrous their beliefs, they at least, when they concluded that suffering and death were essential aspects of the creator's design, had the good sense to yearn to know a higher God.

As for comfort, when we seek it, l can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history's many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes - and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, "Behold, I make all things new.” (In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, Erdmans, 2009, pp. 115-117)

The author makes a statement (somewhere in thiis book) that he is not pastoral. I think that last line contradicts that notion.

The reference to the Carthaginians in the previous post, caused me to find in Wikipedia on Carthage, the following:

"Modern archeological excavations have been interpreted as confirming Plutarch's reports of Carthaginian child sacrifice.^[24] In a single child cemetery called the Tophet by archaeologists, an estimated 20,000 urns were deposited between 400 BC and 200 BC, with the practice continuing until the early years of the Christian period. The urns contained the charred bones of newborns and in some cases the bones of fetuses and 2-year-olds. These remains have been interpreted to mean that in the cases of stillborn babies, the parents would sacrifice their youngest child. There is a clear correlation between the frequency of cremation and the well-being of the city. In bad times (war, poor harvests) cremations became more frequent, but it is not possible to know why. The correlation could be because bad times inspired the Carthaginians to pray for divine intervention (via child sacrifice), or because bad times increased child mortality, leading to more child burials (via cremation)."

Our aborted children are treated as detritus for the garbage dump. Why? Since Christianity has "deconstructed" religious justifications for the sacrifice of innocents, such killing can only be continued when Christian interdicts are extirpated from conscience. Thus does hostility to Christianity grow.